Experiences of Ex-Ex-Gay Individuals in Sexual Reorientation Therapy: Reasons for Seeking Treatment,Perceived Helpfulness and Harmfulness of Treatment,and Post-Treatment Identification

Therapy meant to change someone’s sexual orientation, or reorientation therapy, is still in practice despite statements from the major mental health organizations of its potential for harm. This qualitative study used an inductive content analysis strategy (Patton, 2002) to examine the experiences of thirty-eight individuals (31 males and seven females) who have been through a total of 113 episodes of reorientation therapy and currently identify as gay or lesbian. Religious beliefs were frequently cited as the reason for seeking reorientation therapy. Frequently endorsed themes of helpful components of reorientation therapy included connecting with others and feeling accepted. Harmful aspects of reorientation therapy included experiences of shame and negative impacts on mental health. Common reasons for identifying as LGB after the therapy included self-acceptance and coming to believe that sexual orientation change was not possible. The findings of this study were consistent with recommendations by the American Psychological Association Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation (2009), which concluded that helpful aspects of reorientation therapy could be achieved through affirmative treatment methods while avoiding potential harms that may be associated with reorientation therapy. Limitations of the findings, including a small, self-selected sample, are discussed.     

Stakeholders and voluntary climate reduction goals at large U.S. firms: An institutional analysis

What leads firms to develop voluntary greenhouse gas reduction goals? This paper discusses the results of interviews conducted with vice presidents and managers responsible for environmental sustainability initiatives at large U.S. firms. To situate the analysis, it develops a theoretical framework that sees the firm as a socially embedded creation, where stakeholder groups exert varying levels of influence and provide the context in which the firm responds to outside information in the face of uncertainty. By understanding the firm as socially embedded, the influence and power of groups that have strong preferences for or against environmental protection can be understood. The interviews provide empirical support for this model. Subjects discuss the role of stakeholder groups such as activists, shareholders, consumers, and workers in the development of the firm’s environmental policy. Groups can prompt the firm to set greenhouse gas or energy use reduction goals, and they encourage the firm to reexamine production processes to find new ways to both reduce costs and emissions. This suggests that policies to regulate industrial greenhouse gas emissions may be less costly than some projections indicate.     

Algorithms and agenda-setting in Wikileaks’ #Podestaemails release

ABSTRACT

In the month before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Wikileaks released 37 serialized batches of e-mails authored by former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Each release was announced using a unique PodestaEmail related hashtag (#PodestaEmails2, #PodestaEmails3, etc.). In total, Podesta e-mail related hashtags hit town-wide, country-wide, or worldwide Trending topics lists a total of 1,917 times, remaining on Trending Topic lists everyday within the U.S. for 30 days before election day. In this article, we discuss how Wikileaks’ release methodology increased the potential reach of Podesta E-mail related content. We describe how Wikileaks’ tweets spoke to two audiences: Twitter users and Twitter algorithms. In serializing its content and using new hashtags for each release, Wikileaks increased the potential persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability of this content. By creating the possibility for this content to remain persistently visible on the Trending Topics list, Wikileaks was able to potentially realize a greater degree of agenda-setting than would have been possible through singular hashtag use.     

A revisit to two-way factorial ANOVA with mixed effects and interactions

Abstract

Two mixed models exist in analysis of two-way factorial ANOVA with mixed effects and interactions: the constrained and unconstrained models. The constrained model is unfavored because there is no convincing rationale for the enforced constraints on its random interactions and a lack of clear interpretation about its variance components. The purpose of this study is to further explore the relationship between these two models. We reveal some nice features of the constrained model on partition of the responsive variance. An alternative formulation of ANOVA that follows from this exploration is also presented.     

Challenges to the enforcement of development controls in the Wa municipality

The imposition and enforcement of a land-use regulation is extremely important if society is to reap the full benefits of its stock of land. Ghana has therefore enacted various statutes to regulate land development throughout the country. This paper examines development controls in the Wa Municipality. It finds out the challenges confronting the development control process in the municipality. The paper does these through a review of the development control literature. It also reviews the legal framework for development controls in Ghana. It used questionnaires to gather data from the officials of the Municipal Building Inspectorate Division (MBID), Wa. It used questionnaires to solicit the opinion, knowledge, experience and perception of land developers on the development control regime in the municipality. It revealed that development controls are not adequately enforced in the Wa Municipality. It notes that uncontrolled developments are a common sight in the municipality. It also established that socio-cultural reasons, political interferences, limited public knowledge on the essence of development controls, and an under-resourced building inspectorate division are responsible for this state of affairs. It recommends that the Wa Municipal Assembly strictly enforce its land-use regulations to ensure that the residents of the municipality fully benefit from the imposition of land-use regulations.     

Disease risk and fertility: evidence from the HIV/AIDS pandemic

A fundamental question about human behavior is whether fertility responds to disease risk. The standard economic theory of household fertility decision-making generates ambiguous predictions, and the response has large implications for human welfare. We examine the fertility response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic using national household survey data from 14 sub-Saharan African countries. Instrumental variable (IV) estimates using distance to the origin of the pandemic suggest that HIV/AIDS has increased the total fertility rate (TFR) and the number of surviving children. These results rekindle the debate about the fertility response to disease risk, particularly the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and highlight the question of whether the HIV/AIDS pandemic has reduced GDP per capita.     

The school to work transition for young people in state care: perspectives from young people,carers and professionals

Workforce participation has many positive effects on quality of life. However, as young people in care have generally below‐average levels of educational participation and attainment, they may be ill‐equipped for the transition to further education and work. A mixed‐method study conducted in Australia about career development for young people in care investigated how this population develops ideas about future work: the social and cognitive variables that influence career decision‐making; practices for preparing young people in care for the transition to work or further education; and factors that support or impede the transition. Findings from the qualitative study are reported in this paper. Interview data were obtained from the multiple perspectives of young people in care, foster carers, caseworkers and school personnel. The overall picture was one of young people in care lacking the encouragement, resources and capacity to realistically plan for the job they want. Specific interventions are required to enhance career development and employment outcomes for this population.     

A comparison of bootstrap approaches for estimating uncertainty of parameters in linear mixed‐effects models

A version of the nonparametric bootstrap, which resamples the entire subjects from original data, called the case bootstrap, has been increasingly used for estimating uncertainty of parameters in mixed‐effects models. It is usually applied to obtain more robust estimates of the parameters and more realistic confidence intervals (CIs). Alternative bootstrap methods, such as residual bootstrap and parametric bootstrap that resample both random effects and residuals, have been proposed to better take into account the hierarchical structure of multi‐level and longitudinal data. However, few studies have been performed to compare these different approaches. In this study, we used simulation to evaluate bootstrap methods proposed for linear mixed‐effect models. We also compared the results obtained by maximum likelihood (ML) and restricted maximum likelihood (REML). Our simulation studies evidenced the good performance of the case bootstrap as well as the bootstraps of both random effects and residuals. On the other hand, the bootstrap methods that resample only the residuals and the bootstraps combining case and residuals performed poorly. REML and ML provided similar bootstrap estimates of uncertainty, but there was slightly more bias and poorer coverage rate for variance parameters with ML in the sparse design. We applied the proposed methods to a real dataset from a study investigating the natural evolution of Parkinson's disease and were able to confirm that the methods provide plausible estimates of uncertainty. Given that most real‐life datasets tend to exhibit heterogeneity in sampling schedules, the residual bootstraps would be expected to perform better than the case bootstrap. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.