Hostage taking: Understanding terrorism event dynamics

This paper employs advanced time series methods to identify the dynamic properties of three hostage taking series. The immediate and long run multipliers of three covariates—successful past negotiations, violent ends, and deaths—are identified. Each hostage series responds differently to the covariates. Past concessions have the strongest impact on generating future kidnapping events, supporting the conventional wisdom to abide by a stated no-concession policy. Each hostage series has different changepoints caused by a variety of circumstances. Skyjackings and kidnappings are negatively correlated, while skyjackings and other hostage events are positively correlated. Policy recommendations are offered.     

Women,Health and Housing Assistance: Implications in an Emerging Era of Housing Provision

Women and the households that they head are over‐represented among the most economically and socially disadvantaged households in Australia. Recent changes in the provision of housing assistance for low income households in Australia have distinct implications for women and this paper examines the implications of these changes. Shifting the emphasis in housing assistance away from publicly provided and rent‐controlled housing to direct subsidisation of rents for private tenants has important, largely negative, consequences for the health, affordability and security of housing for many women. This situation is made worse given the current housing affordability crisis in Australia; a crisis that extends across all private housing tenures.     

Response transformations in repeated measures and growth curve models

This article describes estimation and inference procedures for the parameters of the Box-Cox and foided-power transformations in repeated measures and growth curve models. Procedures for computing maximum likelihood estimates of the transformation and covariance parameters under several covanance structures (omnibus sphericity, local sphericity, and unstructured) are described. Lack of fit statistics and hypothesis tests for comparing these structures also are described. The procedures are illustrated on three data sets. Software for performing the analyses in the SAS System is described and is available from the authors.     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

Information fraction estimation: Strategies for a phase 3 non-inferiority maximum duration design with time to event outcome

There is considerable debate surrounding the choice of methods to estimate information fraction for futility monitoring in a randomized non-inferiority maximum duration trial. This question was motivated by a pediatric oncology study that aimed to establish non-inferiority for two primary outcomes. While non-inferiority was determined for one outcome, the futility monitoring of the other outcome failed to stop the trial early, despite accumulating evidence of inferiority. For a one-sided trial design for which the intervention is inferior to the standard therapy, futility monitoring should provide the opportunity to terminate the trial early. Our research focuses on the Total Control Only (TCO) method, which is defined as a ratio of observed events to total events exclusively within the standard treatment regimen. We investigate its properties in stopping a trial early in favor of inferiority. Simulation results comparing the TCO method with alternative methods, one based on the assumption of an inferior treatment effect (TH0), and the other based on a specified hypothesis of a non-inferior treatment effect (THA), were provided under various pediatric oncology trial design settings. The TCO method is the only method that provides unbiased information fraction estimates regardless of the hypothesis assumptions and exhibits a good power and a comparable type I error rate at each interim analysis compared to other methods. Although none of the methods is uniformly superior on all criteria, the TCO method possesses favorable characteristics, making it a compelling choice for estimating the information fraction when the aim is to reduce cancer treatment-related adverse outcomes.     

RATIONAL MYTH MAKING AND ENVIRONMENT SHAPING: The Transformation of the Zoo

This article examines a period of political conflict and institutional change concerning North American zoos in the 1970s, focusing on the efforts of industry leaders to secure zoos' institutional status in an unsettled environment. The task involved zoos' national trade association in introducing various institutional elements to build its authority before member organizations and external critics alike. I consider the idea of zoo‐directed captive breeding programs for endangered species, which was adopted as a “rational myth” that influenced organizational identity and public perceptions of zoos. The analysis develops institutional sociology's understanding of culture and strategic behavior's roles in institutional change.     

Culture Within Sites,Culture as Resources,and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory

Sociologists of social movements agree that culture matters for studying collective action, and have proposed a variety of theoretical concepts to understand culture and mobilization, including framing, free spaces, and collective identity. Despite this, what we mean when we say “culture matters” remains unclear. In this paper, I draw on 30 years of social movement theory and research to construct a typology of three ways that culture is seen as shaping social movement activity: (i) culture renders particular sites fruitful for social movements to mobilize out of; (ii) culture serves as a resource that assists in movement action; and (iii) culture provides wider contexts that shape movement activity. This typology represents the analytic building blocks of theories about culture and social movements, and is presented towards the end of clarifying and sharpening our theoretical concepts. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research that draw on, refine, and extend these three building blocks.     

Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture

In this essay, focusing primarily on the cinema of the walking corpse, I provide an overview of zombie studies and suggest potential avenues for sociological inquiry into zombie phenomena. I argue that zombie films, comic books, novels, video games, and the like can be seen as significant cultural objects that reflect and reveal the cultural and material circumstances of their creation. Despite emanating from complex culture‐producing institutions and (arguably) capturing extant social anxieties, sociology has remained quiet on zombie phenomena. Issues of significance, history, and definition are discussed. I then locate three avenues of inquiry ideally suited to the sociological toolkit: symptomatic analysis of content, production, and audience response and interaction. I conclude by calling for a multipronged sociological analysis into “zombie culture.”