Stepparent Family Membership Status

In this study, 143 participants experiencing a parental divorce completed surveys regarding their relationship with a stepparent. Using semantic-differential items, participants were asked to indicate how much they trusted their stepmother, stepfather, or both. Participants were then asked to indicate why (and if) they considered the stepparent to be family. Most participants considered their stepparent to be part of their family, and were able to articulate reasons or events that caused them to see the stepparent as a family member. These reasons were coded and compared to trust scores. Results indicate that participants reporting positive, positive-neutral, neutral, negative-neutral, and negative responses about their stepparent were significantly different on trust scores. Analyses also reveal that stepfather trust scores were significantly related to the participant residing with the stepfather, but this was not the case for stepmothers.     

New perspectives on a more-or-less familiar poverty index

In this article, we examine some properties and extensions of a particular poverty index, which is already passingly familiar to poverty analysts. Our investigation leads to a new perspective on the family of additively decomposable and scale-invariant poverty indices and provides new insights into the class of poverty measures proposed by Foster et al. (Econometrica 52:761–766, 1984). Finally, our work leads to a clarification of the different roles of transfer properties and distribution sensitivity in poverty measurement.     

Occupational inequalities in volunteering participation: Using detailed data on jobs to explore the influence of habits and circumstances

In this paper we present empirical results that show that detailed occupations have distinctive patterns of association with voluntary participation. We draw upon data from four secondary survey datasets from the UK (coverage 1972–2012). Occupations are shown to link to volunteering in a wide range of scenarios and in individual, household, and longitudinal contexts. We argue that these linkages provide insight into social inequalities in volunteering, and that they can help us to understand the relative influence of “circumstance” and “habits” in enabling or inhibiting voluntary participation.     

Assimilation versus multiculturalism: The views of urban Americans

Parents of children in public schools in a large American urban center, representing a number of different ethnic groups, were interviewed about their personal views and feelings toward cultural and racial diversity in America today. Three main issues were addressed: respondents' attitudes toward the maintenance of heritage cultures versus assimilation; their attitudes toward bilingualism; and their attitudes toward other groups in the community. The analyses revealed important differences in attitudes between ethnic minority groups and established white and black groups. Nonetheless, strong support was shown for the retention of heritage cultures, even among middle-class white and working-class black Americans. The working-class white American sample was distinctive in its rejection of multiculturalism and in its negative attitudes toward other ethnic and racial groups. All groups supported the idea of bilingualism for their children, and certain groups thought that public schools had an important role to play in its promotion. Overall, the results delineate a series of factors that affect intragroup and intergroup harmony and the processes of adjustment that transpire within a social system when it has to cope with ethnic and racial diversity.     

Rethinking productivity: The perspective of the Earth as the primary corporation

Productivity and its consequences touch everything. Its comprehensive embrace includes Wall Street and rain forests, automobile output, diminishing Earth stocks, satisfying insatiable consumerism, chemical toxins, increasing population, and loss of topsoil. We ride the postindustrial roller coaster with its upside and downside. Thus, economically, we can cheer as the stock market goes up, up, up. Ecologically, we can lament this trajectory as sending a message that the life systems of the planet are going down, down, down.A rising environmental awareness is recognizing that the Earth is in a deficit position. Hence, the logical warrant for rethinking productivity. Here, our metaphors become a powerful communication system; specifically, the justification for rethinking productivity from the normative perspective of the Earth as the primary corporation. Wearing such an accountability lens, the business person understands the language and the judgment that, if the Earth falls to bankruptcy, then everything else collapses.To explore this critical issue positively, a framework is used setting forth ten guiding principles toward an ecological consciousness. Immediately following each principle, specific connections are made to initiate the process of rethinking productivity. The purpose is to offer not only concrete thinking and creative alternatives but actionable ideas or applications in the workplace and in our industrial and commercial settings; and to stimulate the beginnings of dialogue with the business community. The proposal builds toward a potential commitment worth the full investment of our human energies.The guiding principles emphasize the shamanic attitude which sees all things swayed by sacred meanings; shifting from object-domination to the experience of a subject radiating an interior richness; experiencing the infinitely differentiated splendor of the Earth; taking time to listen to the voices of divine presence; recovering insights of the mind and insounds of the heart to live in compassionate harmony with the Earth; becoming passionately engaged with life as an experience of celebration, with human happiness rescaled to Earth needs; becoming educated to the genius of the Earth and the human as its most original mode of expressiveness; with the full substance of our humanity, relating in mutually enhancing ways to the entire Earth community; inspired by the Dream of the Earth, finding enterprises worthy of our human energy; in the unfolding of this New Story, putting on a new imagination, Re-VISION-ing the human and being shaped by an ecological consciousness as a way into the future.Corresponding to each of these guiding principles, actionable ideas and applications are offered: choosing appropriate quality of life indicators; energizing people in organizations through the systematic elimination of all forms of waste; building upon the George Winter model for installing an environmental business management system; addressing three strategic levels of listening; enlarging lessons of world-class manufacturing organizations to planetary scope; extending the insights of a "geologian" to Earth dynamics; drawing upon the power of storytelling; contrasting the Dominant Social Paradigm and the New Environmental Paradigm. In summary, an extraordinary future awaits business leaders whose vision of this new productivity paradigm is inspired by a Dream of the Earth.     

Social work supervision of young people

This paper summarizes findings on 50 teenagers supervised by local authority social services (work) departments. Interviews were held with social workers, young people and parents at the start of intervention and about a year later. Pre-tests and post-tests were also used to complement other statistical and qualitative data. After identifying the main reasons for the teenagers being on formal or informal supervision, the paper moves on to discuss the process, content and outcome of supervision as perceived by each of the three key actors. It also outlines what the young people and their parents found positive and helpful about supervision. Finally the paper demonstrates that forms of help and control need not be opposites and that social workers can help some very troubled teenagers. However, in order for services to have an impact, they have to be deployed as part of a package rather than as alternatives.     

Testing the proportional odds assumption in multiply imputed ordinal longitudinal data

A popular choice when analyzing ordinal data is to consider the cumulative proportional odds model to relate the marginal probabilities of the ordinal outcome to a set of covariates. However, application of this model relies on the condition of identical cumulative odds ratios across the cut-offs of the ordinal outcome; the well-known proportional odds assumption. This paper focuses on the assessment of this assumption while accounting for repeated and missing data. In this respect, we develop a statistical method built on multiple imputation (MI) based on generalized estimating equations that allows to test the proportionality assumption under the missing at random setting. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for two MI algorithms for incomplete longitudinal ordinal data. The impact of both MI methods is compared with respect to the type I error rate and the power for situations covering various numbers of categories of the ordinal outcome, sample sizes, rates of missingness, well-balanced and skewed data. The comparison of both MI methods with the complete-case analysis is also provided. We illustrate the use of the proposed methods on a quality of life data from a cancer clinical trial.     

Comparison of two methods of measuring physical activity in South African older adults

The aim of this study was to assess the validity and reliability of the Yale Physical Activity Survey (YPAS) and the short version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) in older South African adults. The YPAS includes measures of weekly energy expenditure (EE) for housework, yard work, caregiving, exercise, and recreation. The IPAQ measures total time and EE during vigorous and moderate activity, walking, and sitting. The instruments were administered twice for test-retest reliability (men, n = 52, 68 +/- 5.4 years, and women, n = 70, 66 +/- 5.8 years). Data for criterion validity were obtained from accelerometers. YPAS reliability ranged from r = .44 to.80 for men and r = .59 to .99 for women (p < .0001). IPAQ reliability was lower for men (r = .29 to .76) than for women (r = .46 to .77). Criterion validity of the YPAS was .31 to .54 for men and .26 to .29 for women. The YPAS and short IPAQ had comparable results for reliability and criterion validity.     

On the use of extreme value tail modeling for generalized pairwise comparisons with censored outcomes

In randomized clinical trials, methods of pairwise comparisons such as the ‘Net Benefit’ or the ‘win ratio’ have recently gained much attention when interests lies in assessing the effect of a treatment as compared to a standard of care. Among other advantages, these methods are usually praised for delivering a treatment measure that can easily handle multiple outcomes of different nature, while keeping a meaningful interpretation for patients and clinicians. For time-to-event outcomes, a recent suggestion emerged in the literature for estimating these treatment measures by providing a natural handling of censored outcomes. However, this estimation procedure may lead to biased estimates when tails of survival functions cannot be reliably estimated using Kaplan–Meier estimators. The problem then extrapolates to the other outcomes incorporated in the pairwise comparison construction. In this work, we suggest to extend the procedure by the consideration of a hybrid survival function estimator that relies on an extreme value tail model through the Generalized Pareto distribution. We provide an estimator of treatment effect measures that notably improves on bias and remains easily apprehended for practical implementation. This is illustrated in an extensive simulation study as well as in an actual trial of a new cancer immunotherapy.