Health E-types?

This paper presents a simple typology of different forms of engagement with the Internet by families with children with various forms of chronic illness. The analysis is informed by ongoing debates about the nature, distribution and efficacy of reflexivity in contemporary social life, especially as it relates to the changing nature of information and knowledge. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with sixty-nine parents and sixteen children, the paper offers a nuanced account of the manner in which laypeople are engaging with e- health. It is an account that argues that any reading of the 'digital divide' that is based upon a simple homology between socio-structural location, reflexivity and differential ability to gain material purchase from information in the 'information age' is misjudged.     

Pretesting Experimental Instructions

Laboratory experiments, well established in sociology and social psychology, are alternate realities constructed for assessing derivations from theories. Experiments instantiate a theory's scope and initial conditions, and that information is usually delivered through instructions to participants. Because experiments often use video and computer technology and often test very precise predictions of new theories, we suggest developing objective means to assess information delivery. We illustrate these points by reference to a widely used standard experiment to assess theories of status processes. We first describe elements of good experimental design with their justifications. Next, we describe new techniques we have developed and illustrate their usefulness, showing results of a first use of the new techniques. While the assessment still relies somewhat on judgments, we find the technique useful and suggest further developments that might improve it for experimental and other research uses.     

Evaluating Public Commentary and Scientific Evidence Submitted in the Development of a Risk Assessment

Risk assessments form the methodological basis for many public policies. A key component of the risk assessment process is the public commentary period. We conducted a case study of the California environmental tobacco smoke risk assessment to describe the contribution of the commentary to the risk assessment process. We used content analysis to examine the sources, quantity, and quality of public commentary, as well as the agency's response to the commentary. We examined the type and quality of publications cited in the commentary. Most of the comments were from critics of the risk assessment (36/44, 80%), especially tobacco industry affiliates (30/36, 83%). Critics were more likely to evoke the science evaluation criteria of study quality, reliability, and validity than were supporters. More than half the critics argued that appropriate procedures were not followed (13/23, 57%). Of the 29 commentaries on the respiratory, carcinogenic, and cardiovascular chapters, four resulted in changes to the risk assessment, such as the addition of new references or reanalysis of data. Journal articles were the most frequently cited type of reference, cited by critics (1,022/1,526 of references, 67%) and supporters (39/60, 65%). However, journal articles submitted by critics had lower impact factors than those cited by supporters (2.6 vs. 3.6, p=0.03). Participation in the public input process was not balanced among all interested parties, although this may reflect different opportunities for stakeholders to participate in stages of the process. Critics and supporters of the risk assessment used different criteria to evaluate the scientific evidence, suggesting that they were socially constructing the evidence to support their positions.     

Democratic Deficit in the ACT: Is the Citizen Initiated Referendum a Solution?

Hopeful of bringing citizens closer to government decision‐making Gary Humphries recently presented the Community Referendum Bill 2002 to the ACT Legislative Assembly. The Citizen Initiated Referendum has many staunch advocates however this paper considers whether CIR is an appropriate solution to perceived democratic deficits in the ACT or anywhere else in Australia. The paper canvasses a number of pitfalls of CIR. These include: their potential to aggravate rather than ameliorate the democratic deficit; the problems associated with under‐deliberation; and potentially detrimental consequences for existing electoral arrangements. Specifically, CIR could engender voter fatigue, reduce the salience of elections and exacerbate levels of ungovernability and accountability, all of which are known to turn people off politics and voting.     

Stress Crossover in Newlywed Marriage: A Longitudinal and Dyadic Perspective

Studies of stress and marital quality often assess stress as an intrapersonal phenomenon, examining how spouses’ stress may influence their own relationship well‐being. Yet spouses’ stress also may influence partners’ relationship evaluations, a phenomenon referred to as stress crossover. This study examined stress crossover, and conditions that may facilitate crossover, in a sample of 169 newlywed couples over 3.5 years. A significant crossover effect emerged for husbands, which was moderated by couples’ observed conflict resolution skills. For wives, a significant stress interaction emerged, such that the influence of husbands’ stress on wives’ marital satisfaction depended on wives’ own stress levels. These findings highlight the importance of a dyadic approach when examining the role of stress in marriage.     

Improving robustness of next-hop routing

A weakness of next-hop routing is that following a link or router failure there may be no routes between some source-destination pairs, or packets may get stuck in a routing loop as the protocol operates to establish new routes. In this article, we address these weaknesses by describing mechanisms to choose alternate next hops. Our first contribution is to model the scenario as the following tree augmentation problem. Consider a mixed graph where some edges are directed and some undirected. The directed edges form a spanning tree pointing towards the common destination node. Each directed edge represents the unique next hop in the routing protocol. Our goal is to direct the undirected edges so that the resulting graph remains acyclic and the number of nodes with outdegree two or more is maximized. These nodes represent those with alternative next hops in their routing paths. We show that tree augmentation is NP-hard in general and present a simple \(\frac{1}{2}\)-approximation algorithm. We also study 3 special cases. We give exact polynomial-time algorithms for when the input spanning tree consists of exactly 2 directed paths or when the input graph has bounded treewidth. For planar graphs, we present a polynomial-time approximation scheme when the input tree is a breadth-first search tree. To the best of our knowledge, tree augmentation has not been previously studied.     

A mixed-methods examination of sexual coercion and degradation among women in violent relationships who do and do not report forced sex

Although partner sexual abuse is clearly an important dimension of partner violence, it has received less research attention than partner physical and psychological abuse. This article contributes to the literature by examining similarities and differences in coercive and degrading sexual tactics experienced by women who do (n = 31) and women who do not (n = 31) report forced sex using quantitative and qualitative data. The women in the sample had all been recently (within the past 6 months) stalked by a violent intimate partner. Results suggest that both women who do and women who do not report forced sex experience various coercive and degrading tactics within the context of sexual activity. Results also suggest that multiple sexual abuse dimensions should be considered within the context of partner psychological abuse, physical abuse, and stalking and that more research on understanding the outcomes associated with dimensions of sexual abuse within the context of physical and psychological abuse is needed.     

Public Participation and Claimsmaking: Evidence Utilization and Divergent Policy Frames in California's Ergonomics Rulemaking

Notice and comment provisions in agency rulemaking provide animportant mechanism for the public to contribute to policy.Yet there is limited research on how interest groups participatein this process. California's passage of an ergonomics standardin 1997, the only current state statute in the country, providesa useful, high salience policy case for examining public commentary.Between an initially proposed comprehensive standard and theenactment of a much weaker regulation occurred the largest publicresponse in California's state Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration history. Through a detailed content analysisof the notice and comment submissions we identify features ofparticipation and claimsmaking that differ between businessand nonbusiness submissions. Business groups were the largemajority of participants and also presented a disproportionateamount of evidence, using an "abstract-technical" policy frameto assert the illegitimacy of the ergonomics standard. Labor,public health organizations and private citizens representedless than one-third of the participants and relied primarilyon experiential information and a "concretized-moral" characterizationof policy issues in support of the standard. The existence ofthese distinct "interpretive communities" that mobilize differentresources raises questions about whether public commentary canfulfill its purported "democratic accountability" purpose aswell as underline the limitations of appealing to scientificexpertise for solving complex policy problems.     

Exercise behavior in older adults: a test of the transtheoretical model

The transtheoretical model (TTM) was developed as a guide for understanding behavior change. Little attention has been given, however, to the appropriateness of the TTM for explaining the adoption of exercise behavior in older adults. The purposes of this study were to determine the reliability of the TTM instruments and validate TTM predictions in 86 community-dwelling older adults (mean age 75.1 +/- 7.0 years, 87% women) who were participants in a 16-week walking program. TTM construct scales--self-efficacy, decisional balance (pros and cons), and processes of change (behavioral and cognitive)--were generally reliable (all>.78). Behavioral processes of change increased from baseline to follow-up, but pros, cons, and cognitive processes did not change among participants who became regular exercisers. Stage of change did not predict exercise adoption, but baseline self-efficacy predicted walking behavior. These results lend partial support to the TTM in predicting exercise behavior.     

Wage-Poor Mothers and Moral Economy

"You have to choose ... and what mother's choosing this jobover her child?"

This article explores the subaltern work andfamily care practices of 300 low-wage women. Although US welfarereform enforced the labor market as the sole route for familysupport, many, often single–mother, families remain wageimpoverished. Their work habits orbit around keeping childrensafe and defy market norms. Furthermore, in wage-poor Americaand beyond, this defiance is understood as morally legitimate,representing a hidden challenge to an economic ideology thatsubordinates humanity to the market.