Religion and intimate partner violence in Chile: Macro- and micro-level influences

The Catholic Church has had a strong influence on the Chilean legal and social landscape in ways that have adversely affected victims of intimate partner violence; e.g., it succeeded until just five years ago in blocking efforts to legalize divorce. At the same time, quantitative studies based on survey data from the United States and other countries show a generally favorable influence of religion on health and many other domains of life, including intimate partner violence. The present study explores the puzzle posed by these seemingly opposing macro- and micro-level forces. Results based on data from the 2005 Survey of Student Well-Being, a questionnaire on gender-based violence administered to students at a large public university in Chile, show that moderate or low levels of religiosity are associated with reduced vulnerability to violence, but high levels are not. This non-linearity sheds light on the puzzle, because at the macro level the religious views shaping Chile’s legal and social environment have been extreme.     

Weighted quantile regression with nonelliptically structured covariates

Although quantile regression estimators are robust against low leverage observations with atypically large responses (Koenker & Bassett 1978), they can be seriously affected by a few points that deviate from the majority of the sample covariates. This problem can be alleviated by downweighting observations with high leverage. Unfortunately, when the covariates are not elliptically distributed, Mahalanobis distances may not be able to correctly identify atypical points. In this paper the authors discuss the use of weights based on a new leverage measure constructed using Rosenblatt's multivariate transformation which is able to reflect nonelliptical structures in the covariate space. The resulting weighted estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal, and have a bounded influence function. In addition, the authors also discuss a selection criterion for choosing the downweighting scheme. They illustrate their approach with child growth data from Finland. Finally, their simulation studies suggest that this methodology has good finite‐sample properties.     

Pavlov and the prisoner's dilemma

Our Pavlov learns by conditioned response, through rewards and punishments, to cooperate or defect. We analyze the behavior of an extended play Prisoner's Dilemma with Pavlov against various opponents and compute the time and cost to train Pavlov to cooperate. Among our results is that Pavlov and his clone would learn to cooperate more rapidly than if Pavlov played against the Tit for Tat strategy. This fact has implications for the evolution of cooperation.     

High School Family Centers: Transformative Spaces Linking Schools and Families in Support of Student Learning

ABSTRACT

This study explores school, family, and community partnership at the high school level, using eight family centers as the entry point for the investigation. The purpose of the study was to identify ways that parents and school staff could collaborate to support high school students' achievement. The study findings led to the development of a model that represents three inputs that are crucial to the creation of a successful family center: (1) a supportive infrastructure, (2) the existence of skilled center staff, and (3) the presence of responsive programming. These three inputs led to the creation of a thriving center that acts as a transformative space, a “zone of community,” that results in four outputs: (1) the creation of relational trust among adults, (2) shift in parents' role construction and efficacy, (3) the generation of student relational trust, and (4) the development of student efficacy. The data from this study suggest that the relational trust developed in these transformative spaces called family centers can have a positive effect on student efficacy. The study concludes with seven recommendations for schools and districts looking to establish family centers in high schools as a way to expand family engagement at the high school level.     

Personal reflections on cautions and considerations for navigating the path of grounded theory doctoral theses and dissertations: a long walk through a dark forest

Grounded theory (GT) has been a popularly used qualitative research methodology in the social sciences and has become increasingly popular for doctoral theses and dissertations. Yet, issues such as the changing nature of grounded theory, time constraints, theses advisors, doctoral committee procedures and Institutional Review Board regulations create challenges for doctoral candidates (researchers) who choose to use GT for their dissertations. In this paper, we present the general and specific challenges of using GT for doctoral theses and dissertations by sharing our personal experiences from our Ph.D. programmes in the USA. We conclude by providing practical suggestions for doctoral researchers who are considering using GT for their theses and dissertations.     

Annexation as a factor in the growth of U.S. cities, 1950–1960 and 1960–1970

The incidence of annexation, the growth in the original area and in the area annexed, and the proportion of growth due to annexation between 1950 and 1970 are analyzed for U.S. cities grouped by size, metropolitan status, and region of the country. Over this period, annexation was a principal means of population growth for incorporated places outside the Northeast. Though often associated with metropolitan growth, annexation was even more important in the growth of nonmetropolitan cities. Overall growth differences by size of place, metropolitan status, and decade (1950--1960 or 1960--1970) could not be explained by the incidence and nature of annexation.