RACE AND THE EDUCATIONAL EXPECTATIONS OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN: The Case of South Africa

South Africa, a country that is highly stratified by race, is an important location for studying the relationship between race and educational expectations. Using a longitudinal data set, we examine the educational expectations of black (African), colored (mixed race), and white (European ancestry) parents and children in Cape Town, South Africa. We find that parents and children have high educational expectations regardless of race, but black parents and children have higher educational expectations than coloreds and whites once socioeconomic and other factors are controlled. We also find that parents' and children's expectations tend to agree more and are more closely correlated among coloreds and whites than blacks. We test two explanations for the educational expectations of parents and children, finding more support for the status attainment perspective among coloreds and whites than blacks and support for the family social capital perspective among blacks and coloreds only.     

SOLIDARITY AND DRUG USE IN THE ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC SCENE

Current research and theory on rave culture has articulated a link between solidarity and drug use, although the precise nature of this relationship remains unclear. Work conducted in the field of cultural studies contends that while rave participants engage in drug use, it is by no means the exclusive source of solidarity. However, work in the fields of public health and medical science portrays rave culture as a site of extensive drug consumption and personal risk, where solidarity is dismissed or dubiously acknowledged as chemically induced. Prior research has not sought to reconcile this tension, or to consider how the relationship between drug use and solidarity may have changed over time. Using data from a multimethod ethnography of the rave scene in Philadelphia, we found the drug use–solidarity relationship substantially more complicated than prior scholarship has articulated. Our discoveries, consequently, provide clarification of this relationship as well as advance the literatures on solidarity, collective identity, youth culture, and music scenes.     

Understanding the Alteration and Decline of a Music Scene: Observations from Rave Culture1

The sociological study of scenes—music and otherwise—has flourished in the latter twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Most research has documented a scene’s origins or its “evolution” into mainstream culture. Fewer studies have systematically addressed what leads to a scene’s alteration and decline, although many scholars have partially addressed it in authenticity studies anchored in the Frankfurt School’s claims about culture and economics. Are culture industries sufficient in explaining music scene transformation? The present article attempts to explain the cultural transformation of the Philadelphia rave scene and to articulate its relevance for other kinds of social worlds. Using a multimethod ethnographic approach, I show that five forces (generational schism, commercialization, cultural otherness/deviance and self destruction, social control, and genre‐based scene fragmentation) help explain the alteration and decline of the rave scene from its high point in the mid to late 1990s to its diminished and fragmented state presently. In describing these forces, I hope to move beyond culture industry narratives toward a broader explanation of cultural change, one that is lacking not only in music scene studies, but also in literatures on many other kinds of social worlds.     

Therapist effects on dropout in couple therapy

Marriage and family therapy scholars have argued that therapists play a crucial role in successful couple therapy, yet little research has empirically documented that the therapist in couple therapy has a significant impact on outcomes. Known as the study of therapist effects, this study sought to assess the amount of variance attributed to the therapist in couple therapy outcomes. Using dropout as the outcome variable, this study analyzed data from 1,192 couples treated by 90 masters and doctoral student therapists at a university‐based training clinic. Results from multilevel analysis indicated that therapists in the sample accounted for 9.4% of the variance in couple dropout while controlling for initial couple impairment. Therapist gender and therapist experience did not significantly predict variability in therapist effects. These findings give promise to future research on therapist effects in couple therapy and encourage exploration into which therapist characteristics and behaviors contribute to successful clinical outcome.     

The time series concept of invertibility

Box and JENKINS introduced the concept of invertibility for reasons which are argued to be largely irrelevant. However, the concept has some value since the boundary between invertible and ”strongly“ non-invertible moving average paramter sets, gives rise to bounds on the autocorrelations. As well as being of academic interest, these bounds may be useful for identifying processes.     

On the invertibility conditions for moving average processes

Conditions for the general Moving Average process, of order q, to be invertible or borderline non-invertible are deduced. These are termed the acceptability conditions. It turns out that they depend on the magnitude of the final moving average parameter, θ _q . If ‖θ _q ‖ >1, the process is not acceptable. Should ‖θ _q ‖ = 1, the conditions, for any particular q, follow simply - if use is made of the remainder theorem. When ‖θ_q‖< 1, an appeal is made to ROUCH* E'S theorem, to establish the conditions. Analogous stationarity results immediately follow for autoregressive processes.     

A Self-Image Inventory: Its Theoretical Background,Reliability and Validity*

Wylie (1974) points out that there is a lack of adequate theoretical development in the investigation of the self-concept. The result is a proliferation of operational definitions with no clear understanding of the relationship between operations, between constructs, and between the constructs and their operationalizations. In this article we make explicit the theoretical component of self to which this Self-image Inventory relates. The article presents the inventory and twenty years of research experience with it. The inventory is found to be both reliable and valid for measuring the self-image as a role specific component of self.