From Child to Parent? The Significance of Children’s Education for Their Parents’ Longevity

In addition to own education and other socioeconomic resources, the education of one’s children may be important for individual health and longevity. Mothers and fathers born between 1932 and 1941 were analyzed by linking them to their children in the Swedish Multi-generation Register, which covers the total population. Controlling for parents’ education, social class, and income attenuates but does not remove the association between children’s education and parents’ mortality risk. Shared but unmeasured familial background characteristics were addressed by comparing siblings in the parental generation. In these fixed-effects analyses, comparing parents whose children had tertiary education with parents whose children completed only compulsory schooling (the reference group) yields a hazard ratio of 0.79 (95 % CI: 0.70–0.89) when the socioeconomic position of both parents is controlled for. The relationship is certainly not purely causal, but part of it could be if, for example, well-educated adult children use their resources to find the best available health care for their aging parents. I therefore introduce the concept of “social foreground” and suggest that children’s socioeconomic resources may be an important factor in trying to further understand social inequalities in health.     

Still connecting the dots: An investigation into infants' attentional bias to threat using an eye-tracking task

An attentional bias toward threat has been theorized to be a normative aspect of infants' threat and safety learning, and an indicator of risk for internalizing psychopathology in older populations. To date, only four studies have examined this bias using the dot-probe task in infancy and the findings are mixed. We extended the literature by examining patterns of attention to threat in a culturally and linguistically diverse sample of infants aged 5–11 months old (N = 151) using all measures previously employed in the infant dot-probe literature. Given that an attentional bias toward threat is associated with higher risk of developing anxiety disorders later in life, we also examined how negative affect—an early correlate of later anxiety disorders—is related to attentional bias toward threat in infancy. This study was the first to use a consistent measure of negative affect across the whole sample. An eye-tracking dot-probe task was used to examine attentional bias toward threat (i.e., angry faces) relative to positive (i.e., happy faces) stimuli. Results showed that an attention bias to threat was not characteristic of infants at this age, and negative affect did not moderate the putative relationship between attention and emotional faces (angry, happy). These findings therefore suggest that attention biases to socio-emotional threat may not have emerged by 11 months old.     

Estimating Prediction Error: Cross-Validation vs. Accumulated Prediction Error

We study the validation of prediction rules such as regression models and classification algorithms through two out-of-sample strategies, cross-validation and accumulated prediction error. We use the framework of Efron (1983 Efron , B. ( 1983 ). Estimating the error rate of a prediction rule: improvement on cross-validation . Journal of the American Statistical Association 78 : 316 – 331 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) where measures of prediction errors are defined as sample averages of expected errors and show through exact finite sample calculations that cross-validation and accumulated prediction error yield different smoothing parameter choices in nonparametric regression. The difference in choice does not vanish as sample size increases.     

‘But I can do the job’: examining disability employment practice through human rights complaint cases

Natural data on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s website outlining the complaint cases generated from Disability Discrimination Act, 1992 (DDA) were used to examine the social construction of disability employment discrimination. Using a social model and human rights citizenship lens, some 987 complaint cases were analysed to assess the prevalence of disability discrimination in employment, and its relationship to the types of disability, gender, entity undertaking the actions and organisational context. Of all complaint cases across the Australian Human Rights Commission’s operations, by far the largest proportion involves disability discrimination. Within the disability discrimination complaint cases, employment makes up the greatest proportion of these cases. In examining the patterns of discrimination seven major themes emerged involving: distinctive patterns across disability type; access to premises; human resource mismanagement; selection of new employees; integration of assistive technology; perception of cost of disability inclusions; and inflexible organisational workplace practices. The discussion examines the underlying reasons for the emergent themes where employers misunderstood key legal concepts that underpin the DDA including: unjustifiable hardship; inherent requirements; reasonable adjustment; direct; and indirect discrimination. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings as a way of understanding the social construction of disability discrimination in employment to signal ways to better develop inclusive organisational practice.