(Im)materiality, virtual reality and interaction: grounding the 'virtual' in studies of technology in action

This paper explores the organisation of social interaction amongst participants ‘in’ Virtual Reality. Despite the wide‐ranging sociological interest in ‘virtual’ technologies, there is rather little detailed sociological investigation of user experiences of the virtual technology par excellence, namely multi‐user Virtual Reality. Interestingly the discourses that underpin discussions of more mundane virtual technologies (eg email, the Web, mobile phones, etc.) tend to draw on design visions for Virtual Reality, such as the opportunities for social life freed from the constraints of the physical body. This paper contributes to a growing number of empirical studies that provide a critique of this view, but maybe more importantly, provides a detailed analysis of action and interaction in virtual worlds. It considers the organisation of interaction within VR with particular emphasis on the ways in which visual features of the digital domain are seen and shared by participants. The paper describes the ways in which the abilities to share views on the virtual world requires participants to overcome problems associated with the very material character of the VR interfaces. The study is based on the analysis of recordings of a Virtual Reality system that enables participants to talk to one another and see one another's actions within a virtual environment.     

Girls and guys,ghetto and bougie: Metapragmatics,ideology and the management of social identities1

This case study explores the metapragmatic awareness of a young, academically successful, African American, female speaker. It describes some of the identities and orientations that the speaker performs through language and the perceived role of linguistic style in such performances. This study suggests that these linguistic performances are a complex negotiation of ethnicity, gender and class that both draw from and resist the macrosocial indexing of social categories. Further, the understood role of language in the social negotiations of the speaker serves as an illustration of the relationship among metapragmatics, ideology and identity and also highlights the dynamism of identity management as individuals position themselves in allegiance with, or opposition to, various groups that populate their social landscape.     

The Effects of Average Fundamental Frequency and Variance of Fundamental Frequency on Male Vocal Attractiveness to Women

This paper employs a cue synthesis experimental method to examine the effects of pitch and intonation on male vocal attractiveness to women. Voices were acoustically manipulated to yield nine combinations of three levels of average fundamental frequency and three levels of variance of fundamental frequency. Strong main effects were obtained for the average fundamental frequency manipulation, with high voices rated as significantly less attractive to women than either medium or low voices, which do not differ in attractiveness. The main effects of manipulations of variance of fundamental frequency on vocal attractiveness and benevolence did not reach significance, but there was a significant interaction on the benevolence factor, with high or low average fundamental frequency manipulations being rated particularly low for voices with low variance of fundamental frequency.     

Attachment status and complexity of infants' self- and other-knowledge when tested with mother and father

At 13 and 20 months, infants' featural knowledge of self and parent was assessed separately with mother and father. Infants' featural knowledge was measured by a scale that included tasks reflecting infants' knowledge of facial features, spatial location, name, possession and gender. No significant relation between attachment status and featural knowledge was obtained at 13 months when tested with either parent. At 20 months, in contrast, more complex featural knowledge of self and parent was demonstrated by infants who were securely attached than by those who were insecurely attached. Independent of age, however, infants' featural knowledge of their mothers was more complex than that of their fathers, although no differences in self-knowledge were obtained as a function of parent gender. These data are understood in the context of cognitive development and the differences in interactional qualities assessed by attachment status and parent gender.     

Sleep habits and patterns of college students: a preliminary study.

The negative effects of sleep difficulties have been well documented. However, the prevalence of such problems among US college students has not been well studied. Design difficulties are common in the limited number of existing investigations, making it difficult to estimates the prevalence and types of disturbance studied. The authors describe the use of a quantitative-based assessment instrument to provide an initial indication of students' sleep problems and to serve as a means of addressing some of the deficiencies in the literature. In their sample of 191 undergraduates at a rural southern university, they found that most of the students exhibited some form of sleep disturbance and that women, in general, reported more sleep disturbances than men did. They suggest how colleges and university officials can alter procedures to minimize students' sleep disturbances and reduce the deleterious effects of sleep problems on academic performance.     

The Future Challenge for Direct Payments

Since 1997, Local Authorities have had the discretionary power to pay cash directly to disabled adults up to the age of 65 and assessed as needing social service support. More recently, the scope of Direct Payments has been widened to include people aged over 65 years and will, under the Health and Social Care Act 2001, be extended to further groups including disabled people from 16 to 18 years of age and parent carers of young children with impairments. Direct Payments have the potential not only to impact radically upon an individual's quality of life but also to influence the 'community care' market economy and the way personal support services are purchased and delivered in the future. Recent figures from a survey undertaken by the Association of Directors of Social Services suggest that 80% of local authorities have already introduced a Direct Payments scheme and that over 3500 people are already in receipt of direct payments (Jones, 2000). This paper is based upon evidence from a user-controlled Best Value Review of Direct Payments (BVDP) in Wiltshire. It explores, from disabled people's perspective, the advantages and disadvantages of Direct Payments, and demonstrates the challenges still facing both service users and service providers.     

The utility of experimental design short courses?

This paper describes the one‐day introduction to experimental design training course at GlaxoSmithKline. In particular, the use of paper helicopter experiments has been an effective and efficient method for teaching experimental design techniques to scientific and other staff. A good supporting strategy by which the statistics department provides back‐up following the course is essential. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Bayesian decision theory approach to variable selection for discrimination

Motivated by examples in spectroscopy, we study variable selection for discrimination in problems with very many predictor variables. Assuming multivariate normal distributions with common variance for the predictor variables within groups, we develop a Bayesian decision theory approach that balances costs for variables against a loss due to classification errors. The approach is computationally intensive, requiring a simulation to approximate the intractable expected loss and a search, using simulated annealing, over a large space of possible subsets of variables. It is illustrated by application to a spectroscopic example with 3 groups, 100 variables, and 71 training cases, where the approach finds subsets of between 5 and 14 variables whose discriminatory power is comparable with that of linear discriminant analysis using principal components derived from the full 100 variables. We study both the evaluation of expected loss and the tuning of the simulated annealing for the example, and conclude that computational effort should be concentrated on the search.     

Men matter more: the social class identity of married British women, 1985–1991

Summary.  We investigate the class identity of married women as it relates to their own and their husband's class position. Whereas previous workers have attempted to test whether identity depends solely on the husband's position, not at all on the husband's position or equally on the husband's and wife's position, leaving out all intermediate cases, we estimate new diagonal reference models that quantify the relative weight of each partner's class position on their own class identity. In previous literature, it was also argued that women who work full time should be more likely to adopt a sharing model than other women and in some cases these different types of women were compared. We move beyond this simple dichotomy and more systematically formulate hypotheses about the conditions under which women attach more or less weight to their own class position and less or more weight respectively to that of their husbands. To test these hypotheses, we consider models where the weights are allowed to depend on characteristics of each partner and the couple. Using the British Social Attitudes Survey data for 1985–1991, we find that, when the husband's commitment to the labour force exceeds that of the wife, the husband's weight exceeds the wife's weight but, when the wife's commitment exceeds that of the husband's, the weights are approximately equal. We also find (unexpectedly) that women who hold higher positions than their husbands attach more weight to their husband's position than to their own position.