IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE OUTCOME,CHANGE THE CONTEST

This article analyzes contests when contestants derive heterogeneous benefits from winning and investments are seen as costs to the contest designer. An example of this is sports leagues maximizing league profits. For sports leagues, optimal contests depend upon the heterogeneity of market sizes and the impact of team investment on winning. Sports leagues have mechanisms to change the structure of contests, implying they have some control of the expected payoff of teams, the value of the athletes, and the balance of the league. Data from Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association are used to empirically estimate the model. (JEL C72, L10, L83)     

How Can I Become More Secure?: A Grounded Theory of Earning Secure Attachment

The purpose of this study was to develop a grounded theory of earning secure attachment. This study included 15 women and 5 men who met the criteria of having a self-reported history of attachment insecurity and demonstrated evidence of earned security. The grand tour research question, How do adults with a history of insecure attachment earn security?, was explored using constructivist grounded theory and semi-structured interviews emphasizing processes of positive attachment change. The results describe a process model of change hinging on three interrelated categories: meta-conditions of positive attachment change, making intrapsychic changes, and making interpersonal changes. Clinical implications include the importance of clients committing to the process, clients working with a clinician trained in trauma-focused therapy, and clinicians being surrogate attachment figures for clients.     

Introduction: making the case for qualitative interviews

ABSTRACT

We introduce four papers comprising a Themed Section for this issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, which together ‘Make the Case for Qualitative Interviews’. Here our aim is to show how this collection provides a timely contribution to key debates concerning the value of qualitative interviews, particularly as these are employed and analysed in much recent social scientific thinking. We explore ways to move beyond recent, sometimes constraining and occasionally dismissive, approaches to interviews in the social sciences through reframing and reconfiguring central questions germane to these debates. We also seek to challenge a broader neo-liberal trend towards valuing quantitative over depth qualitative research. Through this Introduction, and the collection of papers that follows, we seek to re-establish the value of qualitative interviews by shifting the focus from a preoccupation with what interviews can be said to do, towards questions centring on what can be done with interviews.     

Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering

Maintaining the performance of infrastructure-dependent systems in the face of surprises and unknowable risks is a grand challenge. Addressing this issue requires a better understanding of enabling conditions or principles that promote system resilience in a universal way. In this study, a set of such principles is interpreted as a group of interrelated conditions or organizational qualities that, taken together, engender system resilience. The field of resilience engineering identifies basic system or organizational qualities (e.g., abilities for learning) that are associated with enhanced general resilience and has packaged them into a set of principles that should be fostered. However, supporting conditions that give rise to such first-order system qualities remain elusive in the field. An integrative understanding of how such conditions co-occur and fit together to bring about resilience, therefore, has been less clear. This article contributes to addressing this gap by identifying a potentially more comprehensive set of principles for building general resilience in infrastructure-dependent systems. In approaching this aim, we organize scattered notions from across the literature. To reflect the partly self-organizing nature of infrastructure-dependent systems, we compare and synthesize two lines of research on resilience: resilience engineering and social-ecological system resilience. Although some of the principles discussed within the two fields overlap, there are some nuanced differences. By comparing and synthesizing the knowledge developed in them, we recommend an updated set of resilience-enhancing principles for infrastructure-dependent systems. In addition to proposing an expanded list of principles, we illustrate how these principles can co-occur and their interdependencies.     

Beyond Neighborhoods and Crime: Expanding the Scope of Social Disorganization to Explain Occupational Deviance

This article proposes a structural explanation for the occupational deviance dimension of white collar crime. The systemic model of social disorganization theory is used as a framework for understanding organizational conditions that produce high rates of occupational deviance. The model of workplace disorganization proposed here posits parallel mechanisms can be found in communities as well as organizations. Marginalized workplaces, employee turnover, and employee heterogeneity are antecedent factors that discourage employee network formation and collective action against deviance. By refocusing on organizational factors, we offer a broader understanding of occupational deviance, one that can predict and explain the workplace conditions under which counterproductive behaviors occur.     

The role of perceptions of partner's alcohol use in heavy alcohol use and alcohol reduction intervention preferences among LGBQ adults in primary,romantic relationships

Correlates of heavy episodic alcohol and alcohol reduction intervention preferences were examined among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) adults in romantic relationships. Anonymous data were collected online; analyses included logistic and multinomial regression models. One-fourth of participants reported recent heavy episodic alcohol use. Perceptions of partners' engaging in heavy alcohol use was associated with an increased odds of engaging in heavy alcohol use. Perceptions of partners' heavy alcohol use was associated with an increased odds of preferring a couples-based alcohol intervention compared to preferring no intervention. Findings highlight the need to consider partners in alcohol interventions for LGBQ couples.     

An Examination of Public Private Academic Partnerships: Does Program Success Enhance University Performance Outcomes?

In response to a steady decline in State funding, universities have become heavily involved in a variety of public private academic partnerships (PPAPs) in such areas as medical research, business incubation, technological commercialization, continuing professional education, and intercollegiate athletics. Despite this trend, research which examines if such partnerships actually enhance university funding is rare within the public organization literature. Given this, we focus on university intercollegiate athletics programs, which represent one of the largest PPAPs ever undertaken by universities, to examine whether PPAP success can potentially enhance university performance outcomes leading to increased funding levels. Such programs represent a PPAP because public, private, and academic entities all come together to form an organization (division 1 football at the bowl subdivision level) which seeks to benefit all three entities through sharing resources and responsibilities. Study results showed that athletic success positively influenced a variety of university performance outcome variables such as enrollments and endowments. While results indicate that PPAP success can enhance university funding, we also suggest modifications that should enhance the chances that PPAPs will be successful.     

Groups or Gatherings? Sources of Political Engagement in 19th Century American Cities

There is broad agreement that citizen participation is critical for successful democracy. Recently, scholars have linked such political participation with the notion of social capital—community-level resources, such as trust, norms, and networks, that foster collective action. Much uncertainty remains regarding the sources of social capital, however. Here we examine two different features of community life that are believed to nurture social capital, and political participation in turn: public venues where relative strangers can meet anonymously, socialize, and share information and opinions (i.e., venues for informal interaction); and venues for organized exchange between familiars, such as voluntary organizations and social clubs. Using quantitative data from America's largest cities at the end of the 19th century, we examine the relationship between both supposed sources of social capital and respective rates of voter participation. We find little support for the role of informal interaction in fostering an active and engaged citizenry. We do, however, find evidence that citizen participation was related to some types of associationalism (or organized exchange). In particular, associations that fostered high levels of mutual interdependence among members seemed the most strongly linked to higher levels of political participation.     

Does intergenerational mobility shape psychological distress? Sorokin revisited

Drawing from Sorokin's hypothesis that socially mobile individuals are at greater risk of experiencing psychological distress than their non-mobile counterparts, we investigate whether intergenerational occupational mobility influences psychological distress, as measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale. Using data for men from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and Sobel's Diagonal Mobility Models, we find little evidence for Sorokin's hypothesis; mobile individuals are no more likely to be psychologically distressed than their non-mobile counterparts. In fact, one group of mobile men - those who left their farming origins - are actually less distressed than the sons who remain as farmers and non-mobile men in higher-ranked social classes. We speculate that this reflects the fact that farming became very arduous during the late 20th century and these mobile sons of farmers appreciate their improved life chances. Our findings suggest that the association between mobility and psychological distress varies across specific class backgrounds and is contingent upon the broader social and economic context.