Query languages for statistical databases

Statistical database management systems keep raw, elementary and/or aggregated data and include query languages with facilities to calculate various statistics from this data. In this article we examine statistical database query languages with respect to the criteria identified and taxonomy developed in Ozsoyoglu and Ozsoyoglu (1985b). The criteria include statistical metadata and objects, aggregation features and interface to statistical packages. The taxonomy of statistical database query languages classifies them with respect to the data model used, the type of user interface and method of implementation. Temporal databases are rich sources of data for statistical analysis. Aggregation features of temporal query languages, as well as the issues in calculating aggregates from temporal data, are also examined.     

Social Media Policy in Social Work Education: A Review and Recommendations

Although social media use has grown dramatically, program policies have not kept pace. Some programs now state that student social media activities have led to professional conduct reviews and may violate ethical standards. This article reviews current social media policies and conceptualizes their key elements. A review of current social media policies is reported, pointing to the need for further policy development. Six domains of a social media policy are identified: understanding social media, ethical and legal obligations, implications of one’s personal and professional online presence, institutional obligations to the program and agency, productivity implications, and possible consequences for violations of the policy. A model social media policy is detailed, and unresolved issues are identified.     

L'économie des plateformes sous l'angle de la géographie ouvrière: comprendre les stratégies d'organisation collective dans le contexte du travail intermédié par les plateformes numériques

L'auteure analyse sous un angle géographique la lutte collective des travailleurs de plateforme. Distinguant deux formes de travail de plateforme (l'offre de services locaux et le microtravail), elle examine leurs caractéristiques spatiales respectives et les stratégies d'organisation collective spécifiques à chacune. À partir de trois démarches de dialogue social (comités d'entreprise, négociation collective et accords multientreprises), elle cherche à comprendre pourquoi chaque catégorie de travailleurs de plateforme choisit telle stratégie plutôt que telle autre. Elle analyse les cadres réglementaires dans lesquels s'inscrivent les luttes collectives de ces travailleurs et les chances de voir cette mobilisation améliorer leurs conditions de travail.     

Counting Young Carers in Switzerland – A Study of Prevalence

An online survey of children in school grades 4–9 (mostly aged 10–15) was conducted in order to determine the prevalence of young carers in Switzerland using a 2‐stage stratified sampling approach. 4082 respondents were drawn from 230 schools. A total of 3991 respondents were included in the analysis and of these 307 (7.7%) were identified as young carers. The population estimate of prevalence was 7.9 per cent. This suggests that there are around 38 400 young carers in school grades 4–9 in Switzerland. Extrapolating to the 9–16 age group gives a figure of almost 51 500.     

The interplay of friends and parents in adolescents’ daily lives: Towards a dynamic view of social support

This daily diary study investigated the interplay of perceived friend and parent support in adolescents’ everyday lives. Specifically, we tested the interactive effects of friend and parent support on adolescent well‐being at both the intra‐ and inter‐individual level. A diverse sample of 119 adolescents (M_age = 15.36) completed diary reports for 2 weeks. Multivariate multilevel models demonstrated that on days adolescents felt more supported by their friends or parents, they experienced increases in their happiness and social connectedness. Additionally, parent support emerged as a protective factor for youth lacking friend support, although patterns differed at the intra‐ vs. inter‐individual level. The findings underscore the dynamic nature of social support in adolescents’ daily lives and highlight the interactive roles of friends and parents in promoting youth well‐being.     

Groups and individuals: conformity and diversity in the performance of gendered identities

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and ‘groupishness’ of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology.     

Late,But Not Too Late? Postponement of First Birth Among Highly Educated US Women

We examine the link between the postponement of parenthood and fertility outcomes among highly educated women in the USA born in 1920–1986, using data from the CPS June Supplement 1979–2016. We argue that the postponement–low fertility nexus noted in demographic and biomedical research is especially relevant for women who pursue postgraduate education because of the potential overlap of education completion, early career stages, and family formation. The results show that women with postgraduate education differ from women with college education in terms of the timing of the first birth, childlessness, and completed fertility. While the postponement trend, which began with the cohorts born in the 1940s, has continued among highly educated women in the USA, its associations with childlessness and completed parity have changed considerably over subsequent cohorts. We delineate five distinct postponement phases over the 80-year observation window, consistent with variation over time in the prevalence of strategies for combining tertiary education and employment with family formation.     

The (in)security of gender in Afghanistan’s peacebuilding project: hybridity and affect

In this article I draw on a feminist approach to hybridity to explore interview data and observations from my field research in Afghanistan. I argue that there is a logic of masculinist protection influencing the affective environment of the peacebuilding project there. The combination of a perceived patriarchal context in Afghanistan and security routines protecting civilian internationals (and Afghan elites), which rely on hypermasculine signifiers, help to create and perpetuate the conditions in which the female (for both internationals and Afghans) is marked with insecurity. I point to hybridity between the foreign and female experience, as well as resistance and reflexivity within my research. Throughout I explore fragments of power hierarchies that cut through the meaning of gender, rendering the female state a disempowering one, always referenced in some uncertain, hybrid way as protected or in need of protection.     

Does Dividing the Range by Four Provide an Accurate Estimate of a Standard Deviation in Family Science Research? A Teaching Editorial

Occasionally, scientific reports have omitted information on standard deviations, making estimates of effect sizes very difficult to impossible. In such situations, several scholars have recommended obtaining an estimate of the standard deviation of distributions by dividing the range of the distribution (highest value minus lowest value) by four. However, there appears to be little evidence to confirm the validity of this approach. Articles from 2012 to 2015 in the journal Marriage & Family Review were surveyed to find instances where demographic variables (age, education, duration of relationship, number of children) were reported with both standard deviations and ranges. Ratios between range and standard deviations were calculated by several rules of thumb or more complex formulas and compared with the actual ratios obtained. Results indicated that dividing by five in general provided a more accurate estimate of actual standard deviations but accuracy in predicting the true ratio between range and standard deviation was substantially related to the position of the mean score within the range of scores with larger divisors needed as the mean approached either the minimum or the maximum values of the demographic variable (skew). Other recent formulae for estimating the standard deviation were also evaluated, but the skew-based approach appeared to be more accurate than the others. However, further investigation in other samples is needed because the skew-based approach was derived from observation of the data here, which might not replicate in different sets of data.