A new long-term survival model with dispersion induced by discrete frailty

Lifetime Data Analysis - Frailty models are generally used to model heterogeneity between the individuals. The distribution of the frailty variable is often assumed to be continuous. However, there...     

Identity and integration: The roles of relationship and retention in nonprofit mergers

Prior research suggests that nonprofits are flexible and possess multiple identities, although we know less about how transformative changes, such as mergers, shape nonprofit identity. This qualitative study draws upon in‐depth interviews from 13 nonprofit merger cases to explore factors that influence postmerger identity and integration. In particular, we focus on the roles of organizational similarity and relationships, program and personnel retention, and rebranding. Ultimately, we derive a typology of postmerger integration in nonprofits and suggest that postmerger identity may be classified in terms of absorption, preservation, or creation. Implications for nonprofit leaders are discussed.     

No wonder social workers feel uncomfortable in court

The present article assesses the adversary systemper se and asks the question, Is there any place for courtroom antics and histrionics in cases involving children? Social workers are uncomfortable before the august body of thecourt, not because of any lack of education or knowledge on their part but because of the nature of the adversary process itself.     

Comparing Networks Across Space and Time, Size and Species

We describe and illustrate methodology for comparing networks from diverse settings. Our empirical base consists of 42 networks from four kinds of species (humans, nonhuman primates, nonprimate mammals, and birds) and covering distinct types of relations such as influence, grooming, and agonistic encounters. The general problem is to determine whether networks are similarly structured despite their surface differences. The methodology we propose is generally applicable to the characterization and comparison of network–level social structures across multiple settings, such as different organizations, communities, or social groups, and to the examination of sources of variability in network structure. We first fit a p^* model (Wasserman and Pattison 1996) to each network to obtain estimates for effects of six structural properties on the probability of the graph. We then calculate predicted tie probabilities for each network, using both its own parameter estimates and the estimates from every other network in the collection. Comparison is based on the similarity between sets of predicted tie probabilities. We then use correspondence analysis to represent the similarities among all 42 networks and interpret the resulting configuration using information about the species and relations involved. Results show that similarities among the networks are due more to the kind of relation than to the kind of animal.     

English Language Proficiency of Immigrants and Refugees in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area

Studies of the determinants of English language ability have generally focused on the largest immigrant groups in the United States. Much less is known about smaller, but significant regional concentrations of immigrants and refugees. This article presents data on four very distinct and understudied groups: Russians, Somalis, Hmong, and Mexicans in the Midwest. We found large differences in English language proficiency across the different national origin groups, even after controlling for background variables. These differences were not attributable to refugee status or to linguistic distance from English. Being Somali, migrating to the United States at a young age and having a college diploma were the best predictors of both spoken and written proficiency. The returns to higher education were particularly noteworthy — respondents with college diplomas were more than 29 times more likely than non‐high school graduates to speak English well, and more than 20 times as likely to read well. Women appear to have benefited more than men from completing college in terms of spoken English proficiency since the male‐female gap narrows among the highly educated. Length of time in the United States was a good predictor of whether an individual speaks English at home, regardless of age of entry to the country.     

'The Tribunal was the most stressful thing: more stressful than my son's diagnosis or behaviour': the experiences of families who go to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT)

It is more than 10 years since the Special Educational Needs Tribunal was established in 1994 as an independent panel which arbitrates in disputes between parents of children with the label special educational needs and Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in England. In 2002 the Tribunal began hearing claims for disability discrimination and was re-named the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT). Since 1994 over 20,000 appeals have been registered. This article, which forms part of my ongoing Ph.D. thesis 'Parents as advocates: the experience of parents who register an appeal with SENDisT', offers an analysis of parents' Tribunal stories. Here, the key question is what affect the process of going to SENDisT has on the social, emotional and financial well-being of the family. Through a process of narrative inquiry the aim is to foreground parents' unheard stories and to reveal their 'hidden' experiences.     

Public Meetings and Risk Amplification: A Longitudinal Study

This article offers longitudinal data tracking people who did and did not attend a series of public meetings in an upstate New York rural community grappling with the expansion of an existing solid waste landfill and remediation of an adjacent inactive hazardous waste site. Before and after the public meetings, mailed questionnaires measured risk perceptions and perceived credibility of risk managers (here, the state government agencies and the responsible industry) conducting the meetings. Respondents at each measurement point included meeting attendees and nonattendees, with some fluctuation over time when attendees at one measurement point were nonattendees at the next and vice versa. The results from the first survey indicate that following the first two public meetings, attendees perceived greater risks from the waste sites than did nonattendees; attendees also perceived the risk managers as less credible. After the third public meeting, the results showed that attendees' risk perceptions remained steady; however, perceptions of government agency credibility significantly decreased. After the fourth public meeting, the survey found that attendees' risk perceptions were again not significantly different, whereas perceptions of government agency credibility increased significantly. The industry's credibility also increased, though only among attendees who had attended the most recent public meeting, not among attendees who had attended both the third and fourth public meetings. For nonattendees, risk perceptions and credibility ratings did not change. The discussion examines how distinctive characteristics of communication at each public meeting may have resulted in different effects and proposes hypotheses for future research.     

Stemming retail leakage with a sense of community: Leveraging the links between communal ties and shopping decisions

Retail business development is a broad goal for both private business interests as well as local policymakers, yet the goal of retail opportunities for local residents themselves is often seen as secondary. This paper considers the argument that retail opportunities and sense of community are in fact linked in important ways, links that reinforce the social fabric of a community and/or neighborhood. The paper first briefly reviews the inherent linkages between retail shopping and local development patterns, and then considers the sense of community in the context of Garfield County in western Colorado. Based on the key questions derived from this background, we formally test the inter-relationship between local retail spending and sense of community from detailed survey data, then more broadly consider the factors that critically shape a locality's “sense of community.” These findings shape several important policy implications.