The (ab)sense of a concept of social support in parenting research: a social work perspective

Social support, as a complex, dynamic and multidimensional concept, has been studied extensively. However, a review of research publications on social support and parenting reveals that social work perspectives on social support are underdeveloped in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Social support is predominantly studied in relation to parental health, considering social support as a buffer against potential negative outcomes for children. This, in turn, legitimates extensive research on parents ‘at risk’. Specific target groups have been questioned abundantly using social support measures, mainly consisting of self‐reports. We conclude that social support is studied as a predefined concept, lacking conceptualizations that encompass the actual enacted support in relation to the perspectives of both givers and receivers of support. Moreover, the focus on targeted groups ignores the experience of social support in more diverse populations in general services and in everyday life. Issues of reciprocity, diversity and multivocality are central to our appeal for social work perspectives truly encompassing the relational aspect of social support. The question whether, and to what extent, social workers (including practitioners, policy‐makers and researchers) should give attention to this relational aspect is discussed.     

Origins and rationale of centres for parents and young children together

The range of centres where parents and children come together has mushroomed in different parts of the world, as new social work practices address the emerging non‐material needs of parents in changing demographic contexts. In this paper, we explore the origins and modi operandi of these centres in Belgium, France, Italy and Japan. Analysis of previous studies and policy documents reveal diverse political rationales, including addressing declining birth rates, preventing psychosocial problems and social isolation of mothers and promoting social cohesion and equality of educational opportunities. Remarkably, despite the diverse cultural and socio‐political contexts and rationales, these centres also share very similar ways of functioning and provide an informal type of social support to parents with young children. As these recently emerged centres are seldom studied, further research is welcomed to explore parents' and professionals' perspectives.     

The Rise of Age Homogamy in 19th Century Western Europe

In many parts of Western Europe the age at first marriage and the level of celibacy declined in the second half of the 19th century. This weakening of the European marriage pattern (EMP) can be interpreted as a “classic” response to the increase of the standard of living, but a more far‐reaching interpretation is that the erosion of the EMP was part of a cultural shift characterized by the rise of a new, less instrumental and more egalitarian view on marriage and partner selection. The latter vision implies the increase of the preference for a same age marriage. We test this explanation by using a combined Belgian‐Dutch data set of marriage certificates (N = 766,412). Our findings corroborate the “cultural shift thesis.”     

Divergences and duality for estimation and test under moment condition models

We introduce estimation and test procedures through divergence minimization for models satisfying linear constraints with unknown parameter. These procedures extend the empirical likelihood (EL) method and share common features with generalized empirical likelihood approach. We treat the problems of existence and characterization of the divergence projections of probability distributions on sets of signed finite measures. We give a precise characterization of duality, for the proposed class of estimates and test statistics, which is used to derive their limiting distributions (including the EL estimate and the EL ratio statistic) both under the null hypotheses and under alternatives or misspecification. An approximation to the power function is deduced as well as the sample size which ensures a desired power for a given alternative.     

K–Player Additive Extension of Two-Player games with an Application to the Borda Electoral Competition Game

In this note we introduce the notion of K–player additive extension of a symmetric two-player game and prove a result relating the equilibria in mixed strategies in the two games. Then we apply the result to the Borda electoral competition game.     

A general concept of scoring rules: general definitions,statistical inference,and empirical illustrations

We develop the general conceptual, mathematical and statistical foundations of behavioral social choice for scoring rules. Traditional scoring rules are difficult to assess empirically because one rarely observes the deterministic complete linear orders that they require as input. We provide a general concept of scoring rules in terms of a broad range of mathematical representations of preference or utility, namely arbitrary finite binary relations, probability distributions over such relations, real valued multi-criteria utility vectors and real valued random utility representations. We extend Regenwetter et al.’s (Behavioral social choice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006) statistical framework to a more general setting. We illustrate the general modeling and statistical tools by applying them to four well known sets of survey data. We illustrate two potential problems that have previously received little attention and that deserve systematic study in the future: (1) Scoring rule outcomes can suffer from model dependence in that the social welfare functions computed from ballot, survey, or hypothetical data may depend on implicit or explicit modeling assumptions. (2) Scoring rule outcomes may suffer from low statistical confidence in that the correct assessment of social orders from empirical data can be far from certain. We also illustrate the empirical congruence among conceptually competing social choice methods.     

Authoritarianism and pathological hatred: A social psychological profile of the middle eastern terrorist

Grounded on the analysis of MMPI tests administered to 90 jailed Middle Eastern terrorists, and semi-structured interviews with 57 Middle Eastern terrorists released from jail, this paper suggests that, regardless of their ethnicity, religiosity, political affiliations, or gender, Middle Eastern terrorists share common social-psychological tendencies. Organizing these tendencies under the labels of “authoritarianism” and “pathological hatred,” we suggest that contemporary terrorists are significantly different from their respective ethnic control groups and their predecessors. Briefly stated, rather than using violence against innocent civilians as a means to accomplish rational political ends, we suggest that today’s terrorists use rational political goals as a convenient means to inflict violence against innocent civilians.     

Index for Predicting Insurance Claims from Wind Storms with an Application in France

For insurance companies, wind storms represent a main source of volatility, leading to potentially huge aggregated claim amounts. In this article, we compare different constructions of a storm index allowing us to assess the economic impact of storms on an insurance portfolio by exploiting information from historical wind speed data. Contrary to historical insurance portfolio data, meteorological variables show fewer nonstationarities between years and are easily available with long observation records; hence, they represent a valuable source of additional information for insurers if the relation between observations of claims and wind speeds can be revealed. Since standard correlation measures between raw wind speeds and insurance claims are weak, a storm index focusing on high wind speeds can afford better information. A storm index approach has been applied to yearly aggregated claim amounts in Germany with promising results. Using historical meteorological and insurance data, we assess the consistency of the proposed index constructions with respect to various parameters and weights. Moreover, we are able to place the major insurance events since 1998 on a broader horizon beyond 40 years. Our approach provides a meteorological justification for calculating the return periods of extreme‐storm‐related insurance events whose magnitude has rarely been reached.     

Patrolling Chineseness: Singapore’s Kowloon Club and the ethnic adaptation of Hong Kongese to Singaporean society

In combination with their strategy to recruit foreign talent, Singaporean state authorities have increasingly focused their attention on community integration schemes for Chinese professional newcomers. The government facilitated such integration with the creation of the Kowloon Club in 1990. The Kowloon Club is not only a government experiment that has been repeated three times since then, but also the only new migrant association that does not explicitly target Mainlanders. Through in-depth interviews with the Club’s leadership, I explore the ethnic adaptation of the Kowloon Club membership as it negotiates the evolving sense of Chineseness found in state designs and Singaporean society. Much like the emergence of the 1997 Hong Kongese identity, the Kowloon Club’s activities have shifted in strong reaction to the racialized category put forth by state authorities and embodied by Mainlander professionals in that the Club’s activities now symbolize and help patrol what Chineseness means as everyday performance in the city-state.     

Designing Personalized Treatment: An Application to Anticoagulation Therapy

In this study, we develop an analytical framework for personalizing the anticoagulation therapy of patients who are taking warfarin. Consistent with medical practice, our treatment design consists of two stages: (i) the initiation stage, modeled using a partially‐observable Markov decision process, during which the physician learns through systematic belief updates about the unobservable patient sensitivity to warfarin, and (ii) the maintenance stage, modeled using a Markov decision process, during which the physician relies on his formed belief about patient sensitivity to determine the stable, patient‐specific, warfarin dose to prescribe. We develop an expression for belief updates in the POMDP, establish the optimality of the myopic policy for the MDP, and derive conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a myopically optimal dose. We validate our models using a real‐life patient data set gathered at the Hematology Clinic of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. The proposed analytical framework and case study enable us to develop useful clinical insights, for example, concerning the length of the initiation period and the importance of correctly assessing patient sensitivity.