Getting Along or Getting Your Own Way: The Development of Young Children's Use of Argument in Conflicts with Mother and Sibling

The development of children's use of argument in conflicts with their mother and sibling during their fourth vear, a period of marked changes in their understanding of others, was studied in 49 children observed at home with their mothers and siblings at 33 and 47 months. Children's use of reasoned argument in conflict increased: however, the proportion used for conciliation and compromise decreased, and children used justifications increasingly to support their own position. Mothers, hut not siblings, changed in parallel to the children over this period. Both the initiator of a dispute and children's expression of affect were related to children's use of argument; children used less reasoned argument when they were upset. Results are discussed in relation to differences in the development of children's relationships with mother and sibling and the importance of the link between affective expression and the use of argument in family disputes.     

An experimental evaluation of alternative communication systems as used for medical diagnosis.

While the problem of providing adequate health care to remote populations has been widely recognized, little research has been undertaken to evaluate alternative systems designed to provide such care. An essential part of such a system is the communications link between the doctor and the community he is serving. Studying this two-way subsystem is the context of primary diagnosis and patient management, efficiency and effectiveness of color television, black and white television and hands-free telephone were compared with physical presence consultation. No significant differences in performance were found among the three systems using telecommunications. Physical presence consultation was found superior only for detecting secondary medical problems. Significant rank order correlations were found, however, between the years of experience of the consulting physician and both diagnostic accuracy and appropriate patient management. Also, the attitudes of the patients, doctors and nurses alike ranked physical presence over color television over black and white television over hands-free telephone for medical consultations.     

A Generalized QMRA Beta‐Poisson Dose‐Response Model

Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) is widely accepted for characterizing the microbial risks associated with food, water, and wastewater. Single‐hit dose‐response models are the most commonly used dose‐response models in QMRA. Denoting as the probability of infection at a given mean dose d, a three‐parameter generalized QMRA beta‐Poisson dose‐response model, , is proposed in which the minimum number of organisms required for causing infection, K_min, is not fixed, but a random variable following a geometric distribution with parameter . The single‐hit beta‐Poisson model, , is a special case of the generalized model with K_min = 1 (which implies ). The generalized beta‐Poisson model is based on a conceptual model with greater detail in the dose‐response mechanism. Since a maximum likelihood solution is not easily available, a likelihood‐free approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) algorithm is employed for parameter estimation. By fitting the generalized model to four experimental data sets from the literature, this study reveals that the posterior median estimates produced fall short of meeting the required condition of = 1 for single‐hit assumption. However, three out of four data sets fitted by the generalized models could not achieve an improvement in goodness of fit. These combined results imply that, at least in some cases, a single‐hit assumption for characterizing the dose‐response process may not be appropriate, but that the more complex models may be difficult to support especially if the sample size is small. The three‐parameter generalized model provides a possibility to investigate the mechanism of a dose‐response process in greater detail than is possible under a single‐hit model.     

Critical values and powers for tests of uniformity of directions under multivariate normality

The Rayleigh, Ajne, Giné and two new tests of uniformity of directions are investigated as tests for multivariate normality when the population mean vector and covariance matrix are assumed to be unknown. The new tests include one which is designed especially to detect for bimodal alternatives and one which is designed to perform well under a wide variety of alternatives. Simulated percentile points are obtained under the assumption that the variates constitute a random sample from a multivariate normal distribution. Powers of the five tests are compared under alternatives in the bivariate as well as higher dimensional settings.     

Book reviews

In case-control studies it is important that controls selected are representative of the population from which the cases came, to give an unbiased estimate of population exposure. This is difficult to achieve, but one method to select controls has been to use the patient lists of the general practitioners with whom the cases are registered. Using data from a case-control study of heart attacks in young women; this article explores whether this method of selecting controls resulted in an unrepresentative distribution of deprivation levels in controls. The controls did not reflect the high levels of deprivation seen in the cases, although they came from the same neighbourhoods (general practice catchment areas). Such controls are often referred to as neighbourhood controls, but this is misleading. General practice controls are more likely to represent the general distribution of the population than the relative affluence or otherwise of the cases.     

Racist attitudes,out‐groups and the Australian experience

Australia today is a culturally diverse nation with people from over 190 different countries claiming 300 different ancestries. But despite an official commitment to diversity, contemporary Australian society continues to experience tensions between multicultural policies and a legacy of Anglo privilege and cultural dominance. To assess this, the Challenging Racism Project conducted a national survey, commissioned by the Special Broadcasting Service, to gauge the nature and extent of racist attitudes and experience of racism across Australia during July–August 2015 and November 2015. Results show that sociodemographic characteristics show little contemporary relationship to racist attitudes. Age, once associated with “old” racist attitudes, is no longer significant. On the other hand, Anglo privilege is empirically linked to racism through notions of social dominance. We conclude that it is to the media, and to public discourse generally, to which future research attention, using critical discourse analysis, should turn in efforts to make Australia a fairer, more tolerant, multicultural society.     

Myth versus Reality: Comparing the Depiction of Juvenile Delinquency in Metropolitan Newspapers with Arrest Data*

While the extant literature on the social construction of crime in the media is extensive, little literature exists on the media's construction of juvenile delinquency in newspapers, particularly in small cities. Even though smaller metropolitan areas have lower crime rates, how these newspapers construct delinquency undoubtedly impacts the attitudes, behaviors, and fears of residents, perhaps more so than in larger metropolitan areas. The purpose of this research is to assess how newspapers from five of the smallest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) socially construct juvenile delinquency, offenders and victims, and to assess whether or not these images perpetuate myths related to juvenile delinquency. An analysis of 231 articles indicates that small‐MSA newspapers construct an inaccurate image of juvenile offenders that significantly promotes the myth of juveniles as violent predators. Specifically, juvenile offenders are constructed as violent predators with innocent, random victims. In contrast, newspapers construct a more accurate picture of victims, with females represented as the most common juvenile victim, and sexual assault victimization as the most common of all juvenile violent crime victimization.