English Language Proficiency of Immigrants and Refugees in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area

Studies of the determinants of English language ability have generally focused on the largest immigrant groups in the United States. Much less is known about smaller, but significant regional concentrations of immigrants and refugees. This article presents data on four very distinct and understudied groups: Russians, Somalis, Hmong, and Mexicans in the Midwest. We found large differences in English language proficiency across the different national origin groups, even after controlling for background variables. These differences were not attributable to refugee status or to linguistic distance from English. Being Somali, migrating to the United States at a young age and having a college diploma were the best predictors of both spoken and written proficiency. The returns to higher education were particularly noteworthy — respondents with college diplomas were more than 29 times more likely than non‐high school graduates to speak English well, and more than 20 times as likely to read well. Women appear to have benefited more than men from completing college in terms of spoken English proficiency since the male‐female gap narrows among the highly educated. Length of time in the United States was a good predictor of whether an individual speaks English at home, regardless of age of entry to the country.     

A simple estimator for a shared frailty regression model

Summary. We propose a simple estimation procedure for a proportional hazards frailty regression model for clustered survival data in which the dependence is generated by a positive stable distribution. Inferences for the frailty parameter can be obtained by using output from Cox regression analyses. The computational burden is substantially less than that of the other approaches to estimation. The large sample behaviour of the estimator is studied and simulations show that the approximations are appropriate for use with realistic sample sizes. The methods are motivated by studies of familial associations in the natural history of diseases. Their practical utility is illustrated with sib pair data from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.     

Asthma Patients' Activities and Air Pollution: A Semiparametric Censored Regression Analysis

Asthma patients' health status may be especially sensitive to some types of air pollution, but the evidence on this is mixed. We explore the effects of ground-level ozone on asthma patient's activities, breaking apart the usual aggregated category of leisure into indoor and outdoor activities, and differentiating those by whether the activities were active or inactive. Applying the semiparametric censored estimation method we demonstrate that even though the period over which activities were observed was relatively low in ozone levels, there is a significant impact of ozone on a few activities. The (non-ozone) economic and demographic variables in the model play significant roles in explaining the allocation of time among seven activities, suggesting the suitability of the approach for other household decision-making contexts.     

Bayesian locally optimal design of knockout tournaments

The elimination or knockout format is one of the most common designs for pairing competitors in tournaments and leagues. In each round of a knockout tournament, the losers are eliminated while the winners advance to the next round. Typically, the goal of such a design is to identify the overall best player. Using a common probability model for expressing relative player strengths, we develop an adaptive approach to pairing players each round in which the probability that the best player advances to the next round is maximized. We evaluate our method using simulated game outcomes under several data-generating mechanisms, and compare it to random pairings, to the standard knockout format, and to two variants of the standard format.     

Educating for Social Justice: Making sense of multicultural and antiracist theory and practice with Canadian teacher activists 1

This paper presents an argument for further engagement between educational scholars and school-based social justice activists. An analysis of one segment of the broad field of social justice education focuses on multicultural and antiracist education, particularly as they are understood in the Canadian socio-political context. A brief overview of the literature from UK and US sources highlights their complex and often overlapping concerns, and the need for more dialogue across national boundaries toward progressive social change. Excerpts from in-depth interviews with four Canadian teacher-activists reveal the potential for educators to take up various debates and findings from the academic literature in their daily struggles to work for social justice.     

Trait Expressiveness and Marital Satisfaction: The Role of Idealization Processes

This study examined the processes that underlie the association between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction. A total of 168 newlywed couples participated in a four‐wave, 13‐year longitudinal study of marriage. Cross‐sectional and longitudinal path analyses suggested that expressiveness promotes satisfaction by leading spouses to engage in affectionate behavior and by leading them to idealize their partner. Expressive people formed idealized images of their partner because they brought out the best in their partner's behavior and because they interpreted their partner's behavior in a favorable light. The study extends previous research by showing that the benefits of trait expressiveness extend into the second decade of marriage and by providing a plausible explanation of the connections between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction.     

'The Tribunal was the most stressful thing: more stressful than my son's diagnosis or behaviour': the experiences of families who go to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT)

It is more than 10 years since the Special Educational Needs Tribunal was established in 1994 as an independent panel which arbitrates in disputes between parents of children with the label special educational needs and Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in England. In 2002 the Tribunal began hearing claims for disability discrimination and was re-named the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT). Since 1994 over 20,000 appeals have been registered. This article, which forms part of my ongoing Ph.D. thesis 'Parents as advocates: the experience of parents who register an appeal with SENDisT', offers an analysis of parents' Tribunal stories. Here, the key question is what affect the process of going to SENDisT has on the social, emotional and financial well-being of the family. Through a process of narrative inquiry the aim is to foreground parents' unheard stories and to reveal their 'hidden' experiences.     

Effects of Category Order on Answers in Mail and Telephone Surveys1

Abstract Past research suggests that mail surveys encourage a primacy effect, which is a tendency to choose the first answers from a list, whereas telephone surveys encourage a recency effect, a tendency to choose the last answers from a list. This paper summarizes results from 82 new experiments conducted in 12 separate surveys in seven states. Only four of 33 mail survey comparisons exhibited significant primacy effects, while five of 26 experiments in telephone surveys exhibited recency effects. In addition, only three of 23 cross-method comparisons produced a significant primacy/recency effect in the expected manner. The conclusion is that the prevalence of primacy and recency effects has been over-estimated by past research and a new theoretical approach that takes into account multiple causation is needed for examining these effects.     

Beyond recruitment: Predictors of differential participation in a national antihunger organization

Surprisingly little research has sought to explain differential participation after recruitment into social movement organizations (SMOs). This study examines the influence of several sets of predictors on participation by members of a national organization in the antihunger movement. The findings highlight the importance of incentive, ideological, and microstructural factors for differential participation and suggest that favorable perceptions of SMOs also promote participation. Final remarks address the implications of the findings for the social movement and voluntary organization literatures.