Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern — auch im Wahlkampf?

Does the well-known effect of social position on party preference depend on the distance to election day? Based on findings on campaign effects, it is argued that the effect of social position on party preference could vary over time, especially it may react on changes in political communication in campaign phases: parties appeal to their social bases, and therefore the effect of social position on party preference may rise in election campaigns; furthermore, this means that throughout a parliamentary term the partisan effect of social position should first weaken and later rise again. These hypotheses are tested empirically against trend data (Politbarometer) and panel data covering the German federal elections 1972 to 1998. Empirically, however, the core hypotheses are rejected: the structuring effect of social position is almost constant throughout parliamentary terms. Hence, federal election campaigns in Germany do not strengthen the partisan effect of social position substantially.     

Visual Context Effects in Web Surveys

There are many examples of context effects in survey measurement.Responses to survey questions can be shaped by the order ofquestions, the format of response options, the broader surveyenvironment, and so on. For Web surveys, the inclusion of visualimages is a trivial design issue, but may have consequencesfor the responses obtained because they change the visual context.We report a series of experiments examining how responses maybe affected by the use of images in Web surveys. Specifically,we examine the effect that pictures of a healthy woman exercisingversus a sick woman in a hospital bed have on self-rated health.We replicated the experiments in three different surveys, varyingsuch factors as the size and placement of the image and thelocation of the question within the questionnaire. In general,we find that when exposed to a picture of a fit woman, respondentsconsistently rate their own health lower than when exposed toa picture of a sick woman.     

Desiring Relation: Mothers' and Children's Agency,Subjectivity, and Time—Commentary on Daphne de Marneffe's Maternal Desire

Daphne de Marneffe (2004 de Marneffe , D. ( 2004 ). Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life . New York : Little Brown and Company . [Google Scholar]) has enriched our theoretical understanding of maternal desire as fundamentally a desire to relate to or “be with” (p. xi) one's child. This view can enable consideration of children's subjectivity and agency through thinking about the intersections of mothers' and children's desires and subjectivities. Contemplating the meanings of maternal desire necessitates attending to multiple practices of mothering in a range of relational contexts. Finally, there is value in considering maternal presence and time in conjunction with children's sense of time and the present in order to imagine a relational time that both mothers and children construct.     

The effects of an intervention campaign to enhance seat belt use on campus.

The national health objectives for the year 2000 called for an increase in the use of safety restraints to 85% of motor vehicle occupants. An assessment on one campus indicated that only 79% of those observed were wearing seat belts. Nursing faculty and students undertook a multimodal intervention campaign to increase seat belt use in the campus community. Observed use of seat belts increased to 81% after the week-long intervention consisting of reminder banners, media coverage, permanent reminder signs, roll-over demonstrations, a presentation on the need for seat belt use, and distribution of seat belt use pledge cards. Although the increase was small, it was statistically significant and could represent considerable savings in healthcare costs if even 2% of the population could be saved from serious injury by using seat belts. In addition, the change in seat belt use represented a decline of nearly 10% in the number of nonusers.     

Wie wirken „Subkulturen der Gewalt“? Das Zusammenspiel von Internalisierung und Verbreitung gewaltlegitimierender Normen in der Erklärung von JugendgewaltHow do “Subcultures of Violence” lead to violence? The interplay of internalization and prevalence of norms legitimizing violence in the explanation of youth violence

Both the internalization and the prevalence of violence-legitimizing norms are empirically related to acts of violence. The action-theoretic processes, though, that generate these relationships are not well understood. Based on subcultural approaches to violence formulated in social psychology, ethnology and sociology the current study identifies two action-theoretic processes that relate violence-legitimizing norms to acts of violence: conforming to internalized norms in applicable situations on the one hand; and status considerations on the other hand. The model of frame selection is applied to integrate these processes into a general theory of action. Hypotheses are tested using data from a school-based survey in Germany (N?=?2635). Multi-level regression models on measures of violent intentions in a factorial survey, as well as on response times to this factorial survey, are reported. The results confirm the expected interplay of internalization of violence-legitimizing norms, prevalence of these norms, and situational provocation in explaining violent intentions and the time respondents needed to answer the factorial survey.     

A parsimonious multivariate poisson model for market basket analysis

Intensified research on multivariate Poisson models offers new opportunities for the analysis of purchase quantities in market basket data. The investigation of positive or negative correlations in quantity decisions among product categories facilitates a deeper understanding of consumer purchase behavior. The applied multivariate log-normal Poisson model introduces interdependencies between categories with multivariate normal-distributed latent effects by means of a covariance matrix. As the size of this covariance matrix depends on the number of categories in the model, its ation may become tedious. Furthermore, we assume that quantity decisions do not interact for all pairs of categories. That is why we propose to use covariance selection to derive a parsimonious representation of the correlation structure. For two market basket data sets, we show that the vast majority of off-diagonal elements in the covariance matrix are irrelevant. For a data set with product categories, the model with a partly restricted covariance matrix achieves a better fit to the holdout data than the model with full covariance matrix. For a data set with subcategories of the broader category beverage, the proposed model with restricted covariance outperforms the model with full covariance matrix even on the calibration data. We conclude that interactions of quantity decisions are overall the exception, even for complements-in-use.     

A theory of organizational response to hospital regulation: a reply to Smith and Mick

Smith and Mick identify four basic problems with the theory the present writers developed to explain organizational responses (in this case the behavior of hospitals) to regulation. They challenge the basic assumption regarding autonomy, disagree with the implied cause and effect relations between organizational response and regulation, criticize the omission of goals, and claim that the theory has only limited generality. In so doing they state that their primary concern is with "improving our understanding of the limitations and benefits of the theory." Each of the four topics they raise for consideration will receive comment.