Cultural perspectives of death,grief, and bereavement

The cultural makeup of the United States continues to change rapidly, and as minority groups continue to grow, these groups' beliefs and customs must be taken into account when examining death, grief, and bereavement. This article discusses the beliefs, customs, and rituals of Latino, African American, Navajo, Jewish, and Hindu groups to raise awareness of the differences health care professionals may encounter among their grieving clients. Discussion of this small sample of minority groups in the United States is not intended to cover all of the degrees of acculturation within each group. Cultural groups are not homogeneous, and individual variation must always be considered in situations of death, grief, and bereavement. However, because the customs, rituals, and beliefs of the groups to which they belong affect individuals' experiences of death, grief, and bereavement, health care professionals need to be open to learning about them to better understand and help.     

Discovering classes in microarray data using island counts

We present a new biclustering algorithm to simultaneously discover tissue classes and identify a set of genes that well-characterize these classes from DNA microarray data sets. We employ a combinatorial optimization approach where the object is to simultaneously identify an interesting set of genes and a partition of the array samples that optimizes a certain score based on a novel color island statistic. While this optimization problem is NP-complete in general, we are effectively able to solve problems of interest to optimality using a branch-and-bound algorithm. We have tested the algorithm on a 30 sample Cutaneous T-cell Lymphoma data set; it was able to almost perfectly discriminate short-term survivors from long-term survivors and normal controls. Another useful feature of our method is that can easily handle missing expression data.     

Why Study Risk Perception?

Studies of risk perception examine the opinions people express when they are asked, in various ways, to characterize and evaluate hazardous activities and technologies. This research aims to aid risk analysis and societal decision making by (i) improving methods for eliciting opinions about risk, (ii) providing a basis for understanding and anticipating public responses to hazards, and (iii) improving the communication of risk information among laypeople, technical experts, and policy makers.     

A comprehensive approach to sexual and transgender prejudice

Prejudice and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals continues to have a detrimental impact on the mental health of this population. Research examining commonalities and uniqueness among negative attitudes toward specific sexual and gender minority groups is extremely limited. The authors propose that research examining sexual prejudice include attitudes toward diverse subgroups within the larger LGBTQ community in order to facilitate development of underlying constructs and identify unique contributing factors. Common and unique factors identified within existing research are organized into categorical themes, which are delineated in a conceptual factor model of sexual and transgender prejudice.     

Parent‐Adolescent Involvement: The Relative Influence of Parent Gender and Residence

The 1995 wave of the Add Health study is used to investigate the relative influence of parent gender and residence on patterns of parental involvement with adolescents. Adolescent reports (N =17,330) of shared activities, shared communication, and relationship quality with both biological parents are utilized. A multidimensional scaling analysis reveals that parent gender explains most of the variance in parent‐adolescent involvement, with residential status playing a secondary yet a fundamental role in accounting for these patterns. Resident mothers who do not live with adolescents’ biological fathers engage in the broadest range of activities with their children. Unpartnered resident fathers display patterns of parenting that are as similar to mothers as they are to other fathers.