Sirens’ Call: Understanding Poor Financial Decision Making and Credit Card Misuse

Poor financial decision-making paradigms such as misuse of credit cards exist as ruinous forms of personal debt. Psychiatric and physical health problems arise from financial distress. Significant challenges exist for consumers to become financially solvent. Obstacles that exist in overcoming financial stressors can be explained by behavioral economic theories. These theories explain why consumers make unwise financial decisions. Research, practice implications, and a financial therapy model for improving financial decision-making skills are presented. The need for social work to ally with family economic scholars and policymakers around financial literacy and the development of effective financial therapy interventions is discussed.     

The NUDIST qualitative data analysis system

Most computer approaches to qualitative data analysis have concentrated on coding and retrieval of text. This paper describes a research project which set out to support a range of methods for the analysis of unstructured data, with emphasis on the building and testing of grounded theory. It resulted in software whose innovations include: a) No limit to the number of coding categories and sub-categories, and no limit to the number of times a given text passage can be coded; b) The use of separate document and indexing databases, interrelated and of unlimited flexibility; c) Comprehensive hypermedia-like browsing tools for both document and indexing databases; d) Ability to search for words and lexical patterns occurring in text and to combine this with indexing of the text; e) Ability to handle off-line textual and non-textual data as well as on-line data; f) Ability to record textual comments in indexing categories — a memoing facility for emerging ideas and categories; g) Support and exploitation of hierarchical indexing systems; h) Mechanisms for creating new indexing categories out of existing ones, relating them to the data documents, and using them for further analyses. New goals of the project are to provide a number of artificial intelligence based information structuring and reasoning facilities which can be used to aid the organization and retrieval of qualitative data, and to extend the present capabilities of the software to express and test new ideas, concepts, generalizations and hypotheses about the data.     

Testing optimality of experimental designs for a regression model with random variables

Tsukanov (Theor. Probab. Appl. 26 (1981) 173–177) considers the regression model $\text{E(}\text{y}\text{|}\text{Z}\text{)=}\text{Fp}\text{+}\text{Zq}$, $\text{D(}\text{y}\text{|}\text{Z}\text{)=σ}{}^2\text{I}{}_{\mathrm{n}}$, where $\text{y}\text{(n×1)}$ is a vector of measured values,$\text{F}\text{(n×k)}$ contains the control variables, $\text{Z}\text{(n×l)}$ contains the observed values, and $\text{p}\text{(k×1)}$ and $\text{q}\text{(l×1)}$ are being estimated. Assuming that $\text{Z}\text{=}\text{FL}\text{+}\text{R}$, where $\text{L}\text{(k×l)}$ is non-random, and the rows of $\text{R}\text{(n×l)}$ are i.i.d. $\text{N(}\text{0}\text{,Σ)}$, we extend Tsukanov's results by (i) computing E(detH_p), where H_p is the covariance matrix of p?, the l.s.e. of p, (ii) considering ‘optimality in the mean’ for the largest root criterion, (iii) discussing these equations when the matrix R has a left-spherical distribution.     

Series Expansion for a Hypergeometric Function of Matrix Argument with Applications

A series expansion is obtained for the confluent hypergeometric function of the second kind when the argument is a 2 times 2 positive definite matrix. Applications are made to the distributions of Hotelling's generalized T₀² statistic, and the smallest latent root of the covariance matrix.     

A cost containment program targeting home infusion drug therapy

A program was instituted to determine if retrospective, concurrent, and prospective analysis of home infusion therapy cases by a multidisciplinary team comprising clinicians and financial analysts would lead to cost reductions and cost-effective behavioral changes by providers. Actual invoices and prospective price quotes for infusion therapy were reviewed and compared to a database of "usual and customary" prices. The results were presented to providers with the intent of obtaining a reduction in prices for the services rendered or about to be rendered. As a result, $3,265,248 in short-term cost reductions were achieved, and $15,146,789 in long-term cost reductions are projected. Analysis resulted in average cost reductions of $2,247 and $10,424 respectively. Very significant cost reductions can be achieved through the use of a multidisciplinary team and a comprehensive pricing database for home infusion therapy.     

Education,work, and family formation in early adulthood

A multivariate analysis examined relationships among education, work, and family formation using data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. A consensus has emerged among behavioral scientists that these three variables affect each other mutually, but until recently, methodological limitations have made it difficult to study these mutual effects. The present study attacked these difficulties by usingLISREL procedures. The most important findings, perhaps, are that, among women, both working and pursuing higher education exert substantial negative influences on marrying and becoming a parent. These influences are substantially stronger than. influences in the opposite direction. Therefore, these results imply that, for women, delaying childbearing is more a consequence of decisions to pursue other activities than it is a cause of such decisions. Among men, pursuing higher education negatively influenced family formation but working did not. The most notable difference between men and women, however, was that forming a family exerted a positive influence on working among men but not among women. Locus of control exerted little influence on any outcome.     

Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

It is not uncommon for women researchers to experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. Nevertheless, these experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within our discipline. In this article, we use women's experiences with harassment in the field to interrogate the epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology within the discipline of sociology. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews, we examine three “fixations” of contemporary ethnography that inform women ethnographers’ understandings of and reactions to harassment in the field. These fixations are solitude, danger, and intimacy. Our data show that these fixations not only put researchers in danger but also have implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. They contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment, and are motivated by and reproduce androcentric norms that valorize certain types of fieldwork. We argue that acknowledging and analyzing experiences with harassment and other unwanted sexual attention in the field is part of a more fully developed understanding of ethnographic research itself.     

MEASURING QUALITY OF LIFE IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA

South African cities attract thousands of new residents every year in search of work and a better life. The housing backlog coupled with a shortage of housing subsidies means that for many South Africans there is no alternative but to live in informal housing and shack settlements. Informal settlements are therefore here to stay for the next decade and beyond. Given the importance of these residential areas, research needs to be undertaken to determine how to improve the lives of people living in shack settlements. This theme has received little dedicated attention by South African quality of life researchers in the past and the paper begins to address this by exploring the quality of life of informal dwellers in three distinct city areas in South Africa: Buffalo City, Durban, and Alexandra, Johannesburg. The paper investigates the factors that are most important in improving the quality of life of residents in informal housing as well as the main obstacles to a better quality of life. It uses regression analysis to obtain an understanding of the kinds of issues which shape quality of life in these areas and concludes by suggesting several research directions which would improve our knowledge of quality of life for informal settlement residents.     

“Sacrificing at the altar of tenure”: Assistant professors’ work/life management

Work/family scholars are increasingly paying attention to how professors manage their work responsibilities, mainly examining how women with children handle such duties. Virtually nothing is known about how male and female professors without children manage their work demands in relation to their personal lives. The author explores this topic through in-depth interviews with untenured tenure track assistant professors with and without children at two research universities in the U.S. Some participants prioritized work over other aspects of their lives whereas other participants exhibited a shared dedication to work and family. This research demonstrates that the academe's expectations of professors not only affect faculty with children, but others as well.