A NORMAL APPROXIMATION TO THE FISHER DISTRIBUTION

A simple normal approximation is given for the joint probability density function of the polar co-ordinates (θ, ψ) of a random vector following the Fisher distribution with arbitrary mean direction (θ₀, ψ₀). The approximation leads to simple inference procedures which are particularly useful in regression models. Conditions for the adequacy of the approximation are investigated and summarized in tabular form.     

Demographic and Social Research on the Population and Environment Nexus in Australia: Explaining the Gap

Solving the problem of the adverse impact of human numbers on the natural environment is a collective action problem and, if we are to understand it fully, we need good interdisciplinary research which includes work by demographers and sociologists. A number of factors inhibit this work in Australia: narrow disciplinary training; the scarcity of extrinsic rewards; and, as population growth has come to depend on immigration, the risk of peer disapproval. There is also little encouragement for such research from political leaders or the public. Indeed survey data show that the more Australians worry about the state of the environment the more likely they are to want a higher migrant intake.     

Forecasting enrollments during court-ordered desegregation

Distinctive issues arise when a demographer must forecast enrollments in a context of court-ordered desegregation. The key issue studied here is whether magnet schools have strengthened a district's overall attractiveness to enrollees from outside or merely siphoned students away from other nonmagnet schools within the district, without any real districtwide enrollment gain. To clarify this issue, I analyze patterns of change in grade progression rates over several years as magnet schools were phased in at a large urban school district. Generally, magnet schools induced little actual gain, merely slowing the overall weakening of districtwide retention. These findings furnished an important reality check on the judgment for crafting appropriate forecasting assumptions and the resulting forecast proved reasonably accurate.     

Explaining australian immigration

This article reviews the post-Second World War literature on explanations for Australia’s immigration program. It discovers three main schools of thought based on net pull factors: the official explanation and two unofficial explanations which focus on migrants as workers and on migrants as consumers. However the growing importance of net push factors after 1974 means that some of this work is less relevant today. Explanations focusing on net push factors have yet to cohere into a distinct perspective (or perspectives) but some research has been done on chain migration and family-based migration strategies, asylum seekers, temporary movement, and migration and the law. Immigration research is sometimes controversial and politicized. While intellectual integrity must always take priority, the values of civility and tolerance are also important.     

Game-theoretic analyses of coalition behavior

Coalitions are frequently more visible than payoffs. The theory of n-person games seeks primarily to identify stable allocations of valued resources; consequently, it gives inadequate attention to predicting which coalitions form. This paper explores a way of correcting this deficiency of game-theoretic reasoning by extending the theory of two-person cooperative games to predict both coalitions and payoffs in a three-person game of status in which each player seeks to maximize the rank of his total score. To accomplish this, we analyze the negotiations within each potential two-person coalition from the perspective of Nash's procedure for arbitrating two-person bargaining games, then assume that players expect to achieve the arbitrated outcome selected by this procedure and use these expectations to predict achieved ranks and to identify players' preferences between alternative coalition partners in order to predict the probability that each coalition forms. We test these payoff and coalition predictions with data from three laboratory studies, and compare the results with those attained in the same data by von Neumann and Morgenstern's solution of two-person cooperative games, Aumann and Maschler's bargaining set solution for cooperative n-person games, and an alternative model of coalition behavior in three-person sequential games of status.

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The Availability of Birth Control: Victoria 1971–1975

Effective methods of birth control became more available in Victoria between 1971 and 1975. The possible effects of this on unplanned and unwanted fertility should be taken into account in explanations of the general decline in fertility of the period. However, all methods did not become more available for all people. Unmarried people, poorer people, and migrants were disadvantaged, especially in so far as contraception was concerned. Continuing problems in gaining access to suitable methods of contraception may help to explain a persistence of unwanted fertility, either aborted or carried to term.     

The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights: frame contestation and the exploitation of disability

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.     

‘Meeting them where they are at’: A practice note on implementation of the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention in an emergency family homeless shelter

Families experiencing homelessness report higher rates of traumatic exposure than the general population, and traumatic experiences can often be precipitating factors for entrance into a homeless shelter. Emergency shelter is meant to be a brief, temporary housing intervention to support families toward more stable and permanent living arrangements. Beyond this ecological intervention, there is a frequently unmet need for trauma-specific mental health services. Further still, psychosocial interventions to support sheltered families should be sensitive to both the trauma-specific needs of this population and the constraints of the shelter setting. The Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI) is a brief, secondary prevention protocol that aims to prevent PTSD after exposure to a traumatic event, with research demonstrating its effectiveness in acute care settings such as child advocacy centres and emergency departments. This case study illustrates the implementation of CFTSI in an emergency family shelter in a large urban area, highlighting the appropriateness of the intervention for the setting, its adaptability to client needs and its generalizability to other non-traditional intervention settings.