Parent-child interaction therapy: application of an empirically supported treatment to maltreated children in foster care

One of the more serious problems faced by child welfare services involves the management of children with serious behavioral and mental health problems. Aggressive and defiant foster children are more likely to have multiple foster care placements, require extraordinary social services resources, and have poor short- and long-term mental health outcomes. Interventions that work with challenging foster children and enhance foster parents' skills in managing problem behaviors are necessary. This article presents the successful results of a single case study examining the application of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) with an aggressive young boy and his foster-adoptive parent. PCIT is a dyadic intervention that has been identified as an empirically supported treatment for abused children and for children with different types of behavioral disruption. The application of PCIT to assist foster parents is a promising direction for child welfare services.     

The contemporary foreclosure crisis and US crime rates

Foreclosure rates in America reached unprecedented levels during the last half of the 2000s, and many observers have speculated that elevated crime rates were one of the probable negative collateral consequences of this trend. We examine this issue with a comprehensive county-level analysis of the role of foreclosure in shaping contemporary crime patterns, highlighting the possibility of theoretically informed non-linear and conditional relationships. Multivariate regression models that account for the well-documented spatial autocorrelation of crime rates and the possible endogeneity of foreclosure reveal a positive association between rates of foreclosure and property crime that accelerates significantly once foreclosure rates attain historically high levels. Multiplicative models indicate that this pattern holds for burglary across diverse county conditions, but the observed non-linear effect of foreclosure on robbery rates is limited primarily to areas that also exhibit relatively high levels of resource deprivation and limited new housing construction.     

The role of sexual behavior in the identification process of gay and bisexual males

This study examined the role of same‐sex sexual behavior in the identification and coming‐out process among three cohorts of gay and bisexual males. The sequence through which the males identified their same‐sex attractions was coded as either sex‐centered (labeling of sexual identity after first same‐sex sexual encounter) or identity‐centered (labeling of sexual identity before engaging in sex with males). The project tested whether developmental sequence was a significant predictor of later adjustment to sexual identity and relationship involvement. Findings demonstrate that the proportion of sex‐centered males decreased as a function of age cohort. Moreover, sex‐centered males reported higher levels of homophobia toward other males, more lifetime sexual partners, and more heterosexual sexual and romantic relationships. Thus, the route males take to identify and label their sexual identity is a good predictor of future adjustment and relationship involvement.     

Partitioning Pearson's Chi-squared Statistic for Singly Ordered Two-way Contingency Tables

This paper presents a partition of Pearson's chi-squared statistic for singly ordered two-way contingency tables. The partition involves using orthogonal polynomials for the ordinal variable while generalized basic vectors are used for the non-ordinal variable. The benefit of this partition is that important information about the structure of the ordered variable can be identified in terms of locations, dispersion and higher order components. For the non-ordinal variable, it is shown that the squared singular values from the singular value decomposition of the transformed dataset can be partitioned into location, dispersion and higher order components. The paper also uses the chi-squared partition to present an alternative to the maximum likelihood technique of parameter estimation for the log-linear analysis of the contingency table.     

Du Bois and Diasporic Identity: The Veil and the Unveiling Project

Positioning Du Bois's arguments in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) within social theory enhances our understanding of the phenomenological dimensions of racial oppression and of how oppressed groups build on members' differences, as well as on what they share, to construct a cosmopolitan and richly textured community. Du Bois wrote Souls just at the beginning of the Great Migration but indicated that geographical dispersion would deepen racial solidarity, enhance the meaningfulness of community, and emancipate individual group members through participation in mainstream society while maintaining their black identity. Du Bois's writings have powerful implications for understanding how to promote racial justice, and contemporary readers might consider that they have implications for social justice more generally. An analysis of black newspapers that were published during the period of 1900 to 1935 illustrates how Du Bois's conceptions were woven into discourse and everyday practices.     

The Case against Commercial Antivirus Software: Risk Homeostasis and Information Problems in Cybersecurity

New cybersecurity technologies, such as commercial antivirus software (AV), sometimes fail to deliver on their promised benefits. This article develops and tests a revised version of risk homeostasis theory, which suggests that new cybersecurity technologies can sometimes have ill effects on security outcomes in the short run and little-to-no effect over the long run. It tests the preliminary plausibility of four predictions from the revised risk homeostasis theory using new survey data from 1,072 respondents. The estimations suggest the plausible operation of a number of risk homeostasis dynamics: (1) commercial AV users are significantly more likely to self-report a cybersecurity event in the past year than nonusers, even after correcting for potential reverse causality and informational mechanisms; (2) nonusers become somewhat less likely to self-report a cybersecurity event as the perceived riskiness of various e-mail-based behaviors increases, while commercial AV users do not; (3) the negative short-run effect of commercial AV use on cybersecurity outcomes fade over time at a predicted rate of about 7.03 percentage points per year of use; and (4) after five years of use, commercial AV users are statistically indistinguishable from nonusers in terms of their probability of self-reporting a cybersecurity event as perceptions of risky e-mail-based behaviors increase.