DRUG POLICY IN THE TIME OF AIDS:

In 1985, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded an ethnographic research project in San Francisco to study the needle sharing behavior of injection drug users (IDUs). The goal of the research was to develop a strategy to slow the spread of HIV among this hidden and hard to reach population of drug users and their sexual partners. This small-scale project grew into a model intervention in which bleach, condoms, and street-based education by outreach workers were employed to inform IDUs of the risk of AIDS and of methods for protecting themselves. The "reach and teach bleach" model was adopted by NIDA and implemented in a number of American cities. This study describes the development of the model intervention, the adoption of the model by NIDA as part of its National AIDS Demonstration Research (NADR) project, and the political circumstances under which the city of San Francisco applied for the NADR grant. Drawing on Social Worlds/Arena theory, and based on extensive interviews and participant observation, a sociohistorical analysis examines the initial development, implementation, and disintegration of the model outreach project and the impact of the program on drug policy in the city of San Francisco.     

Estimation of noncentrality parameters

We propose some estimators of noncentrality parameters which improve upon usual unbiased estimators under quadratic loss. The distributions we consider are the noncentral chi-square and the noncentral F. However, we give more general results for the family of elliptically contoured distributions and propose a robust dominating estimator.     

Erroneous perceptions and arousal among regular and occasional video poker players

This study investigated the relationship between the level of arousal (Heart Rate) and the number of erroneous perceptions among video poker players. Twelve regular and twelve occasional gamblers participated in a gambling session conducted in a natural environment. It was hypothesised that 1) a significant positive correlation would be observed between arousal and the number of erroneous verbalizations, 2) regular players would show a higher level of arousal than occasional players, and 3) they would emit more erroneous verbalizations. Results showed that hypotheses one and three were confirmed. Theoretical and practical implications of these results for the psychology of gambling are discussed.This study was supported by a grant from Loto-Québec.     

Small Town in Mass Society Revisited1

Abstract The case study of a small New York town that dramatized the thesis that the secular expansion of macro forces—urbanization, industrialization, bureaucratization—has permanently reduced the autonomy of all small communities is an example of a special type of discovery/persuasion strategy in the social sciences: the “opposition case study.” In contrast to the more rigorous “competitive test” or the atheoretical “negative case,” opposition case studies confront the dominant perspective with a qualitative illustration of a new theory in the context of a zero-sum game. When they are successful, opposition cases meet four criteria: the dominant view is immediately rendered obsolete; the origin of the new idea supports its plausibility; the new perspective is shown to be testable; and the new perspective quickly generates new lines of research. Small Town in Mass Society meets the first criterion, and may have been heuristic, but its probable origin in populist ideology undermines its testability.     

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE STRATIFICATION OF EDUCATIONAL TRANSITIONS: THE LOGISTIC RESPONSE MODEL WITH PARTIAL PROPORTIONALITY CONSTRAINTS

In this paper we reanalyze Robert D. Mare's highly influential work on educational transitions among American men born in the first half of the 20th century. Contrary to previous belief, Mare found that the effects of socioeconomic background variables decline regularly across educational transitions in conditional logistic regression analyses. We have reconfirmed Mare's findings and tested them by introducing a modified logistic response model that constrains selected social background effects to vary proportionally across educational transitions. We refer to our preferred model as the logistic response model with partial proportionality constraints (LRPPC). The model can easily be estimated in Stata or using other standard statistical software. Partial proportionality constraints may also prove useful in interpopulation comparisons based on other linear models.     

BAYESIAN SUBSET SELECTION AND MODEL AVERAGING USING A CENTRED AND DISPERSED PRIOR FOR THE ERROR VARIANCE

This article proposes a new data‐based prior distribution for the error variance in a Gaussian linear regression model, when the model is used for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging. For a given subset of variables in the model, this prior has a mode that is an unbiased estimator of the error variance but is suitably dispersed to make it uninformative relative to the marginal likelihood. The advantage of this empirical Bayes prior for the error variance is that it is centred and dispersed sensibly and avoids the arbitrary specification of hyperparameters. The performance of the new prior is compared to that of a prior proposed previously in the literature using several simulated examples and two loss functions. For each example our paper also reports results for the model that orthogonalizes the predictor variables before performing subset selection. A real example is also investigated. The empirical results suggest that for both the simulated and real data, the performance of the estimators based on the prior proposed in our article compares favourably with that of a prior used previously in the literature.