‘There is always this feeling of otherness’: exploring the lived experiences of visually impaired immigrant women in Canada

This paper explores the experiences of immigrant women with visual impairment in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) of Canada. Conceptually, the paper draws from feminist disability theory and critical scholarship on blindness to consider the discursive and material processes shaping women’s experiences across different socio-cultural contexts. Empirically, the paper draws from in-depth interviews with seven women. The analysis is organized around three themes. The first explores women’s understandings of visual impairment. The second examines the ways in which women’s experiences of visual impairment are shaped by meanings and attitudes that circulate within their cultural communities, and the extent to which immigration might challenge or reinforce these meanings. The third examines the shifting barriers and opportunities women face with respect to social and economic participation. We close by identifying the conceptual implications of our research.     

The heritability of emergent leadership: Age and gender as moderating factors

In this study, we examined the moderating influences of gender and age with respect to testing the heritability of leadership emergence. A large data base of 12,112 twins from Sweden was used in the current study to decompose the variance of emergent leadership into an unobservable genetic component and environmental components that are either common or unshared among twin pairs. Consistent with prior leadership research on genetics, we found that a genetic factor is able to explain a significant proportion of the variation across individuals in predicting how twins perceive their emergent leadership behavior (about 44% for women and 37% for men). Furthermore, we also found that the magnitude of genetic influence on emergent leadership varied with age, but only for women with the heritability estimate being highest for the mid-age women versus lowest for the older women. Implications for advancing research on the genetic and environmental influences on leadership emergence are discussed.     

Understanding Community Resilience from a PRA Perspective Using Binary Decision Diagrams

Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is a useful tool to assess complex interconnected systems. This article leverages the capabilities of PRA tools developed for industrial and nuclear risk analysis in community resilience evaluations by modeling the food security of a community in terms of its built environment as an integrated system. To this end, we model the performance of Gilroy, CA, a moderate‐size town, with regard to disruptions in its food supply caused by a severe earthquake. The food retailers of Gilroy, along with the electrical power network, water network elements, and bridges are considered as components of a system. Fault and event trees are constructed to model the requirements for continuous food supply to community residents and are analyzed efficiently using binary decision diagrams (BDDs). The study also identifies shortcomings in approximate classical system analysis methods in assessing community resilience. Importance factors are utilized to rank the importance of various factors to the overall risk of food insecurity. Finally, the study considers the impact of various sources of uncertainties in the hazard modeling and performance of infrastructure on food security measures. The methodology can be applicable for any existing critical infrastructure system and has potential extensions to other hazards.     

The sociology of late secularization: social divisions and religiosity

At the start of the twentieth century the religious differed from the religiously indifferent largely in being religious. Now they differ in a number of other social and demographic characteristics that reduce interaction between the two populations further than simple numbers would require. That some of the main carriers of religion are immigrants or adherents of recently imported faiths reinforces the sense that religion is what other people do. In the context of the stock of religious knowledge being depleted and religion‐taken‐too‐seriously being unpopular, the narrow demographic base of the religious makes conversion unlikely and thus makes the reversal of secularization unlikely.     

The Risk of James–Stein and Lasso Shrinkage

This article compares the mean-squared error (or ?₂ risk) of ordinary least squares (OLS), James–Stein, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) shrinkage estimators in simple linear regression where the number of regressors is smaller than the sample size. We compare and contrast the known risk bounds for these estimators, which shows that neither James–Stein nor Lasso uniformly dominates the other. We investigate the finite sample risk using a simple simulation experiment. We find that the risk of Lasso estimation is particularly sensitive to coefficient parameterization, and for a significant portion of the parameter space Lasso has higher mean-squared error than OLS. This investigation suggests that there are potential pitfalls arising with Lasso estimation, and simulation studies need to be more attentive to careful exploration of the parameter space.     

Spaces of Muslim Identity in Inverness,Scotland

Each generation of immigrants has its own challenges; for example, how to maintain already constructed identities among first generation immigrants and how to construct identities of the second generation of immigrants. Numerous literature suggests that the previous studies on these topics have been conducted within larger cities such as London, Glasgow or Edinburgh. This article examines how Muslim immigrants in a small city maintain and modify some aspects of their religious and cultural identities. The data consist of 30 interviews conducted with first and second generation of Muslim immigrants in Scotland, analysis of which suggests the size of the city does not appear to affect daily Muslim practices nor their ability to maintain Muslim identity. Rather, access to shared spaces, such as Inverness Masjid and the local halal meat shop, become critical to how Muslim's maintain and modify their identity in a new place.     

Modeling population and subject-specific growth in a latent trait measured by multiple instruments over time using a hierarchical Bayesian framework

Psychometric growth curve modeling techniques are used to describe a person’s latent ability and how that ability changes over time based on a specific measurement instrument. However, the same instrument cannot always be used over a period of time to measure that latent ability. This is often the case when measuring traits longitudinally in children. Reasons may be that over time some measurement tools that were difficult for young children become too easy as they age resulting in floor effects or ceiling effects or both. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model for such a scenario. Within the Bayesian model we combine information from multiple instruments used at different age ranges and having different scoring schemes to examine growth in latent ability over time. The model includes between-subject variance and within-subject variance and does not require linking item specific difficulty between the measurement tools. The model’s utility is demonstrated on a study of language ability in children from ages one to ten who are hard of hearing where measurement tool specific growth and subject-specific growth are shown in addition to a group level latent growth curve comparing the hard of hearing children to children with normal hearing.KEYWORDS: Bayesian hierarchical models, psychometric modeling, language ability, growth curve modeling, longitudinal analysis     

Service diversification and growth of professional service firms

This study investigates the impact of service diversification on the rate and mode of firm growth in professional service firms (PSFs). Drawing on the extant PSF literature, we identify differing views regarding the growth impact of service diversification. Specifically, some scholars suggest that the external client benefits associated with service diversification should allow PSFs to expand revenues at a rapid pace and pursue less merger and acquisition activity, whereas others imply that increased diversification can cause internal challenges with respect to learning costs, coordination and innovation that can limit the rate of revenue growth and encourage more mergers and acquisitions. We test these competing views using longitudinal data on 137 accounting firms and cross-sectional data on 125 law firms and find that service diversification is negatively associated with the rate of firm revenue growth and positively associated with the use of mergers and acquisitions.