Geographic Distributions of Extreme Weather Risk Perceptions in the United States

Weather and climate disasters pose an increasing risk to life and property in the United States. Managing this risk requires objective information about the nature of the threat and subjective information about how people perceive it. Meteorologists and climatologists have a relatively firm grasp of the historical objective risk. For example, we know which parts of the United States are most likely to experience drought, heat waves, flooding, snow or ice storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. We know less about the geographic distribution of the perceived risks of meteorological events and trends. Do subjective perceptions align with exposure to weather risks? This question is difficult to answer because analysts have yet to develop a comprehensive and spatially consistent methodology for measuring risk perceptions across geographic areas in the United States. In this project, we propose a methodology that uses multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate extreme weather and climate risk perceptions by geographic area (i.e., region, state, forecast area, and county). Then we apply the methodology using data from three national surveys (n = 9,542). This enables us to measure, map, and compare perceptions of risk from multiple weather hazards in geographic areas across the country.     

Forty Years of Food Safety Risk Assessment: A History and Analysis

Before the founding of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 1980, food safety in the United States had long been a concern, but there was a lack of systematic methods to assess food-related risks. In 1906, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Roosevelt signed, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act to regulate food safety at the federal level. This Act followed the publication of multiple reports of food contamination, culminating in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which highlighted food and worker abuses in the meatpacking industry. Later in the 20th century, important developments in agricultural and food technology greatly increased food production. But chemical exposures from agricultural and other practices resulted in major amendments to federal food laws, including the Delaney Clause, aimed specifically at cancer-causing chemicals. Later in the 20th century, when quantitative risk assessment methods were given greater scientific status in a seminal National Research Council report, food safety risk assessment became more systematized. Additionally, in these last 40 years, food safety research has resulted in increased understanding of a range of health effects from foodborne chemicals, and technological developments have improved U.S. food safety from farm to fork by offering new ways to manage risks. We discuss the history of food safety and the role risk analysis has played in its evolution, starting from over a century ago, but focusing on the last 40 years. While we focus on chemical risk assessment in the U.S., we also discuss microbial risk assessment and international food safety.     

Adaptation and Strategic Retirement of Secondary School Teachers

Public Organization Review - This study explains strategic retirement amongst Uganda’s secondary school teachers using work adjustment and development theories. Data relating to psychological...     

The Role of Family and Friends in Return Migration and Its Labor Market Outcomes

Population Research and Policy Review - Drawing on survey data on individuals’ motives for migration in Sweden (N?=?2172), we examine the importance of family and friends for...     

A modified Monty Hall problem

Theory and Decision - We conduct a laboratory experiment using the Monty Hall problem to study how simplified examples improve learning behavior and correct irrational choices in...     

Does parenting correspond with children's defending behavior? Examining linkages in the context of peer social preference

Bullying intervention research points to the important role of children standing up for victims (defending behavior). This study provides an initial look at how certain parenting practices may be generally related to the socialization of defending behavior among children. Defenders typically enjoy significant social status, allowing them the social capital to intervene. With this in mind, we also assess how parenting and children's social preference scores might uniquely or interactively predict defending behavior. This cross‐sectional study employs a sample of 219 (101 boys) fourth‐grade children living in the Western United States. Both mothers and fathers self‐reported their authoritative, authoritarian, and psychologically controlling parenting practices. A peer sociometric assessment provided each child's social preference score. Peer nominations provided each child's reputation for defending behaviors. Multiple regression results showed that a few of the parenting dimensions significantly predicted girls’ defending behavior above and beyond peer social preference. In contrast, the defending behavior scores of boys were unrelated to parenting. Finally, we used interaction analyses to probe whether the association between defending and parenting meaningfully varies according to children's levels of social preference. We did not find evidence to support this. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for future research.     

State,Commune and Gender Inequality Among Teachers in Rural and Small-Town China, 1957–1979

Studies of Maoist China have suggested that workplace gender inequality was greater in rural areas than cities. One possible explanation is that this was a result of the different institutional arrangements that governed rural and urban spaces. Another alternative is that different ideologies were associated with different types of work irrespective of institutional context. This article examines this through an analysis of teachers in Guangdong and Jiangsu. Some teachers were employed by the state in the same way that urban workers were, while others were employed by village-level administrations within communes. Levels of gender inequality were not majorly different between the two groups of teachers. In both groups there was a high degree of pay equality in comparison to other types of work. Other types of gender inequalities existed in teaching, but their effects were mitigated by the unintended consequences of structural changes in education during the Cultural Revolution.     

Emergence of the wrapped Cauchy distribution in mixed directional data

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - Inferring the most appropriate distribution (or distributions) to describe observed directional data is important in many applications of circular...