Stigmatizing Clients with Mental Health Conditions: An Assessment of Social Work Student Attitudes

Research suggests that stigma plays a major role in discouraging clients from participating in mental health treatment. Because social workers provide a significant amount of such services, this study investigates social work student stigma as a function of their willingness to treat clients with alcohol dependence, nicotine dependence, depression, and Alzheimer's disease. Students' held higher levels of stigma toward nicotine dependent clients and less toward those with depression. Personal histories of depression and student age - but not smoking or alcohol use - were predictive of higher stigma levels towards nicotine dependent clients. Implications for social work are discussed.     

The measurement of gender wage discrimination: the distributional approach revisited

This paper presents the advantages of taking into account the distribution of the individual wage gap when analyzing female wage discrimination. Several limitations of previous approaches such as the classic Oaxaca–Blinder and the recent distributive proposals using quantile regressions or counterfactual functions are thoroughly discussed. The methodology presented here relies on Jenkins’ (J Econom 61:81–102, 1994) work and supports the use of poverty and deprivation literature techniques that are directly applicable to the measurement of discrimination. In an empirical illustration, we quantify the relevance of the glass ceiling and sticky floor phenomena in the Spanish labor market.     

Conjugate Priors Represent Strong Pre-Experimental Assumptions

Abstract.  It is well known that Jeffreys' prior is asymptotically least favorable under the entropy risk, i.e. it asymptotically maximizes the mutual information between the sample and the parameter. However, in this paper we show that the prior that minimizes (subject to certain constraints) the mutual information between the sample and the parameter is natural conjugate when the model belongs to a natural exponential family. A conjugate prior can thus be regarded as maximally informative in the sense that it minimizes the weight of the observations on inferences about the parameter; in other words, the expected relative entropy between prior and posterior is minimized when a conjugate prior is used.     

Asymmetric exchange between populations differing in habitat quality: A metapopulation study on the citril finch

The citril finch ( Serinus citrinella ) is a Cardueline finch restricted to the high mountains of western Europe. Since 1991 we have captured-recaptured about 6000 birds in two contrasting subpopulations located on the same mountain but separated by 5 km in distance. Citril finches, at the north-facing locality (La Vansa), rely more on Pine trees ( Pinus uncinata ) as their main food source, than birds at the south-facing locality (La Bofia), which rely more on herb seeds, which are of lower energetic content. Birds at La Vansa had higher body mass and fat score than those at La Bofia, suggesting that La Vansa was a site of higher-quality than La Bofia. By the use of a metapopulation approach and multistate models, we found that citril finches at the high-quality locality (La Vansa) showed higher survival rates than those at the low-quality one (La Bofia) (Vansa adults: φ = 0.42 - 0.04, juveniles: φ = 0.34 - 0.05; Bofia adults: φ = 0.35 - 0.04, juveniles: φ = 0.28 - 0.05). Dispersal was also asymmetric and higher for juvenile birds, with movement rates for juvenile citril finches from the low-quality to the higher-quality locality (Bofia to Vansa: é = 0.38 - 0.10) higher than the reverse (Vansa to Bofia: é = 0.09 - 0.03). We also investigated time-specific factors (e.g. meteorological data and fructification rate of Pinus ) as potential predictors of overall mortality and dispersal patterns. The results do not allow strong conclusions regarding the impact of these factors on survival and movement rates. Patterns of movement found in the Citril Finch between localities document a new model for the dispersal of species from low to high quality habitats, which we label of 'sources and pools'. This contrasts with currently accepted models of 'sources and sinks', in which movement is from high to low quality habitats, and 'Ideal Free Distributions', in which there is a balanced dispersal between habitats of different quality.     

Understanding Child Outcomes: An Application to Child Abuse and Neglect

Recently, there have been several empirical studies exploring the effects of abortion on child outcome by correlating the availability of abortion to a mother at the time of a child's birth. This paper presents a model that helps explain the process, as well as establish that the incidence of child neglect is also reduced by access to abortion. It argues that the birth of a child reduces the desired quality of not only that particular birth but of all previous and subsequent offspring. More specifically, a family does not reduce the quality invested in a particular child, whether unwanted or not, but in all family members. Several propositions derived from the model are empirically tested. Some of the findings include that access to abortion reduces the neglect of children, yet is positively associated with sexual abuse. Furthermore, unlike the stylized facts, blacks and female-headed households are no more likely to neglect and abuse their children than other households once availability of abortion, employment status, income and other variables are taken into account. Finally, income and the poverty rate are found to be unrelated with maltreatment, while other variables such as the unemployment rate have better explanatory power.     

A statistical method for synthesizing mediation analyses using the product of coefficient approach across multiple trials

Mediation analysis often requires larger sample sizes than main effect analysis to achieve the same statistical power. Combining results across similar trials may be the only practical option for increasing statistical power for mediation analysis in some situations. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate: (1) marginal means for mediation path a, the relation of the independent variable to the mediator; (2) marginal means for path b, the relation of the mediator to the outcome, across multiple trials; and (3) the between-trial level variance–covariance matrix based on a bivariate normal distribution. We present the statistical theory and an R computer program to combine regression coefficients from multiple trials to estimate a combined mediated effect and confidence interval under a random effects model. Values of coefficients a and b, along with their standard errors from each trial are the input for the method. This marginal likelihood based approach with Monte Carlo confidence intervals provides more accurate inference than the standard meta-analytic approach. We discuss computational issues, apply the method to two real-data examples and make recommendations for the use of the method in different settings.     

The attitudes toward lesbians and gay men scale (ATLG): adaptation and testing the reliability and validity in Chile

Previous researchers have used the attitudes toward lesbians and gay men (ATLG) scale (Herek, 1988) and reported their own reliability coefficients and validity measures, but research on this subject is scarce in Chile. In order to determine if ATLG scale was a reliable and valid instrument in our country, we adapted and examined the psychometrics properties using a sample composed of 142 psychology and economics undergraduate students. This study found the ATLG scale to be reliable (a = .90) and valid for the Chilean population and is a recommended instrument for measuring attitudes toward gay men and lesbians.