Attitudes to Employment of Professionally Qualified Refugees in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the attitudes to work and experiences seeking employment of professionally qualified refugees enrolled on a course to enhance their employability skills in Leeds, United Kingdom (UK). We analyse the results within the framework of conceptual models describing the transition of refugees into employment (which are essentially linear) and those that categorize refugees according to their resettlement styles based on their social features and the host society's response. Our data reinforce that these people are (initially at least) highly motivated to work, strongly identify with their profession and suffer considerable loss of self‐esteem as they are unable to secure appropriate employment. Attitudes to securing employment were often related to their length of time in the UK. Recent arrivals were more positive about returning to their profession, even if this meant retraining, developing skills and time spent in alternative employment. Many of those here for longer were resigned to retraining, and the worst cases felt despair and feelings of betrayal. Our work showed that many had poor job search strategies and a lack of knowledge of the culture and norms of their chosen profession. We argue that the generic support of statutory employment services or the voluntary sector is inappropriate and that there is a role for professional bodies to be more active in their engagement with these groups of people. The results suggest that conceptual models need to be more nuanced to capture the experiences of these refugees: attitudes to work can cycle from optimism to disillusionment, so a linear model will not capture the full complexity, and we also found evidence of shifting among categories of resettlement styles.     

Changes in At-Risk American Men's Crime and Substance Use Trajectories Following Fatherhood

Fatherhood can be a turning point in development and in men's crime and substance use trajectories. At-risk boys (N = 206) were assessed annually from ages 12 to 31 years. Crime, arrest, and tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use trajectories were examined. Marriage was associated with lower levels of crime and less frequent substance use. Following the birth of a first biological child, men's crime trajectories showed slope decreases, and tobacco and alcohol use trajectories showed level decreases. The older men were when they became fathers, the greater the level decreases were in crime and alcohol use and the less the slope decreases were in tobacco and marijuana use. Patterns are consistent with theories of social control and social timetables.     

A Critical Look at Some Analyses of Major League Baseball Salaries

At a data analysis exposition sponsored by the Section on Statistical Graphics of the ASA in 1988, 15 groups of statisticians analyzed the same data about salaries of major league baseball players. By examining what they did, what worked, and what failed, we can begin to learn about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to analyzing data. The data are rich in difficulties. They require reexpression, contain errors and outliers, and exhibit nonlinear relationships. They thus pose a realistic challenge to the variety of data analysis techniques used. The analysis groups chose a wide range of model-fitting methods, including regression, principal components, factor analysis, time series, and CART. We thus have an effective framework for comparing these approaches so that we can learn more about them. Our examination shows that approaches commonly identified with Exploratory Data Analysis are substantially more effective at revealing the underlying patterns in the data and at building parsimonious, understandable models that fit the data well. We also find that common data displays, when applied carefully, are often sufficient for even complex analyses such as this.     

Transforming sub-Saharan Africa

This article provides an analysis of my personal experience and research on the need for sub-Saharan African economic transformation. It contains relevant references to econometric modeling which are consistent with this analysis. After presenting the causes of African failures, ranging from the alleged role of slavery and colonization, to trade composition and relative decline, to present day problems of governance, low level of foreign investment in Africa, and mass unemployment, the article concludes with an agenda for the transformation of sub-Saharan Africa.     

Jensen's Inequality for General Location Parameter

A wide class of location parameters is shown to satisfy Jensen's inequality. When the expectation EX exists and l is a convex function, Jensen's inequality states that El(x) ≥ l(EX). It is shown that for μ, a properly defined location parameter, μ(l(x)) μ l(μ(x)).     

Density estimation using asymmetric kernels and Bayes bandwidths with censored data

We propose a modification to the regular kernel density estimation method that use asymmetric kernels to circumvent the spill over problem for densities with positive support. First a pivoting method is introduced for placement of the data relative to the kernel function. This yields a strongly consistent density estimator that integrates to one for each fixed bandwidth in contrast to most density estimators based on asymmetric kernels proposed in the literature. Then a data-driven Bayesian local bandwidth selection method is presented and lognormal, gamma, Weibull and inverse Gaussian kernels are discussed as useful special cases. Simulation results and a real-data example illustrate the advantages of the new methodology.     

Double‐mouthed discourse: Interpreting,framing, and participant roles1

In this article I examine multilingual displays in a Congolese Pentecostal church in Cape Town, South Africa. I focus on the simultaneous interpreting of the pastor's French sermon into English. I argue that the interpreting activity performed at church is used as a powerful interactional device to dramatize and shape the pastor's sermon. A close examination of participant roles shows that although these may appear to be predetermined by the interpretee‐interpreter format of the sermon, speaking roles are actually fluid and negotiated. I submit that an important role of the church interpreter is to convey the pastor's inspiration from the Holy Spirit and reach out to the potential audience absent from the here and now of the service. His high emotional engagement helps convey this inspiration prospectively to the audience and retroactively to the pastor himself.     

Comparing several experimental groups with a control in the multivariate case

This paper presents a multivariate extension of Dunnett's test for comparing simultaneously k treatment group means with a single control group mean. A test based on Hotelling T²statistics is presented and approximate critical values are evaluated for the case of equal numbers of observations in each group, for the .05 and .01 levels of significance, for 1 to 5 variates, for 1 to 10 treatment groups, and for varying degrees of freedom. The accuracy of the procedure for generating approximate critical values is assessed via simulation studies conducted for selected cases and an example is presented using real data.