Victim Experiences in Hate Crimes Based on Sexual Orientation

Using interview data from a convenience sample of 450 lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults, the varieties of victim experiences in hate crimes based on sexual orientation are described. Most crimes were perpetrated in public settings by one or more strangers, but victimization also occurred in other locales, and perpetrators included neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. In deciding whether a crime was based on their sexual orientation, victims tended to rely primarily on contextual cues and perpetrators' explicit statements. Victims' concerns about police bias and public disclosure of their sexual orientation were important factors in deciding whether to report antigay crimes, as were beliefs about the crime's severity and the likelihood that perpetrators would be punished.     

Linking For-Profit and Nonprofit Executive Compensation: Salary Composition and Incentive Structures in the U.S. Hospital Industry

Research concerning executive compensation has a long history. However, most studies have been conducted on publicly traded investor-owned enterprises. Although the not-for-profit sector experienced explosive growth during the 1990s, little work has been devoted to understanding its executive compensation schemes and incentives arrangements. In the United States, recent Federal and State legislation has changed the landscape under which nonprofits must operate to avoid penalties for paying excessive compensation to its executives. Studies of compensation schemes under different organizational arrangements are limited. This paper uses the U.S. hospital industry to link the for-profit and nonprofit compensation and incentive literatures. It highlights selected for-profit executive compensation and incentive processes and suggests how some of these methods could be applied in a nonprofit setting.     

What Risks Are People Concerned About

An unusual questionnaire was used to explore what risks concern laypeople. It asked respondents to list, in their own words, as many risks of personal concern as they could. They then selected the five risks of greatest concern and answered a set of specific questions about each. A coding scheme was developed for categorizing these responses and was shown to have good reliability. The questionnaire was administered to a heterogeneous convenience sample of subjects. They reported a very broad range of risks of concern, which differed in plausible ways as a function of their gender and age. Females and student-age subjects were generally more concerned about the environment, whereas males and older subjects were more likely to mention health and safety risks. Both the extent of the risk-reduction actions that they reported and their expressed willingness to pay for future risk reductions were greater for risk that presented a direct personal threat (e.g., health risks) than for risks that posed a diffuse threat to the environment or to people in general (e.g., pollution). Respondents perceived themselves as bearing primary responsibility for managing threats to their own health, but generally saw government as bearing a heavier responsibility for managing environmental risks (especially for pollutants) and war. The questionnaire instrument and coding structure developed for this work are well-suited to a variety of future research applications. They provide a way to identify the risks that concern lay groups, as well as to track the evolution of those concerns over time.     

An instance of spurious equivalence relations

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Four normal children learned conditional discriminations that had upper-case or lower-case Greek letters as comparison stimuli, and dictated letter names as...