Ambient temperature,birth rate,and birth outcomes: evidence from South Korea

Population and Environment - The effects from rising temperatures, a symptom of climate change, have become a significant concern. This study finds that one additional day with a maximum...     

The Planned Happenstance Career Inventory: A Cross‐Cultural Comparison

This study examined the measurement invariance and latent mean difference of an English version (J. H. Lee et al., 2017) of the Planned Happenstance Career Inventory (PHCI; B. Kim, Jung, et al., 2014) across cultures. Participants were 262 American and 291 South Korean undergraduates. Measurement invariance results indicated that the 5‐factor structure was adequate for both groups and that conditions for configural, metric, and partial intercept invariance were met. Latent mean analysis was used to compare the mean scores of the PHCI skills (curiosity, flexibility, persistence, optimism, and risk taking). The latent means of curiosity, flexibility, persistence, and optimism were higher among South Korean undergraduates, but no significant difference was found regarding risk taking. Career counselors should consider differences in planned happenstance perceptions across cultures to provide better career guidance. Future studies are needed to verify the distinctive nature of flexibility by replicating the factor structure of the PHCI with other samples.     

Remembering Lucky Dragon,re-membering Bikini: worlding the Anthropocene through transpacific nuclear modernity

This paper examines two recent Godzilla-themed cultural artefacts that highlight the entanglement between nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy: first, the 60th anniversary Godzilla exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Daigo Fukuryū Maru Exhibition Hall; second, the 2014 American Godzilla directed by Gareth Edwards. This paper frames these two distinctive post-Fukushima cultural texts as memory work that mediates post-WWII genealogies of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power as constitutive elements of U.S. militarism and transpacific technological modernity. Specifically, this paper foregrounds how these two recent cultural texts, produced at different Pacific shores, bring the complexity of the often-absented Pacific back into focus. By enacting what Rob Wilson and Chris Connery call ‘worlding’ to make sense of divergent representations of the tragic Lucky Dragon/Bikini incident that decidedly informed the creation of the original Japanese Gojira [1954. Film. Directed by Honda Ishiro. Japan: Toho Co., Ltd.], this paper analyses geopolitical figurations of the Pacific and its peoples in both the specific context of this tragic incident and the broader formation of transpacific nuclear modernity. In so doing, this paper unravels the ways in which these divergent representations grapple with nuclear modernity’s reordering of necropolitics and biopolitics and its effects: specifically, the ways in which the renarration of death-making nuclear technology as a technology of good life conveniently erases the victims of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and nuclear waste that the reproduction of U.S. nuclearism depends on and continues to produce.     

Ethnic Identity and Offending Trajectories Among Mexican American Juvenile Offenders: Gang Membership and Psychosocial Maturity

We examined the association of joint trajectories of ethnic identity and criminal offending to psychosocial maturity, gang membership, and Mexican American affiliation among 300 Mexican American male juvenile offenders from ages 14 to 22. There were two low‐offending groups: one was the highest in ethnic identity and changing slightly with age and the other was the lowest in ethnic identity and stable with age. A third group displayed moderately declining offending and moderately stable ethnic identity. A fourth group displayed high‐offending individuals with moderate, but increasing, levels of ethnic identity, who were initially lower in psychosocial maturity and more likely to be gang members. The findings highlight the need to contextualize theories of ethnic identity development.     

Construction and Initial Validation of the Planned Happenstance Career Inventory

This study was conducted to develop and initially evaluate the psychometric properties of the Planned Happenstance Career Inventory (PHCI), which aims to assess skill in using chance events to develop career opportunities. After item generation and exploratory factor analysis, 130 original items were reduced to 25 items across 5 factors (5 items for each corresponding factor). Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the validity of this 5‐factor structure, and the goodness of fit showed an adequate fit to the observed data for both women and men. Results showed that PHCI subscales correlated moderately and in expected directions with career preparation, career decision‐making self‐efficacy, and career stress. These findings suggest that the PHCI, which assesses 5 dimensions of career‐related planned happenstance skill, shows promise as a useful tool for facilitating understanding of the influence of chance events on career choice behavior.     

Causal inferences from many experiments

The underlying statistical concept that animates empirical strategies for extracting causal inferences from observational data is that observational data may be adjusted to resemble data that might have originated from a randomized experiment. This idea has driven the literature on matching methods. We explore an un-mined idea for making causal inferences with observational data – that any given observational study may contain a large number of indistinguishably balanced matched designs. We demonstrate how the absence of a unique best solution presents an opportunity for greater information retrieval in causal inference analysis based on the principle that many solutions teach us more about a given scientific hypothesis than a single study and improves our discernment with observational studies. The implementation can be achieved by integrating the statistical theories and models within a computational optimization framework that embodies the statistical foundations and reasoning.     

The social ecology of the Columbine High School shootings

The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 prompted school officials and policy-makers to create and implement programs and policies that would prevent violence in school and ensure school safety. Ten years have passed since the Columbine shooting; however, debates concerning risk factors for the shootings continue to ensue. The focus of this article is to examine the Columbine school shootings within the context of Bronfenbrenner's (1994) ecological systems analysis. We examine the most commonly identified risk factors, which operate within five systems levels: chrono-, macro-, exo-, meso-, and microsystems, and draw implications for school-based practice and policy.     

Sports PR in message boards on Major League Baseball websites

Message boards are possible places for sports fans to actively express and exchange their opinions. The purpose of this study is to explore the typology of message board uses on sports websites. The analysis of 1350 topics on eight Major League Baseball teams’ websites for 10 days revealed that: (1) the cognitive need of using message boards in a sports organization's website was an outstanding motivation; (2) sharing opinions was a new motivation category (compared to traditional uses and gratifications) that was found to be dominant; and (3) winning teams and losing teams’ message boards were significantly different in terms of number of topics, number of users, and optimism score; however, messages seemed to be optimistic. Implications for public relations practitioners suggest that the message board is an excellent monitoring tool for them as well as a fine communication tool between sports organizations and fans.