CAUSAL EFFECTS OF TREATMENTS FOR INFORMATIVE MISSING DATA DUE TO PROGRESSION/DEATH

In longitudinal clinical trials, when outcome variables at later time points are only defined for patients who survive to those times, the evaluation of the causal effect of treatment is complicated. In this paper, we describe an approach that can be used to obtain the causal effect of three treatment arms with ordinal outcomes in the presence of death using a principal stratification approach. We introduce a set of flexible assumptions to identify the causal effect and implement a sensitivity analysis for non-identifiable assumptions which we parameterize parsimoniously. Methods are illustrated on quality of life data from a recent colorectal cancer clinical trial.     

The Forest-Related Content of Children's Textbooks: 1950–1991*

This study utilizes content analysis to measure the prominence of six environmental themes in children's science and social studies textbooks over the period 1950–1991. Regression analysis of data from a sample of 118 textbooks reveals that textbook space devoted to forest issues has decreased since 1950. Within this shrinking space, treatments of ecological issues with regard to forests have increased, but only in science texts. All other environmental themes have decreased in prominence. The decreasing attention to forest issues in texts may be due in part to the trend of “mentioning,” the replacement of narrative text with strings of facts, in the production of textbooks. The finding that newer, more proenvironmental themes have not replaced the classical economic view of forests as commodities suggests that the growth in environmentalism in the United States since 1950 has not yet been sufficiently integrated into our culture to affect the formal education of children.     

Families formed as a result of donor insemination: the views of semen donors

This paper reports the views and feelings of semen donors at two London donor insemination (Dl) programmes regarding the recipients of Dl and the families created by this method. In particular it reports on: the types of recipients that donors wish to assist; their understanding of the legal position of donors and Di fathers; their views on the'matching' of donors and Dl fathers; their perception of Dl offspring's need or desire for information about the donor; their views on whether parents should tell their offspring about their Dl conception and regarding the secrecy surrounding Dl in general; and what they believe the community thinks about Dl. Overall, the donors perceive Dl families as being normal, and are very supportive of the autonomy and privacy of these families, but they also have concerns about the needs of the offspring. The authors draw attention to the need to take into account the views of donors in forming assisted reproduction policies, and also the need for the interests of the child to be paramount, as they are in the case of adoption.     

How College Men Understand Unwanted Sex with Women

Recent studies have shown that heterosexual college men report unwanted sex at higher rates than one might expect. And yet, college men’s perceptions of unwanted sex with women have been studied infrequently. This study examines how men understand unwanted sex with women and the impact of these experiences. Thirty-nine men, aged 18–25, were interviewed using open-ended questions related to their unwanted sexual experiences. Our findings demonstrate how men frequently minimize unwanted sex by framing it as either funny, unimportant, or something that happens to women. However, we find evidence that men's attempts at minimization are not always successful and that some experiences are indeed upsetting and/or hurtful. Rather than treating all men as a homogeneous category, our analysis details the circumstances associated with more or less troubling experiences. We find that there are particular circumstances (e.g. incapacitation), as well as personal characteristics (e.g. virgin), that position men to be more distressed by unwanted sex. This heterogeneity of men’s experiences explains some, but not all, differences in effects. Our analysis reveals that in experiences described as mild to severe, men talk about unwanted sex in highly contradictory ways. We argue that these contradictions are evidence of broader cognitive and emotional work done by men to convince themselves that unwanted sex does not matter to them. Our findings raise the possibility that when men use hegemonic notions of masculinity to understand their unwanted experiences, these interpretations serve to minimize the emotional damage that men might otherwise report.