Estimation of Hazard, Density and Survivor Functions for Randomly Censored Data

Maximum likelihood estimation and goodness-of-fit techniques are used within a competing risks framework to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of hazard, density, and survivor functions for randomly right-censored variables. Goodness-of- fit techniques are used to fit distributions to the crude lifetimes, which are used to obtain an estimate of the hazard function, which, in turn, is used to construct the survivor and density functions of the net lifetime of the variable of interest. If only one of the crude lifetimes can be adequately characterized by a parametric model, then semi-parametric estimates may be obtained using a maximum likelihood estimate of one crude lifetime and the empirical distribution function of the other. Simulation studies show that the survivor function estimates from crude lifetimes compare favourably with those given by the product-limit estimator when crude lifetimes are chosen correctly. Other advantages are discussed.     

Neither ‘family’ nor ‘corporate’ farming: Australian tomato growers as farm family entrepreneurs

For the past two decades there has been much debate about the future of family farming. The basic question on which this debate has turned is whether current pressures on family farm systems should be understood as symptomatic of a terminal condition, in which farmers are replaced progressively by corporate ownership; or whether family farms will persist as a social formation, albeit increasingly subsumed by off-farm interests. Using evidence from the Australian processing tomato sector, this article documents the changing social and economic formation of ‘family farming’. We argue that in this industry, the appropriate way to describe farmers is through the deployment of that a new category of farming; farm family entrepreneurs. This phrase is coined to describe the situation where family units remain at the social and economic heart of farm ownership and operation, but in the context where they relate to their land-based assets through legal and financial structures characteristic of the wider economy. As this article explores, this formation seems to represent an accommodating modus operandi for farm units within neo-liberal agricultural governance. Nevertheless, however, this duality of family-based structures and capitalist entrepreneurialism inevitably provokes a series of tensions, whose resolution requires a variety of organizational strategies to be put in place.     

From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.     

Risk Compensation or Risk Reduction? Seatbelts,State Laws,and Traffic Fatalities*

Objective. The risk compensation hypothesis suggests that drivers enjoying greater safety will drive more recklessly and thereby impose greater risks on nonoccupants. We provide a test of the risk compensation hypothesis in the context of state seatbelt laws and belt use rates. Methods. Fixed‐effects models with policy and demographic variables are estimated using annual state data from 1985 to 2002 to test the effect of seatbelt laws and seatbelt use rates on logged fatality rates for occupants, pedestrians, motorcyclists, and all nonoccupants in separate models. Results. Contrary to the risk compensation hypothesis, the results indicate that both occupants and nonoccupants enjoy greater safety due to state mandatory use laws and increased safety belt use rates. Conclusion. Overall, seatbelt laws and the higher belt use these laws induce do not increase nonoccupant risk exposure. If anything, these laws and the accompanying increase in belt use result in safer driving behavior.     

Refugee Children in Wales: Coping and Adaptation in the Face of Adversity

This article aims to makes a contribution to redressing a methodological and theoretical imbalance in existing research on refugee and asylum‐seeking children. It draws on two qualitative studies from Wales with children and young people. The samples include unaccompanied minors and children living with families as well as both children who are supported in the asylum system and those who have been granted refugee status. The focus on ecological post‐migratory stressors and coping processes that young people identify as being integral to their well‐being and, once granted status, to how they adapt to settlement includes a selective study of some of the sources of resilience referred to in the children's talk. Recognising the interplay between individual and environment leads to a discussion of both personal attributes and collective cultural identities.     

NATURAL HEALTH DISCOURSES AND THE THERAPEUTIC PRODUCTION OF CONSUMER RESISTANCE

Social critics of the natural health movement charge that it indoctrinates consumers in a therapeutic consumerist ideology. This "dominated consumer" thesis ignores that socially situated individuals must negotiate a plethora of institutionally specific power structures aiming to classify and govern their identities. Accordingly, resistance toward specific institutional constructions of identity can be produced through marketplace ideologies. I explore this understudied ideological effect by analyzing the narratives of women who are using natural health alternatives to resist their ascribed medico-administrative identities. Natural health's therapeutic ideology enables these women to contest the degenerative implications of their medical diagnoses and, conversely, to reconstruct their chronic illnesses as an opportunity for discovering their inner regenerative potential and expanding their spiritual horizons. This analysis has implications for prior studies suggesting that resistance toward the technocratic and bureaucratic aspects of conventional medicine exemplifies a Foucauldian "care of the self." I argue that a postmodern adaptation of Foucauldian theory is needed to address the complex interrelationships among the care of the self, medical consumerism, and the therapeutic ideology of the natural health marketplace.     

Dementia Problem Behavior and the Production of Informal Caregiving Services

Informal caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer's disease spend a considerable amount of time providing care. In this paper, we use Grossman's health production and Becker's time allocation models to develop a model of informal care provision to elderly dementia patients. In our model, time inputs produce caregiving services, which provides utility to the caregiver, but reduces leisure. We assume that time is less productive of services on the margin as the disease progresses. In this framework, an increase in patients' disease severity does not necessarily increase informal caregiver time input. The cost of formal care establishes a reservation price for informal caregiving. When the costs of informal caregiving rise above this reservation level, the patient is institutionalized. We test empirically the effect of deterioration in the patients' condition, proxied by both disease severity and dementia problem behavior, on informal caregiving time. We find that dementia-related problem behaviors and functional limitations significantly increase inputs of informal caregiving time. Patients' problem behavior exerts a modifying effect on functional limitations, and patients' comorbidities have no effect on informal caregiving time.