Heart Trouble and Racial Group Identity: Exploring Ethnic Heterogeneity Among Black Americans

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States, and compared to other racial and ethnic groups, Blacks between the ages of 45 and 65 have the highest likelihood of dying from heart disease. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about intragroup variation among the US Black population. In this study, utilizing a nationally representative sample of Black Americans, we examine the relationship between heart trouble and racial group identity for two groups of Blacks: African Americans and Caribbean Blacks. We include two measures of racial group identity: closeness to other Blacks and Black group evaluation. Our results reveal three important patterns. First, closeness to other Blacks is suppressed by Black group evaluation. Second, at low levels of closeness to other Blacks, there is little difference between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the probability of heart trouble. However, as closeness to other Blacks increases, the probability of heart trouble increases for African Americans, but decreases for Caribbean Blacks. Finally, with respect to positive Black group evaluation, both African Americans and Caribbean Blacks benefit and experience a lower probability of heart trouble.     

Social Structural Location and Vocabularies of Participation: Fostering a Collective Identity in Urban Agriculture Activism

Contextualized within the visible inequality that permeates its local food landscape and the broader elitist food culture of California's San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland's urban agriculture movement comprises actors with rich vocabularies of motive for participation. Drawing from 25 in‐depth interviews with movement activists, I uncover a racial and social class homogeneity among participants that contributes to the formation of a collective identity but also limits the movement's outcomes in important ways. This research draws from Bourdieu's theory of class distinction and social movement theories of collective identity formation to contribute to literature on the reproduction of class and racial privilege in alternative food activism. I find that narratives for movement involvement converge on three discourses: possession of education‐derived knowledge to contend with the agroindustrial complex, the conflation of the creation of community through urban food growing with inclusivity, and a missionary‐like desire to educate others as to the benefits of growing their own food. I argue that the movement could benefit from a more diverse repertoire of action generated from a greater integration of racially and economically diverse actors working together to reorient the food system toward local food production alternatives.     

What is a family? Constructions of family and parenting after a custody transfer from birth parents to foster parents

The subject of stability for children in long‐term foster care is an emerging field within social work with vulnerable children. In Sweden, the adoption of foster children is not a common occurrence. Instead, when a child has been placed in foster care for 3 years, the local social welfare committee will consider whether the custody of the child should be transferred to the foster parents regardless of the circumstances of the birth parents, in order to secure stability and a sense of family belonging. Consequently, custody transfers raise questions such as “who is family?” and “who is a parent?” This qualitative interview study with custodians and young people who have experienced custody transfer highlights that who counts as family and as a parent is ambiguous. This article draws attention to how negotiations about family and parenthood revolve around biological, emotional, and relational dimensions. Furthermore, we show that stability for children in care has to be understood in terms of processes over time and not as the result of a single decision of custody transfer. Consequently, social workers need to take several aspects into account when they assess family belonging and stability for children in foster care.     

The Robustness of Common Measures of 2×2 Association to Bias Due to Misclassifications

The strength of association between two dichotomous characteristics A and B can be measured in many ways. All of these statistics are biased when there is misclassification, and all are prevalence dependent whether or not their population values are. Measures lacking fixed endpoints for random and perfect association, such as sensitivity, specificity, risk ratios, and odds ratio, have a bias either so unpredictable or so large that the observable and true measures of association may bear little resemblance to each other. Reexpressions of these measures that fix the endpoints and other measures with fixed endpoints, such as kappa, phi, gamma, risk difference, and attributable risk, produce attenuated estimates of their true values. Disattenuating such estimators is possible using test—retest data.     

Meet the Parents? Family Size and the Geographic Proximity Between Adult Children and Older Mothers in Sweden

The aim of this study is to estimate the causal effect of family size on the proximity between older mothers and adult children by using a large administrative data set from Sweden. Our main results show that adult children in Sweden are not constrained by sibship size in choosing where to live: for families with more than one child, sibship size does not affect child-mother proximity. For aging parents, however, having fewer children reduces the probability of having at least one child living nearby, which is likely to have consequences for the intensity of intergenerational contact and eldercare.     

Fragility index of block tailed vectors

Financial crises are a recurrent phenomenon with important effects on the real economy. The financial system is inherently fragile and it is therefore of great importance to be able to measure and characterize its systemic stability. Multivariate extreme value theory provide us such a framework through the fragility index ( 11, 7 and 8). Here we generalize this concept and contribute to the modeling of the stability of a stochastic system divided into blocks. We will find several relations with well-known tail dependence measures in the literature, which will provide us immediate estimators. We end with an application to financial data.     

Causes and outcomes in studies of fear of childbirth: A systematic review

Problem

Fear of childbirth negatively affects women during pregnancy and after birth.

Implementation of a Posted Schedule to Increase Class-Wide Interobserver Agreement Assessment

The present study investigated the impact of an antecedent intervention in the form of a daily posted schedule on the interobserver agreement (IOA) assessment of educational goals implemented within a classroom at a private school serving individuals with disabilities. During baseline, the percentage of academic goals with interobserver agreement was low and stable (M?=?5%). Teacher performance improved during the intervention (M?=?92%). A reversal replicated this effect and performance maintained during 6-week, 6-month, and 1-year follow-up probes. Results suggest a daily posted schedule can effectively increase interobserver agreement assessment by direct-care teaching staff.