Differential Labeling of Mental Illness Revisited: Patterns Before and After the Rise of Managed Care

With the National Comorbidity Survey of the early 1990s, Thoits (2005) recently showed that lower-status mentally ill individuals were not more often hospitalized or pressured into psychiatric treatment than comparably ill persons of higher status, disconfirming a central hypothesis of labeling theory. However, that finding may have been due to changes in the mental health treatment system introduced by the spread of managed care. The differential labeling hypothesis is reexamined here with data from the Epidemiological Catchment Area Studies (ECA) collected in the early 1980s before managed-care plans began to dominate the insurance marketplace and from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication conducted in the early 2000s when managed care had saturated the market. Little systematic support for the differential labeling hypothesis was found in the three studies, although, over time, the higher rates of mental hospitalization among less educated and low-income individuals found in the ECA survey disappeared. Trends across the studies suggest that educated and affluent persons with psychiatric problems more frequently sought hospital care. These findings further undermine the validity of the differential labeling hypothesis and suggest that service utilization or treatment-seeking factors may help explain mental hospitalization rates.     

Coming to terms: a discussion of John Ogbu’s cultural‐ecological theory of minority academic achievement

Over the course of 30 years of academic work, the late educational anthropologist John Ogbu had an enormous influence on educational research, and on educational anthropology in particular. In this paper, I lay out the tenets of his cultural‐ecological (CE) theory of minority student responses to schooling. I also offer critical commentary and point out ways in which CE theory can be sharpened to facilitate increasingly nuanced and accurate analyses. Even as I point to specific problems in Dr Ogbu’s work, my suggestions for enhancing CE theory do not contradict its basic tenets, which provide a solid resource for researchers who study minority student communities. Rather, they add nuance to it by incorporating recent developments in anthropological theory.     

Families, orphans and children under stress in Zimbabwe

This paper evaluates a programme called FOCUS in Zimbabwe: Families, Orphans, and Children under Stress. The programme was initiated in 1993 and works with seven community groups, providing support to around 6500 children in 2000 households. The programme succeeds through committed community volunteers, who made over 93,000 visits to households in 1999. Communities are mobilised by building on existing practices, using natural entry points, and careful selection of local volunteers and supervisors. There is good community ownership, extremely low volunteer turnover, and reporting systems verify that aims and objectives are met. The programme maintains good ethics, addresses a range of children's rights, and is sustainable through a mixture of donor funds, FACT (sponsoring organisation) support and community support. Issues of concern include better recognition of psycho-social needs, prevention and protection from sexual abuse, reducing stigma and discrimination, increasing child-centred approaches and participation, and reducing gender imbalance among volunteers.     

GENDER DILEMMAS, GENDER QUESTIONS, AND THE GENDER MANTRA

This paper discusses the social constructions of gender and the problematic effects of these constructions-masculine/feminie-on intimate attachments. It summarizes the aspect of feminist scholarship which revised the traditional developmental paradigm to include a psychology of women and cites recent infant research which re-describes development as a process of increasingly complex forms of relatedness rather than as a progression from attachment to separation. The authors are influenced by the school of feminist revisionism which argues on behalf of the integration of male and female attributes in each person. Two clinical techniques are suggested-"gender questions" and the "gender mantra"-which identify the contradictions inherent in the social construction of gender and encourage alternative constructions that more adequately represent men's and women's actual psychological experience.     

Instrumental Variables for Logistic Regression: An Illustration

The estimated effect of a regressor on an outcome is inconsistent when that regressor is determined simultaneously with that outcome. Instrumental variables estimation is a means of obtaining consistent parameter estimates in this situation. The best-known form of instrumental variables is two-stage least squares; unfortunately, this procedure cannot be simply extended to non-linear models such as logistic regression. Instrumental variables estimation, however, is still possible, and using the Generalized Method of Moments, this paper is the first to produce instrumental variables estimates for logistic regression. Obtaining these estimates is easy using widely available software. An illustrative example is provided. This methodology should be useful to social scientists familiar with 2SLS and logistic regression.     

Metabolism, energy, and entropy in Marx's critique of political economy: Beyond the Podolinsky myth

Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx's historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but also that his treatment of the coevolution of nature and society was in many ways the most sophisticated to be put forth by any social theorist prior to the late twentieth century. Still, criticisms continue to be leveled at Marx and Engels for their understanding of thermodynamics and the extent to which their work is said to conflict with the core tenets of ecological economics. In this respect, the rejection by Marx and Engels of the pioneering contributions of the Ukrainian socialist Sergei Podolinsky, one of the founders of energetics, has been frequently offered as the chief ecological case against them. Building on an earlier analysis of Marx's and Engels's response to Podolinsky, this article shows that they relied on an open-system, metabolic-energetic model that adhered to all of the main strictures of ecological economics – but one that also (unlike ecological economics) rooted the violation of solar and other environmental-sustainability conditions in the class relations of capitalist society. The result is to generate a deeper understanding of classical historical materialism's ecological approach to economy and society – providing an ecological-materialist critique that can help uncover the systemic roots of today's “treadmill of production” and global environmental crisis. Paul Burkett is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. He is the author of Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (1999), and the co-author, with Martin Hart-Landsberg, of China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (2005). John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and co-editor of Monthly Review (New York). He is the author of The Vulnerable Planet (1994, 1999); “Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology (September 1999); Marx's Ecology (2000); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); and Naked Imperialism (2005).     

Assessing the effectiveness of strategic planning

This paper describes a method for assessing the effectiveness of strategic planning systems in terms of the results actually observed subsequent to planning activity. The paper explains in particular how, in making the assessment, one might cope with the fact of environmental change subsequent to the setting of planned goals. This ends oriented approach to measuring effectiveness is shown to be complementary to process oriented approaches and is illustrated by an example from the coal industry.