The Development of a Reliable Change Index and Cutoff for the Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale

The Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale (RDAS; Busby, Crane, Larson, & Christensen, 1995) is a measure of couple relationship adjustment that is often used to differentiate between distressed and non‐distressed couples. While the measure currently allows for a determination of whether group mean scores change significantly across administrations, it lacks the ability to determine whether an individual's change in dyadic adjustment is clinically significant. This study addresses this limitation by establishing a cutoff of 47.31 and reliable change index of 11.58 for the RDAS by pooling data across multiple community and clinical samples. An individual whose score on the RDAS moves across the cutoff changes by 12 or more points can be classified as experiencing clinically significant change.     

Quantifying Intrinsic and Extrinsic Contributions to Human Longevity: Application of a Two-Process Vitality Model to the Human Mortality Database

The rise in human life expectancy has involved declines in intrinsic and extrinsic mortality processes associated, respectively, with senescence and environmental challenges. To better understand the factors driving this rise, we apply a two-process vitality model to data from the Human Mortality Database. Model parameters yield intrinsic and extrinsic cumulative survival curves from which we derive intrinsic and extrinsic expected life spans (ELS). Intrinsic ELS, a measure of longevity acted on by intrinsic, physiological factors, changed slowly over two centuries and then entered a second phase of increasing longevity ostensibly brought on by improvements in old-age death reduction technologies and cumulative health behaviors throughout life. The model partitions the majority of the increase in life expectancy before 1950 to increasing extrinsic ELS driven by reductions in environmental, event-based health challenges in both childhood and adulthood. In the post-1950 era, the extrinsic ELS of females appears to be converging to the intrinsic ELS, whereas the extrinsic ELS of males is approximately 20 years lower than the intrinsic ELS.     

Shame and pride in second-generation German identity in Melbourne,Australia: emotions and white ethnicity

As members of an established, well-integrated, white ethnic group, second-generation Germans are largely invisible in Australian society. Given this, they are easily presumed a group for whom Gans’ notion of ‘symbolic ethnicity’ might apply. However, based on interviews with adult children of German immigrants in Melbourne, Australia, this article suggests an alternative interpretation using recent literature on the role of emotions for identity. In the interviews with adult children of German immigrants in Melbourne, Australia, the notions of shame and pride in relation to ethnic identity were clearly evident. Shame often emerged in interaction with other people in Australia, and particularly in relation to Nazism and the Second World War. However, most respondents felt equally proud of their German heritage, particularly later in life. These findings suggest that ethnic identity for these second-generation Germans is a deeper, embodied experience that is similar to what Bourdieu terms habitus.     

Participation in different types of volunteering at young, middle and older adulthood

Around 35?% of Australian adults volunteer. It has been found that participation in volunteering varies with life course stage: people tend to participate less in early adulthood, which has been referred to as a ??demographically dense?? period, and more in middle adulthood, which has been characterized as a more stable period of life. This paper extends this research to investigate the types of organizations for which people volunteer at different life course stages. This paper uses data from the Negotiating the Life Course project (2003 and 2006) to examine participation in volunteering for different types of organizations. The focus is on the type of organizations for which people volunteer and how that differs in young, middle and older adulthood. There are three dominant types of organizations that people volunteer for: welfare and community, sport and recreation, and education and training, and volunteering with each of these groups varies with a person??s life course stage. Younger adults tend to be more likely to volunteer for religious groups. People in middle adulthood, and particularly those with school-aged children, tend to volunteer in sport and recreation groups and education and training organizations, and volunteering with welfare, community and health organizations is dominant in older adulthood.     

Community standards,conservatism, and judgments of pornography

In an attempt to determine if a community standard existed and to relate judgments of pornography to conservatism, scores on Wilson and Patterson's Conservatism Scale, yes‐no judgments on whether 25 pictures were or were not pornographic, and demographic data were obtained from a random sample (N = 114) of a community. Results were as follows: (1) suggestive evidence for the existence of a community standard; (2) the c‐scale correlated .57 (N = 114, p < .01) with number of pictures judged pornographic; (3) the 25 pictures met Guttman requirements of unidimensionality (reproducibility of .925); and (4) factor analysis of the pornography judgments yielded three clear‐cut factors and one ambiguous factor which were ordered along the Guttman dimension.     

Estimation with right‐censored observations under a semi‐Markov model

The semi‐Markov process often provides a better framework than the classical Markov process for the analysis of events with multiple states. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we show that in the presence of right censoring, when the right end‐point of the support of the censoring time is strictly less than the right end‐point of the support of the semi‐Markov kernel, the transition probability of the semi‐Markov process is nonidentifiable, and the estimators proposed in the literature are inconsistent in general. We derive the set of all attainable values for the transition probability based on the censored data, and we propose a nonparametric inference procedure for the transition probability using this set. Second, the conventional approach to constructing confidence bands is not applicable for the semi‐Markov kernel and the sojourn time distribution. We propose new perturbation resampling methods to construct these confidence bands. Different weights and transformations are explored in the construction. We use simulation to examine our proposals and illustrate them with hospitalization data from a recent cancer survivor study. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 41: 237–256; 2013 © 2013 Statistical Society of Canada