The Americans with Disabilities Act: an examination of compliance by state, territorial and local governments in the USA

Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits public entities in the US from discriminating against people on the basis of a disability. The term 'public entity' includes all state, territorial, and local governments and their instrumentalities. A survey was conducted to determine the extent of compliance by public entities in the US. Based on the survey the conclusion is that the ADA is being implemented on the state, territorial, and local levels in the US to a satisfactory extent.     

The Ethics of Research With Men who Have Learning Disabilities and Abusive Sexual Behaviour: a minefield in a vacuum

In the wake of the recent awareness of the sexual abuse of people with learning disabilities is the recognition that a small number of men with learning disabilities are themselves sexually abusing. The need to understand the men's behaviour and provide effective responses is pressing yet the search for an ethical course of enquiry appears illusory. The two conflicting dilemmas which make this task so difficult are whether the men's learning disabilities preclude their giving informed consent to the research process, and/or whether men who are sexually abusing have lost some rights to exclude themselves from research which is intended to prevent further abuse. This paper explores in depth these dilemmas and describes the authors' attempts to resolve them as they attempted to devise a protocol for consent to involvement in a qualitative study of men with learning disabilities who sexually abuse. Issues raised in this particular context have relevance to many other issues in learning disability services where robust ethical debate is needed, but often glossed over.     

Towards a theoretical clarification of the ‘spillover’ and ‘compensatory’ work/leisure hypotheses

Two thorny problems have attracted the interest of work/leisure researchers in recent years: (1) the failure of previous research to clearly isolate the relationship between work and non-work from the effects of other confounding variables, and (2) a widespread failure to distinguish between the meanings that people attribute to work (and non-work) and the forms of work (and non-work) people perform. The argument for phenomenological research is made; in this way, empirically-grounded ‘common sense’ definitions of work and leisure could be created and these definitions could be used as a solid research base to test ‘spillover’ and ‘compensatory’ theories of the work/leisure relationship. The author then demonstrates, through the development of an analytic framework for viewing the work/leisure relationship, the fact that ‘compensatory’ and ‘spillover’ hypotheses are potential alternative modes of explanation. Unless the conditions under which each might apply can be specified, one or the other hypothesis can explain a given empirical relationship between the two variables. This further supports the need for solid phenomenological research.     

Estimating the Risks of Smoking, Air Pollution, and Passive Smoke on Acute Respiratory Conditions

Five years of the annual Health Interview Survey, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, are used to estimate the effects of air pollution, smoking, and environmental tobacco smoke on respiratory restrictions in activity for adults, and bed disability for children. After adjusting for several socioeconomic factors, the multiple regression estimates indicate that an independent and statistically significant association exists between these three forms of air pollution and respiratory morbidity. The comparative risks of these exposures are computed and the plausibility of the relative risks is examined by comparing the equivalent doses with actual measurements of exposure taken in the homes of smokers. The results indicate that: (1) smokers will have a 55-75% excess in days with respiratory conditions severe enough to cause reductions in normal activity; (2) a 1 microgram increase in fine particulate matter air pollution is associated with a 3% excess in acute respiratory disease; and (3) a pack-a-day smoker will increase respiratory restricted days for a nonsmoking spouse by 20% and increase the number of bed disability days for young children living in the household by 20%. The results also indicate that the estimates of the effects of secondhand smoking on children are improved when the mother's work status is known and incorporated into the exposure estimate.     

Evidence of fertility regulation among rural french villagers, 1749–1789

In this first part an econometric model describing the sequences of live births to individual couples is developed and estimated, using data for a sample of married women in rural French communes during the period 1749–1789. The main methodological objective is to devise a means of controlling for unobserved heterogeneities that result in the endogeneity of variables describing a couple's accumulated demographic experience. Without such controls it is not possible to secure unbiased estimates of responses to familial demographic events, such as the births and deaths of children. Such estimates are sought here as indirect indicators of the existence and nature of deliberate fertility control.Un modèle économétrique, décrivant la suite des naissances vivantes d'un couple donné, est développé et estimé dans cette première partie, en utilisant des données sur un échantillon de femmes mariées dans des communes rurales françaises durant la période 1749–1789. Le principal objectif méthodologique est de fournir un moyen de contrôler l'hétérogénéité non observée qui résulte de variables endogènes décrivant l'expérience cumulative d'un couple. Sans un tel contrôle il n'est pas possible d'obtenir des estimations sans biais de l'effet d'événements démographiques, tels que les naissances et les décès d'enfants. De tels estimateurs sont recherchés ici en vue de fournir des indications indirectes sur l'exercice et la nature d'une prévention des naissances délibérée.

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The second part of this article will be published in theEuropean Journal of Population, Vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 173–206.     

The Role of Work in Adolescent Development

This commentary discusses the articles in the special section, “Adolescent Career Development in Social Context.” Initially, common and integrative themes are identified and explicated based on the diverse perspectives of the work role in adolescence that were evident in these five articles. In addition, the theoretical frameworks provided by life-span, career development relational perspectives are discussed as possible means of integrating some of the findings presented by the authors of these articles. This article concludes with an observation on how the findings reported in the special section can inform career development scholarship and practice in the next millennium.     

Domain specificity of fairness judgments in economic transactions

Two studies eliciting fairness judgments about hypothetical economic transactions examined whether fairness judgments were influenced by who was being judged. The first study replicated the results of Kahneman et al. (Am. Econom. Rev. 76 (1986a) 728–741; J. Business 59 (1986b) S285–S300) that people judge certain actions by firms as unfair, but it also demonstrated that people judge parallel actions by individuals as fair. The second study suggested that people apply different standards to individuals and firms because of presumed differences between them in wealth, power, and size. When firms were portrayed as no more powerful or wealthy than individuals, differences in fairness judgments were eliminated. Further, respondents were less inclined to judge the behavior of a firm harshly as perpetrator of an unfair act when the firm was identified with an individual than when it was large and anonymous, and they were more inclined to judge the behavior of an individual harshly as perpetrator of an unfair act when the action injured a firm with a clearly identified individual than when the firm was large and anonymous.     

Iterated full partitions

Algebraic calculations that depend upon a full partition can be automated through the use of an operator P for the derivation of such a partition. Calculations that require the repeated use of P are automated by simply iterating the operator. The resulting output is general and contains sufficient structure to identify the result of a calculation for a variety of settings.     

Listening to Disabled People: The Problem of Voice and Authority in Robert B. Edgerton's the Cloak of Competence

Using anthropological methods and a theoretical perspective derived from the sociology of Erving Goffman, Robert B. Edgerton's The Cloak of Competence: stigma in the lives of the mentally retarded (1967) brought an unusual degree of empathy to attempts to understand the lives of those labeled 'mentally retarded'. Yet the book was conceived prior to the time when mental retardation began to be widely formulated as a social construction rather than a clinical syndrome. This essay analyzes the consequences for Edgerton's understanding of the lives of recently deinstitutionalized people of this uneasy combination of empathy and acceptance of mental retardation as an unalterable condition. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Edgerton's conceptualization of mental retardation served to deny to members of his sample a voice with which to speak authoritatively about their own situation. Edgerton's revisionist follow-up research, which called into question some aspects of his earlier conceptualization of mental retardation, is also discussed.