A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance

Eleven behavioral techniques of neutralization intended to subvert the collection of personal information are discussed: discovery moves, avoidance moves, piggybacking moves, switching moves, distorting moves, blocking moves, masking moves, breaking moves, refusal moves, cooperative moves and counter-surveillance moves. In Western liberal democracies the advantages of technological and other strategic surveillance developments are often short-lived and contain ironic vulnerabilities. The logistical and economic limits on total monitoring, the interpretive and contextual nature of many human situations, system complexity, and interconnectedness and the vulnerability of those engaged in surveillance to be compromised, provide ample room for resistance. Neutralization is a dynamic adversarial social dance involving strategic moves and counter-moves and should be studied as a conflict interaction process .     

The Appreciation of Career Literature in Adolescents

With adolescents, the appreciation of career literature was predicted to relate to their reading skill and cognitive development as well as their need for career information. Forty 11th-grade and forty 12th-grade students at a university school read two passages from each of three domains of career literature: short stories, formal literature, and popular literature. The results indicated that both reading skill and cognitive development were related to the extent to which adolescents appreciated three passages in which career information was presented in the form of short stories and personal accounts. Reported need for information to make career choices did not relate to the appreciation of any of the six passages. Implications for theory and practice in the use of career literature are discussed.     

Methods for clarifying criteria for study continuation at interim analysis

In monitoring clinical trials, the question of futility, or whether the data thus far suggest that the results at the final analysis are unlikely to be statistically successful, is regularly of interest over the course of a study. However, the opposite viewpoint of whether the study is sufficiently demonstrating proof of concept (POC) and should continue is a valuable consideration and ultimately should be addressed with high POC power so that a promising study is not prematurely terminated. Conditional power is often used to assess futility, and this article interconnects the ideas of assessing POC for the purpose of study continuation with conditional power, while highlighting the importance of the POC type I error and the POC type II error for study continuation or not at the interim analysis. Methods for analyzing subgroups motivate the interim analyses to maintain high POC power via an adjusted interim POC significance level criterion for study continuation or testing against an inferiority margin. Furthermore, two versions of conditional power based on the assumed effect size or the observed interim effect size are considered. Graphical displays illustrate the relationship of the POC type II error for premature study termination to the POC type I error for study continuation and the associated conditional power criteria.     

How Too Little Can Give You a Little Too Much: Determining the Number of Household Phone Lines in RDD Surveys

Accurately assessing the number of household phone lines inrandom-digit dialed (RDD) surveys for use in weighting has becomemore complicated over time. This study evaluates phone lineweighting by asking an in-depth battery of seven questions designedto measure the number of available land lines in the home moreprecisely. The results show that this weighting correction isnot so simple, and that inadequately parsing the type and useof household phone numbers produces an inaccurate weight. Failingexplicitly to remove irrelevant phone numbers, especially cellphones, produces a larger-than-appropriate weighting adjustment.Potentially more important on a practical level is that, whendone correctly, and even when "overdone," phone line weightinghad little impact across a diverse set of opinion and demographicvariables.     

PARTICIPANT NARRATIVES AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN A METAPHYSICAL MOVEMENT

In this article we explore social movement solidarity through an examination of narratives offered by participants in a metaphysical movement. Drawing from contemporary social movement theory, we focus on how members develop a carefully built collective identity that perpetuates movement goals and ideology. Data for this project are drawn from in-depth interviews with local psychics, participant observation in various metaphysical fairs, and document analysis. We find that the movement's collective identity is centered around several narratives that help establish boundaries, identify antagonists, and create a collective consciousness. Together these narratives form a web of belief that binds members to the movement. The data we present in this article have implications for understanding other expressive movements, as well as for social movement theory in general.