Language Experience Shapes the Development of the Mutual Exclusivity Bias

Halberda (2003) demonstrated that 17‐month‐old infants, but not 14‐ or 16‐month‐olds, use a strategy known as mutual exclusivity (ME) to identify the meanings of new words. When 17‐month‐olds were presented with a novel word in an intermodal preferential looking task, they preferentially fixated a novel object over an object for which they already had a name. We explored whether the development of this word‐learning strategy is driven by children’s experience of hearing only one name for each referent in their environment by comparing the behavior of infants from monolingual and bilingual homes. Monolingual infants aged 17–22 months showed clear evidence of using an ME strategy, in that they preferentially fixated the novel object when they were asked to “look at the dax.” Bilingual infants of the same age and vocabulary size failed to show a similar pattern of behavior. We suggest that children who are raised with more than one language fail to develop an ME strategy in parallel with monolingual infants because development of the bias is a consequence of the monolingual child’s everyday experiences with words.     

A new fuzzy-c-means and assignment technique-based cell formation algorithm to perform part- type clusters and machine-type clusters separately

The incorporation of fuzziness in the cell formation problem by Chu and Hayya (1991 International Journal of Production Research, 29, 1475-1487) is a notable contribution, in which non-binary classification logic is used. However, despite this development, numerical illustrations performed in this research demonstrate that the Chu and Hayya approach can result in solutions with empty party-type cluster(s) and/or empty machine-type cluster(s). Further, it is noted that solutions based on the Chu and Hayya approach can contain non-empty part-type cluster(s) being assigned to empty machine-type cluster(s) and vice versa. Three strategies are offered in this research to overcome these inadequacies: the separate formation of part-type and machine-type clusters; modification of the stopping criterion; and the adoption of the assignment technique in the formation of the final manufacturing cell solutions. A new algorithm has resulted from these modifications and has been rigorously compared to the performance of the Chu and Hayya approach. In general, the new algorithm demonstrates superiorities in global efficiency and in generating feasible party-type clusters, machine-type clusters and manufacturing cells.     

Perceived Challenges to the Sustainability of Community-Based Aging Initiatives: Findings from a National Study of Villages

Concerns have been raised regarding the sustainability of Villages, a rapidly-expanding set of organizations that typically use a participant-directed approach to improve older adults’ quality of life and ability to age in place. Using online survey and telephone-interview data from a 2013 follow-up study of Villages across the United States, this study examined organizational leaders’ perceptions of the major challenges to sustainability. Major challenges identified included: (a) funding, (b) membership recruitment, (c) leadership development, (d) meeting members’ service needs, and (e) limitations of the Village model itself. Findings point to a number of important considerations for the development, implementation, and sustainability of the Village model, including the role of social workers in addressing these challenges.     

A Longitudinal Examination of Family Processes,Demographic Variables,and Adolescent Weight

Nationally representative studies estimate that almost one in five adolescents in the United States is overweight. This is a major concern for individuals' physical and psychological health and the overall economy in terms of health care costs and loss of productivity. A 12- to 14-year-old subsample of 4,688 adolescents from the NLSY97 cohort was used to address the association between family processes, demographic variables, and adolescent body mass index (BMI) percentile over 4 years. The final model indicated that frequency of family meals, gender, race, control, and mothers' BMI were important predictors of adolescent BMI percentile over time. Mothers' BMI was the strongest predictor of adolescent BMI percentile. More frequent family meals led to decreases in BMI percentile over time, whereas males, African Americans, and Latinos had higher average BMI percentiles than other groups.     

Perceptions of College and University Presidents Regarding Tobacco-Free Campus Policies

Abstract

Objective: To identify college presidents’ support for tobacco-free campus policies (TFCP), perceived barriers and benefits to implementing such policies, and activities that might initiate policy adoption. Participants: Participants were 405 presidents (51% of 796 delivered surveys) from a national sample of eligible 4-year institutions in summer 2012. Methods: A 4-page, 24-item cross-sectional questionnaire was mailed to potential participants in 4 waves to maximize the response rate. Results: The vast majority of presidents support TFCP (84%) and believed they should play a key role in establishing TFCP (80%). A majority agreed advocacy by campus groups was necessary to establishing TFCP. Presidents with an existing policy were twice as likely to believe advocacy was necessary for policy establishment. Presidents most commonly selected creating policy drafts and designating a committee as important to initiating TFCP. Conclusion: Advocates would benefit from focusing on presidential involvement and solutions to personnel barriers in establishing TFCP.     

History-in-person: the cultural production of populism among Kentucky's small-scale family farmers

How does an ideology such as populism persist and shift across generations? How do people come to embody such an ideology? This article focuses on a grassroots community association to illustrate how enduring ideologies are culturally produced and transformed. Drawing on oral history interviews and field research with an organization of Kentucky small-scale family farmers, and drawing on Holland and Lave's (2001) concept of history-in-person, I argue that enduring ideologies and attendant identities persist and shift through contentious confluences of individual biographies, citizen's groups, and societal institutions. I contend that the history-in-person approach informed by experience-near data offers an insider's view useful to explaining how durable and contentious ideologies and identities persist and change over time.     

Selection and the Marriage Premium for Infant Health

Previous research has found a positive relationship between marriage and infant health, but it is unclear whether this relationship is causal or a reflection of positive selection into marriage. We use multiple empirical approaches to address this issue. First, using a technique developed by Gelbach (2009) to determine the relative importance of observable characteristics, we show how selection into marriage has changed over time. Second, we construct a matched sample of children born to the same mother and apply panel data techniques to account for time-invariant unobserved characteristics. We find evidence of a sizable marriage premium. However, this premium fell by more than 40 % between 1989 and 2004, largely as a result of declining selection into marriage by race. Accounting for selection reduces ordinary least squares estimates of the marriage premiums for birth weight, prematurity, and infant mortality by at least one-half.     

Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress Through School: A Comment on Rosenfeld

We reexamine Rosenfeld’s (2010) study on the association between child outcomes and same-sex family structure. Using the same data set, we replicate and generalize Rosenfeld’s findings and show that the implications of his study are different when using either alternative comparison groups or alternative sample restrictions. Compared with traditional married households, we find that children being raised by same-sex couples are 35 % less likely to make normal progress through school; this difference is statistically significant at the 1 % level.     

The social role theory of unethical leadership

Challenging the standard reasoning regarding leaders' ethical failures, we argue that a potent contributor to these failures is the social role expectations of leaders. We maintain that leaders' central role expectation of goal achievement contributes to the over-valuing of group goals and greater moral permissibility of the means used to achieve these goals. In studies 1 and 2 we demonstrated that the role of leader, relative to group member, is associated with an increased appraisal of group goals which is predicted by the leaders' role expectations and not driven by the psychological effects of power. Next, we experimentally demonstrated the importance of both role expectations of leadership and group goal importance in leaders' justification to engage in morally questionable behavior to achieve group goals. Finally, we supported the social role predictions in a laboratory experiment by assigning people to roles and assessing goal importance and unethical decision-making and behaviors.     

Exploring the economic and social determinants of psychological well-being and perceived social support in England

Summary.  A fundamental focus of Government concern is to enhance well-being. Recently, policy makers in the UK and elsewhere have recognized the importance of the community and society to the well-being of the nation as a whole. We explore the extent to which economic and social factors influence the psychological well-being of individuals and their perceptions of the social support that they receive, using Health Survey for England data. We employ a random-effects ordered probit modelling approach and find that unobserved intrahousehold characteristics help to explain the variation in our dependent variables, particularly for co-resident females. Our results indicate that individuals with acute and chronic physical illness, who are female, unemployed or inactive in the labour market and who live in poor households or areas of multiple deprivation report lower levels of psychological well-being. Reduced perceptions of social support are associated with being male, single or post marriage, from an ethnic minority, having low educational attainment and living in a poor household, but are not statistically related to area deprivation measures. These findings may help to inform the contemporary policy debate surrounding the promotion of individual well-being and community, through the alleviation of social exclusion.