THE HOLOCAUST AS RECURRING REALITY: VICTIMIZATION THEMES AND JEWISH AMERICAN ETHNIC IDENTITY FORMATION

Drawing on sociological studies that document the regularity through which marginalized ethnic groups construct an ethnic identity, this article examines identity formation in the Jewish American context. A content analysis of 100 short stories written between 1946 and 1995 demonstrates how victim-oriented identities are created out of the more mundane experiences of everyday life. These stories, which were intended for consumption by Jewish American readers, describe daily life within the Jewish American community and, with surprising regularity, bring issues of victimization into the imagined experience for their readers. In addition, the analysis shows how Jewish American short story writers present the Holocaust, victimization, and anti-Semitism as contributing heavily to the processes of identity formation within the community. The discussion of the data concludes by arguing that, as the Jewish American community becomes further removed from the events of World War II, the Holocaust is becoming a more salient recurrent reality in the formation of a Jewish American identity that is increasingly tied to issues of victimization.     

State “Technical Assistance Programs” for Nursing Home Quality Improvement: Variations and Potential Implications

To improve nursing home quality, many states have developed “technical assistance programs” that provide on-site consultation and training for nursing facility staff. We conducted a national survey on these state programs to collect data on program design, operations, financing, and perceived effectiveness. As of 2010, 17 states had developed such programs. Compared to existing state nursing home quality regulations, these programs represent a collaborative, rather than enforcement-oriented, approach to quality. However, existing programs vary substantially in key structural features such as staffing patterns, funding levels, and relationship with state survey and certification agencies. Perceived effectiveness by program officials on quality was high, although few states have performed formal evaluations. Perceived barriers to program effectiveness included lack of appropriate staff and funding, among others. In conclusion, state technical assistance programs for nursing homes vary in program design and perceived effectiveness. Future comparative evaluations are needed to inform evidence-based quality initiatives.     

Boundary-Crossing Competence: Theoretical Considerations and Educational Design

This article provides a conceptual account and empirical analyses of the development of boundary-crossing competence—the ability to function competently in multiple contexts—using representative cases from two after-school programs with immigrant and low-socioeconomic status students. Our findings suggest that organizational designs that create networks of related communities of practice can provide opportunities for nondominant students to develop boundary-crossing competences through participation in expanded, horizontal—rather than hierarchal—systems of what Moll and colleagues have called “networked expertise.” These new directions in understanding competence have important implications for improving learning designs for nondominant students.     

The narrowing sex differential in life expectancy in high-income populations: Effects of differences in the age pattern of mortality

Using data from the Human Mortality Database for 29 high-income national populations (1751–2004), we review trends in the sex differential in e(0). The widening of this gap during most of the 1900s was due largely to a slower mortality decline for males than females, which previous studies attributed to behavioural factors (e.g., smoking). More recently, the gap began to narrow in most countries, and researchers tried to explain this reversal with the same factors. However, our decomposition analysis reveals that, for the majority of countries, the recent narrowing is due primarily to sex differences in the age pattern of mortality rather than declining sex ratios in mortality: the same rate of mortality decline produces smaller gains in e(0) for women than for men because women's deaths are less dispersed across age (i.e., survivorship is more rectangular).     

Determinants of Mortality at Older Ages: The Role of Biological Markers of Chronic Disease

Researchers have had a longstanding interest in understanding the determinants of mortality. This article examines the impact of a broad array of biological markers, together with self‐reports of physical and mental health status, on the probability of dying for older adults. The estimates are derived from logistic regression models based on data from a national survey in Taiwan. The analysis confirms previous studies demonstrating the effects of clinical measures related to metabolic syndrome on mortality and identifies detrimental effects of neuroendocrine and immune‐system markers. The results reveal that biomarkers provide independent explanatory power in the presence of self‐reported health measures. The associations between biomarkers and mortality found here provide new avenues for projecting future mortality and elucidating differences in longevity across populations.     

Residential mobility and the onset of adolescent sexual activity

Data from almost 5,000 adolescent respondents to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) are used to examine the mechanisms that transmit the facilitative effect of residential mobility on the timing of the transition to first premarital sexual intercourse. Adolescents who have recently moved are approximately one third more likely than nonmobile adolescents to experience first premarital intercourse between the first two waves of Add Health. We find that much of the difference between adolescent movers and stayers in the onset of sexual activity is attributable to the greater propensity for delinquency and the weaker academic performance among members of movers’ school‐based friendship networks. Adolescents’ own delinquent behavior and academic performance also help to mediate the association between residential mobility and the transition to first intercourse.     

Embodied Fluidity and the Commitment to Movement: Constructing the Moral Self through Arthritis Narratives

While biomedical research reifies bodily movement in the lives of people with chronic illness as “functional mobility,” our analysis of biographical osteoarthritis narratives uncovers a moral commitment to movement as both a moral imperative and a technique to preserve a self threatened by the limits arthritis places on daily life. A content analysis of twelve interviews with arthritis sufferers shows that, in addition to the practical and emotional challenges of living with arthritis, these actors face the daily challenge of displaying their understanding of embodied fluidity—the timely and fluid movement through time and space—as a virtuous practice. Our informants use the movement mandate—the commitment to move despite the pain it may cause—to produce themselves as competent social and moral actors sacrificing the demands of their bodies to meet social expectations, and they conduct this performance in front of several audiences: the self and specific and generalized others. For these informants, in both private and public realms, the experience and the management of pain and physical limitation are profoundly social and accountable matters, as they affect interactions with others, their own social identities and moral integrity, and their relations with self as they seek to balance their arthritis pain with their past, present, and future self‐concepts.     

Estimating Health Risks from Natural Hazards Using Risk Assessment and Epidemiology

Risk assessment is the process of estimating the likelihood that an adverse effect may result from exposure to a specific health hazard. The process traditionally involves hazard identification, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization to answer “How many excess cases of disease A will occur in a population of size B due to exposure to agent C at dose level D?” For natural hazards, however, we modify the risk assessment paradigm to answer “How many excess cases of outcome Y will occur in a population of size B due to natural hazard event E of severity D?” Using a modified version involving hazard identification, risk factor characterization, exposure characterization, and risk characterization, we demonstrate that epidemiologic modeling and measures of risk can quantify the risks from natural hazard events. We further extend the paradigm to address mitigation, the equivalent of risk management, to answer “What is the risk for outcome Y in the presence of prevention intervention X relative to the risk for Y in the absence of X?” We use the preventable fraction to estimate the efficacy of mitigation, or reduction in adverse health outcomes as a result of a prevention strategy under ideal circumstances, and further estimate the effectiveness of mitigation, or reduction in adverse health outcomes under typical community-based settings. By relating socioeconomic costs of mitigation to measures of risk, we illustrate that prevention effectiveness is useful for developing cost-effective risk management options.     

RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY AND ATTEMPTED SUICIDE AMONG ADOLESCENTS: An Individual-Level Analysis

Building on the Durkheimian legacy's emphasis on social integration as a determinant of suicidal behavior, many macrolevel studies have observed an association between aggregate rates of geographical mobility and suicide, but little research has explored this connection at the individual level. We use data from 9,594 respondents who participated in two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the effect of recent residential mobility on attempted suicide one year later and to explore the mechanisms that potentially transmit this effect. We find that among adolescent girls, recent movers are about 60 percent more likely than nonmovers to report having attempted suicide during the following year and that this difference cannot be readily explained by mover versus nonmover differences in preexisting demographic and family background characteristics. Some of the apparent effect of residential mobility on females' risk of attempting suicide operates through higher rates of victimization and delinquency, lower levels of school attachment, higher rates of social isolation, and a tendency for movers to associate with peers who exhibit delinquent behaviors and who themselves have attempted suicide. In contrast, we find no evidence that mobile female adolescents' deficit of parental social capital or lower levels of school engagement can account for the difference in attempted suicide risk between movers and nonmovers. We also find that residential mobility is not significantly associated with suicide attempts among adolescent males.