Misdirection on the road to Shangri-La

Will life expectancy in the United States rise or fall in this century? The implications of either scenario are far reaching. We contend that the rise of childhood obesity in the United States in the past three decades has been so dramatic that it will soon lead to higher than expected death rates at middle ages and a possible decline in life expectancy by midcentury. The most detrimental health and longevity effects will not be seen for decades--a phenomenon that cannot be detected by current methods used to forecast life expectancy or estimate the number of deaths currently attributable to obesity. This scenario contrasts sharply with the views of mathematical demographers who generate forecasts by relying on the assumption that the U.S. pattern of longevity will follow that of other longer lived nations and on the extrapolation of historical trends in life expectancy into the future.     

Some Sources of Interviewer Variance in Surveys

Interviewer variance is examined for 33 interviewers and 3,000interviews, with age, sex, socioeconomic status, social mobility,and interviewer ratings as key variables. It differs among interviewschedule items and is influenced by combinations of sex andage of interviewers and respondents. Selecting interviewersand assigning households-respondents to them is a complex process,and matching interviewers with respondents on "face sheet" characteristicsmay produce error in some instances while reducing error inothers.     

Developing Absorptive Capacity Theory for Public Service Organizations: Emerging UK Empirical Evidence

A strong public policy focus on high performance means that utilizing management knowledge effectively is at a premium for UK public service organizations. This study empirically examined two English public agencies to explore the inter‐sectoral transfer of a strategic management model originally developed in the private sector – absorptive capacity – which is one way of conceptualizing an organizational competence in such knowledge mobilization. Two theoretical contributions are made. First, a new absorptive capacity framework for public service organizations is developed which recognizes the participation of public agency project teams during an innovation process proceeding over time with phases of co‐creation, testing, metamorphosis and diffusion. Second, our novel framework modifies an early influential model of absorptive capacity. Counter to this model, we argue that realized absorptive capacity requires agency from skilled and embedded actors to turn ‘curbing routines’ into ‘enabling routines’ in all four stages. Project (middle) managers have flexibility in their roles to seize episodic moments of opportunity to innovate and achieve service delivery goals, and to build absorptive capacity capability. Absorptive capacity capability develops organically over time. Future research directions are discussed.     

Validation of a measure of college students' intoxicated behaviors: associations with alcohol outcome expectancies, drinking motives, and personality

OBJECTIVE: The authors aimed to develop a measure of college students' intoxicated behaviors and to validate the measure using scales assessing alcohol outcome expectancies, motives for drinking, and personality traits. PARTICIPANTS AND METHOD SUMMARY: The authors administered these measures and an inventory describing 50 intoxicated behaviors to 198 college students and conducted factor analysis on intoxicated behaviors. Logistic regression models examined relationships between intoxicated behavior dimensions and expectances, motives, and personality traits. RESULTS: Self-reported behaviors during intoxication episodes were reducible to 3 basic dimensions that formed reliable and valid scales: social, antisocial, and emotionally labile intoxication. CONCLUSIONS: Researchers can use the Intoxicated Behaviors Inventory to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions targeting drinking or to identify college students at risk for problematic consequences of alcohol use. In addition, results point to the need for community efforts to encourage more moderate drinking among college students.     

Tasting off-flavors: food science,sensory knowledge and the consumer sensorium

Abstract

In food science and technology, understanding off-flavors has a significance with both technical and commercial implications. In the food industry in the United States, it is a widely held truism that consumers will not buy a product if they do not like the way it tastes or if it contains unpleasant flavors. But how can science determine when food is off putting, and how do scientists learn to address bad tastes in their experimental and technical practice? Based on ethnographic work with food scientists in the United States, this paper is a reflexive account of learning to taste off-flavors, a form of sensory learning that utilizes the scientist’s own body as a kind of instrument. The paper argues that a particular understanding of the consumer sensorium emerges through food scientists’ approach to off-flavors. This is an image of the consumer as a chemically receptive sensory system that is highly sensitive to compounds at trace levels. By utilizing the sensitivity of their own senses, food scientists exploit the relationship between distaste, memory and sensory perception as a form of training to produce future aesthetic memories of off-flavors that can be deployed in a technical context.     

Boundedly rational expected utility theory

We build a satisficing model of choice under risk which embeds Expected Utility Theory (EUT) into a boundedly rational deliberation process. The decision maker accumulates evidence for and against alternative options by repeatedly sampling from her underlying set of EU preferences until the evidence favouring one option satisfies her desired level of confidence. Despite its EUT core, the model produces patterns of behaviour that violate standard EUT axioms, while at the same time capturing systematic relationships between choice probabilities, response times and confidence judgments, which are beyond the scope of theories that do not take deliberation into account.

     

A hierarchical theory of occupational segregation and wage discrimination

Becker's model of discrimination is extended to the case where men exhibit distastes for working under female managers. The distribution of women in the resulting occupational hierarchy depends on the number of women in lower occupations, the wages of male workers in lower occupations, and male distastes for female management. Thus, there exists an occupational sorting function, related to wages, that determines the occupational distribution of women. We integrate this sorting function into a standard wage equation to derive a new decomposition of male-female wage differentials and apply it to a sample of insurance industry workers from the 1988 CPS.     

Testing the ‘standard’ model of stochastic choice under risk

Models of stochastic choice are intended to capture the substantial amount of noise observed in decisions under risk. We present an experimental test of one model, which many regard as the default—the Basic Fechner model. We consider one of the model’s key assumptions—that the noise around the subjective value of a risky option is independent of other features of the decision problem. We find that this assumption is systematically violated. However the main patterns in our data can be accommodated by a more recent variant of the Fechner model, or within the random preference framework.     

Why do they leave? Factors associated with job termination among personal assistant workers in home care

Recruiting and retaining an adequate number of personal support workers in home care is both challenging and essential to allowing elders to age in place. A mixed-method, longitudinal study examined turnover in a sample of 261 personal support workers in Maine; 70 workers (26.8%) left their employment in the first year of the study. Logistic regression analysis indicated that younger age and lack of health insurance were significant predictors of turnover. Analysis of telephone interviews revealed three overarching themes related to termination: job not worthwhile, personal reasons, and burnout. Implications of study findings for gerontological social workers are outlined.     

ADDRESSING SOCIAL DILEMMAS WITH MASCOTS,INFORMATION, AND GRAPHICS

Reducing nonpoint source pollution is a complex social dilemma involving externalities, information asymmetries, and coordination problems. Using a laboratory experiment, this research investigates how mascots, public information, and data visualization can improve collective group behavior to address a social dilemma. Results show that groups reduce pollution in the experiment when a community mascot expresses negative emotions in response to poor water quality outcomes. Additionally, groups pollute less when they are provided public information about water quality, and abatement is greater when feedback is negatively framed. This study demonstrates how novel nonmonetary incentives can be used to achieve a collective environmental goal. (JEL D79, Q25, Q52, Q53, D83)