Solutions to the Challenge of Meeting Rural Transportation Needs: Middle-Aged and Older Adults’ Perspectives

This study aimed to explore how the aging population in Appalachia manages its transportation and plans for the transition to non-driving and to seek possible solutions to the challenge of meeting rural transportation needs. Four focus groups (N = 38) were conducted, supplemented by a questionnaire, in Appalachian Kentucky. The results showed that few alternative transportation existed except a local paratransit service and informal transportation support. Compared to older adults, middle-aged adults reported a greater willingness to use mobile phones and the Internet to arrange transportation if they were available. Participants also recommended expanding the use of existing transportation in the community – such as church vans – to better meet the aging population’s needs. The findings suggest that partnership between government, non-profit, and private sectors is needed, not solely focusing on a tax-dependent solution. Additionally, information and communication technology-based transportation management system would help maximize the use of scare but existing resources in rural areas.     

Family risk and resiliency factors, substance use, and the drug resistance process in adolescence

Recent approaches to drug prevention have emphasized risk and resiliency factors. Two models have been developed to explain these factors, one which posits that separate elements make up each set and the other which posits that a single factor can be either a risk or a resiliency factor depending on, for example, if it is present (resiliency) or absent (risk). This study tested these models and attempted to compare the effects of risk and resiliency across gender and ethnicity. Results support the model in which risk and resiliency are discrete sets of factors and demonstrate that overall resiliency factors play a larger role than risk factors in substance use and drug resistance processes. However, gender proved to be an important moderator of these effects. For adolescent males, resiliency has an indirect effect on overall substance use through age of first use, while risk has a direct effect on overall substance use. For adolescent females, resiliency has a direct effect on overall substance use and risk has an indirect effect through age of first use. This indicates that while early interventions are important for both genders, resiliency factors must be dealt with before initiation of substance use for males. Findings did not differ substantially across ethnicity, although the small African-American sample size may have limited power to detect differences.     

Beyond the Dichotomy: Six Religious Views of Homosexuality

Using published theological and scholarly evidence, this article disrupts the stereotypical “born gay”/“sinful choice” dichotomy widely assumed to characterize religious views of homosexuality in the United States. It argues that we need to keep moral questions separate from questions about the fixity or fluidity of sexual orientation. Rather than two, American Christian and Jewish views of homosexuality can been seen on a range from the “God Hates Fags” view through “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin,” “We Don’t Talk About That,” “They Can’t Help It,” “God’s Good Gift,” and a queer-theological view of the “Godly Calling.”     

Participation in biodiversity conservation: Motivations and barriers of Australian landholders

Biodiversity conservation programs that appeal to landholders’ motivations and minimise their barriers to participation may result in both increased uptake rates and improved ecological outcomes. To understand their motivations and barriers to conserve biodiversity, qualitative interviews were conducted with 45 landholders who had participated in one of three different programs in Queensland, Australia. The results revealed that the landholders’ decisions to participate depended on the level of formal biodiversity protection offered by the program, potential changes to their property rights, personal benefits of participation, and the program objectives. Landholders’ motivations related to conservation, production, financial and experimental imperatives. Common barriers to participation were lost productivity, different interpretations of what constituted “conservation”, and limits to future development and land use options. Voluntary and economic policy instruments can be used to stimulate participation and overcome barriers, but must be applied with care to reduce the creation of perverse ecological outcomes, such as slippage and low additionality.     

Linear Regression for Panel With Unknown Number of Factors as Interactive Fixed Effects

In this paper, we study the least squares (LS) estimator in a linear panel regression model with unknown number of factors appearing as interactive fixed effects. Assuming that the number of factors used in estimation is larger than the true number of factors in the data, we establish the limiting distribution of the LS estimator for the regression coefficients as the number of time periods and the number of cross‐sectional units jointly go to infinity. The main result of the paper is that under certain assumptions, the limiting distribution of the LS estimator is independent of the number of factors used in the estimation as long as this number is not underestimated. The important practical implication of this result is that for inference on the regression coefficients, one does not necessarily need to estimate the number of interactive fixed effects consistently.     

Attribution of tumour lethality and estimation of the time to onset of occult tumours in the absence of cause-of-death Information

A new statistical approach is developed for estimating the carcinogenic potential of drugs and other chemical substances used by humans. Improved statistical methods are developed for rodent tumorigenicity assays that have interval sacrifices but not cause-of-death data. For such experiments, this paper proposes a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation method for estimating the distributions of the time to onset of and the time to death from the tumour. The log-likelihood function is optimized using a constrained direct search procedure. Using the maximum likelihood estimators, the number of fatal tumours in an experiment can be imputed. By applying the procedure proposed to a real data set, the effect of calorie restriction is investigated. In this study, we found that calorie restriction delays the tumour onset time significantly for pituitary tumours. The present method can result in substantial economic savings by relieving the need for a case-by-case assignment of the cause of death or context of observation by pathologists. The ultimate goal of the method proposed is to use the imputed number of fatal tumours to modify Peto's International Agency for Research on Cancer test for application to tumorigenicity assays that lack cause-of-death data.     

“Tractorettes” or Partners? Farmers' Views on Women in Kansas Farming Households

In the United States, for various reasons, fewer farm families rely solely on their farming operations for their livelihoods. As the structure of agriculture changes and farm families adjust their livelihood strategies, do the discourses around gender relations in households also change? This article analyzes the portrayal of women's roles in farming households by drawing on interviews with Kansas field crop farmers, primarily regarding their land‐use decisions, but also inquiring about their farms and communities. The article addresses the following question: How do farmers' discourses compare to Brandth's (2002a) categorizations of three dominant discourses in the literature on gender in European family farming—the discourse of the family farm, the discourse of masculinization, and the discourse of detraditionalization and diversity? While Brandth finds the discourse of the family farm prevalent in the literature, overall, the discourse apparent from 30 farmer interviews is more characteristic of detraditionalization and diversity. Although men are primarily the principal operators in farming, overall, women were not portrayed simply as helpers. Rather, their roles are depicted as diverse and important to farm operations.