Race differences in depressive symptoms: a dynamic perspective on stress exposure and vulnerability

The existence, nature, and strength of race differences in mental health remain unclear after several decades of research. In this research, we examine black-white differences in the relationship between acute stressors and depressive symptoms. We reframe the stress exposure and differential vulnerability hypotheses in the context of long-term trajectories of stress and depression, and we hypothesize that trajectories of stress growth will be associated with trajectories of depressive symptom growth. Using latent growth curve analysis of a sample of 1,972 older persons interviewed three times at three-year intervals, we test the hypotheses that (1) growth in exposure to loss-related events will predict growth in depressive symptoms, and (2) African Americans will experience greater stress growth than whites. Results support the hypotheses. Stress growth exhibited a linear increase for blacks but not for whites, and predicted depression growth for both races, but explained more variance for blacks than for whites.     

Tracking ecstasy trends in the United States with data from three national drug surveillance systems

Anecdotal reports have suggested that the use of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or "ecstasy") is a prodigious problem across the United States. Unfortunately, no longitudinal evidence exists to support this contention. In the current study, data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), Monitoring the Future (MTF), and National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) are used to explore ecstasy use trends in the United States during the 1990s. While the use of ecstasy has increased over time, its prevalence is significantly less than other drugs of abuse. These findings suggest that anecdotal reports of an ecstasy epidemic is premature and that a less frenzied approach to ecstasy control and education may be warranted.     

Deliberation: Integrating Analytical Results into Environmental Decisions Involving Multiple Stakeholders

The National Research Council has recommended the use of an analytic/deliberative decision making process in environmental restoration decisions that involve multiple stakeholders. This work investigates the use of the results of risk assessment and multiattribute utility analysis (the "analysis") in guiding the deliberation. These results include the ranking of proposed remedial action alternatives according to each stakeholder's preferences, as well as the identification of the major reasons for these rankings. The stakeholder preferences are over a number of performance measures that include the traditional risk assessment metrics, e.g., individual worker risk, as well as programmatic, cultural, and cost-related impacts. Based on these results, a number of proposals are prepared for consideration by the stakeholders during the deliberation. These proposals are the starting point for the formulation of actual recommendations by the group. In our case study, these recommendations included new remedial action alternatives that were created by the stakeholders after an extensive discussion of the detailed analytical results.     

Human Rights Curricula in the Formation of a European Identity: the cases of Greece,England and France

This study involves a content analysis of the social studies curricula of England, France and Greece. The purpose of the study is to identify all direct and indirect references made to human and childrens' rights, a supranational theme, which transcends national cultures and is linked with European identity. The analysis revealed that the curriculum of Greece exceeds France and England in quantity at both direct and indirect references. The evidence at hand indicates that human rights as a transnational theme is occasionally and indirectly treated in the national curricula of the selected countries and it does not pervade all social studies subjects, neither can it be found transversally in various other subjects, especially in the case of England. Thus, the findings indicate that, as far as the curricula are concerned, the claims, policies and rhetoric about human rights articulated by politicians in the civil community of the European Union (EU) and cited in several documents, remain unsupported, since they are not fully reflected in the written curricula. It is concluded that nation states in the EU and elsewhere can no longer afford to offer students parochial pedagogy, ethnocentric and Eurocentric orientations ignoring supranational and global views, and themes such as human rights, which can mediate effectively for the formation of European and world identity.     

Evaluating second-order probability judgments with strictly proper scoring rules

Empirical studies have demonstrated that uncertainty about event probabilities, also known as ambiguity or second-order uncertainty, can affect decision makers choice preferences. Despite the importance of second-order uncertainty in decision making, almost no effort has been directed towards the development of methods that evaluate the accuracy of second-order probabilities. In this paper, we describe conditions under which strictly proper scoring rules can be used to assess the accuracy of second-order probability judgments. We investigate the effectiveness of using a particular strictly proper scoring rule the ranked probability score - to discourage biased assessments of second-order uncertainty.     

Max Weber,critical theory,and the administered world

The sociological perspectives of Max Weber and the Frankfurt School have been viewed as polarities in much of the recent literature. The Frankfurt sociologists were advocates of a neo-Marxism that stressed dialectical reasoning and rejected the notion of value-neutrality. Weber adhered to the canons of causal logic and cultivated the ideal of objectivity in social research. Notwithstanding these theoretical and methodological differences, Weber and the advocates of critical theory arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions about the fate of the modern world. Weber saw the advent of a bureaucratic iron cage which would effectively negate the role of the individual, while the Frankfurt sociologists posited the onset of an administered world in which human activity would be smothered in an ever-expanding network of management and control. Given these commonalities, a revision of the standard evaluation of Weber and critical theory is suggested.