Children and young people requiring home assisted ventilation in the South of England: incidence,receipt of care support and components of the care package

The study found an increasing number of ventilator dependent children and young people living at home. Almost three quarters of the sample had a physical disability as a result of or in addition to their primary diagnosis. There was wide variation in the amount of paid care supporting these families which appeared unrelated to the level of ventilatory dependence. Nurses working in community children's teams or hospital outreach teams were the most frequent care organisers and care managers. The majority of the care packages were funded by Health Authorities.     

Too Good to be False: An Essay in the Folklore of Social Science

In 1939, Carl Hovland and Robert R. Sears presented data that they believed linked fluctuations in the price of cotton to lynchings in the South, a linkage first suggested six years earlier by Arthur Raper. This correlation quickly became a popular illustration of frustration-aggression theory. A few years later, a statistical critique by Alexander Mintz cast the reality of the association into doubt, but a sample survey of members of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues reveals that Howland and Sears's "finding" is still widely, if imprecisely, known and accepted. Their article continues to be cited in the social-psychological literature and in many introductory textbooks. The failure of Mintz's critique to catch up with the striking but flawed, original report illustrates a structured impediment to reliable knowledge in the social sciences.     

Social inequality and art institutions

Our objective is to examine how several aspects of the class structure influence the prevalence of artistic institutions. The analysis is based on quantitative comparisons of the 125 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Most of the literature on the history of art concludes that artistic developments depend on the patronage of an elite—as noble patrons, as rich donors, or even as affluent bourgeois donors and audiences. Whereas these conclusions imply that class inequalities further the growth of the arts, our empirical findings indicate the opposite. Both lesser inequality and reductions of inequality in a metropolis increase a variety of artistic institutions, and these influences persist when other influences on these institutions are controlled.     

Huck Finn and the game model gloss

Several authors have cited the metaphor of game playing as an analytical device to study social behavior. Traditionally, the game model has been used either to promote a more strict or instrumental control upon actual social behavior or to match a formal game model construction of a social event with actual behavior in everyday life, and through this method shed light upon aspects which otherwise would be overlooked. In another connection, various authors have discussed the concept of glossing in social relations. This paper uses Mark Twain's last chapters ofThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to explicate how the game model can be used as a gloss. The game model gloss then is a unique combination of sociological conceptualizations presented through the medium of a lively literary allegory. We feel this paper extends the concept of glossing and furthers the understanding of the game metaphor in sociological theory.This paper has been presented at the Spring 1977 meetings of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, Georgia.     

G.H. Mead's Contact Theory of Reality: The Manipulatory Phase of the Act in the Constitution of Mundane,Scientific, Aesthetic,and Evaluative Objects*

Mead's identification of ultimate reality with the experience of physical contact is rooted in his studies of animal perception. Many of his writings on the nature of science, aesthetic experience, and values can be viewed profitably as an attempt to generalize his theory of the act from an analysis of action toward mundane objects to include these other classes of perceptual objects.