Socioeconomic Achievement and Religion: The American Case

Religious preference at several points in the life cycle is examined with regard to its affect on socioeconomic achievement and with regard to how religious preference is influenced by education, occupation, and income. The importance of considering the several major denominations separately instead of as a single category is demonstrated. When this is done Jews, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians have above average socioeconomic achievements; Methodists and Catholics are near the mean; and Baptists are below the average. Controlling for social origins and early achievements greatly attenuates the differences, but does not remove them with regard to education and income.     

Fear of people with mental illnesses: the role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm

Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the "behavior hypothesis" in the general population. We reason that, if this hypothesis is correct, contact with people with mental illnesses should be associated with more perceived danger, and exposure to threat or harm should mediate this association. On the contrary, respondents with more personal and impersonal contact perceive people with mental illness to be less dangerous. Exposure to threat is more common among people with more contact, but this exposure explains very little of the variance in perceived danger. These findings do not support the conclusion that public fear of people with mental illness is due to the observation of violent behavior.     

An integrative intervention for promoting recovery from extramarital affairs

The discovery or disclosure of an extramarital affair can have a devastating impact on partners, both individually and on the relationships. Research suggests that affairs occur relatively frequently in relationships and are a common presenting problem in couple therapy. However, despite their prevalence, there is little empirical treatment research in this area, and most therapists describe this problem as one of the more difficult to treat. In this study, we used a replicated case-study design to explore the efficacy of an integrative treatment designed to help couples recover from an affair. Six couples entered and completed treatment. The majority of these couples were less emotionally or maritally distressed at the end of treatment, and the injured partners reported greater forgiveness regarding the affair. Details of the intervention, suggested adaptations of the treatment, and areas for future research are discussed.     

Gender and racial/ethnic differences in predicting adolescent sexual risk: athletic participation versus exercise

Though often conflated, informal physical exercise and organized athletic participation have very different implications for adolescent sexual risk outcomes. The purpose of this research is to disaggregate strenuous exercise from sports, examine how each is associated with sexual risk, and explain the observed differences using the conceptual lens of cultural resource theory. Using a nationally representative sample of over 16,000 public and private high school students, we employ logistic regression to test hypotheses about the gender-specific and race-specific effects of strenuous exercise and athletic participation on adolescent sexual risk behavior. The results show that both forms of physical activity buffer sexual risk for girls. Strenuous exercise is associated with increased odds of sexual risk for boys. Sports and race interact to influence boys' sexual risk outcomes: Athletic participation is associated with lowered odds of sexual risk for white male adolescents, but heightened odds of sexual risk for black male adolescents.     

Reports of childhood sexual abuse by adolescents and young adults: stability over time

The consistency of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) reporting was explored in this study. Two-hundred seventeen adolescents and young adults (ages 14-24) enrolled in urban health care clinics completed self-report questionnaires assessing CSA and other problem behaviors at enrollment and at 7 months. Results indicated that the stability of CSA self-report at two time points was poor (58% consistent nonreporters of CSA, 20% consistent reporters, 22% inconsistent reporters). Consistent and inconsistent reporters were differentiated on risk measures. Adolescents who endorsed more items from the CSA scale were five times more likely to be consistent reporters. In sum, adolescent CSA reporting was quite inconsistent over time. Using multi-item scales and assessing CSA at two time points enhances accuracy of reporting.     

The production of understanding

While there is little doubt that sociological theory and research has had an important impact on the way people think about health and health care, mental health and medical sociologists are often confronted with challenges concerning the utility of the work that they do. Among the doubters are deans, funding agencies and family members. We are challenged by the ascendency of biological interpretations of human behaviors, by the incompatibility between the contextual view we prefer and the very strong individualistic orientation of our culture, and by the fact that we do not have an applied arm that trains the professionals who treat health and mental-health conditions. How do we respond to this challenge? The title of this paper gives a short answer: "The Production of Understanding." I propose that a powerful but under-recognized value of our work is the generation of explanations about health and mental health matters that help people understand the other side of an "us"/"them" divide. We produce understanding in a context in which misunderstanding is regularly constructed by powerful people who offer victim-blaming explanations for the circumstances experienced by people with less power. The production of understanding serves as an important counterbalance to this tendency. Our work shapes the way people think about problems related to health and mental health, limits the power of inaccurate victim-blaming accounts and provides understanding about why health and mental health are mal-distributed among people from different social circumstances.     

An analysis of VDT monitor placement and daily hours of use for female bifocal users

A population of 72 bifocal wearers was studied to determine the relationship between VDT (video display terminal) placement for those who reported musculoskeletal pain and those who did not. The mean hours worked was 50.4 minutes (p=0.003) greater for those who reported head/neck pain versus those who did not and 48.6 minutes (p=0.004) greater for those who reported shoulder/arm pain that those who did not. There was no statistically significant difference between the means of monitor height, distance, or angle for those who reported pain symptoms versus those who did not. This study indicates that, self reported pain symptoms are correlated with hours of VDT work and that there appears to be a threshold at approximately five hours for pain symptoms among bifocal wearers. No such correlation can be made for monitor placement     

Use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis with a Physiologically-Based Pharmacokinetic Model of Methylmercury to Estimate Exposures in U.S. Women of Childbearing Age

A Bayesian approach, implemented using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis, was applied with a physiologically‐based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model of methylmercury (MeHg) to evaluate the variability of MeHg exposure in women of childbearing age in the U.S. population. The analysis made use of the newly available National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES) blood and hair mercury concentration data for women of age 16–49 years (sample size, 1,582). Bayesian analysis was performed to estimate the population variability in MeHg exposure (daily ingestion rate) implied by the variation in blood and hair concentrations of mercury in the NHANES database. The measured variability in the NHANES blood and hair data represents the result of a process that includes interindividual variation in exposure to MeHg and interindividual variation in the pharmacokinetics (distribution, clearance) of MeHg. The PBPK model includes a number of pharmacokinetic parameters (e.g., tissue volumes, partition coefficients, rate constants for metabolism and elimination) that can vary from individual to individual within the subpopulation of interest. Using MCMC analysis, it was possible to combine prior distributions of the PBPK model parameters with the NHANES blood and hair data, as well as with kinetic data from controlled human exposures to MeHg, to derive posterior distributions that refine the estimates of both the population exposure distribution and the pharmacokinetic parameters. In general, based on the populations surveyed by NHANES, the results of the MCMC analysis indicate that a small fraction, less than 1%, of the U.S. population of women of childbearing age may have mercury exposures greater than the EPA RfD for MeHg of 0.1 μg/kgg/day, and that there are few, if any, exposures greater than the ATSDR MRL of 0.3 μgg/kgg/day. The analysis also indicates that typical exposures may be greater than previously estimated from food consumption surveys, but that the variability in exposure within the population of U.S. women of childbearing age may be less than previously assumed.