Ths State of Welfare. Gilbert Steiner. The Brookings Institution,Washington, D. C., 1971. 356 Pages, $7.50 Hardbound

A questionnaire was developed to elicit data concerning processes and criteria used in graduate programs of social work for retention, promotion, and granting tenure to faculty members. Eighty percent of the 85 graduate programs of social work within the United States and Canada responded to the questionnaire. The results of that study are reported in this paper. Also examined was the source or sanction of the decision—either specific to the program or applied in accordance with a broader academic base, that is, graduate school or university procedures.     

American Public Opinion on Immigration: Nativist,Polarized, or Ambivalent?

For Dauvergne (2016), one consequence of the “end of settler societies” is nativism, or what she calls “mean-spirited politics”: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Multiculturalism. This accords with the prevailing tone of public opinion literature on the subject, which links anti-immigrant hostility in settler societies to influxes of diversity and associated racial threat. In this essay, we determine just how closely this stylized vision of anxiety-fuelled nativism resembles the true state of mass opinion about immigration. Using a variety of surveys fielded in recent years, we show that Americans: 1) hold generally positive views about immigration, though with a substantial dose of ambivalence about its consequences; 2) are not especially consistent in their policy attitudes over time; 3) express policy attitudes that readily depart from their underlying predispositions, and; 4) have only become more pro-immigrant in recent years, and whatever partisan polarization exists on the issue stems from the fact that Republicans are becoming more positive at a slightly slower pace than Democrats. All of this suggests that, while there is a hard core of ethnocentrism and "mean-spiritedness" in the U.S., the prevailing tone is much less negative than the standard portrayal assumes.     

Life satisfaction linked to different independence-from-parents conditions in Italian emerging adults

ABSTRACT

The transition toward adulthood in Italy lasts longer than in other countries with respect to living with the family of origin, starting work, and gaining economic independence. This study aimed to analyse the transition to adulthood in Italian youths by exploring these developmental tasks. The first aim was to analyse gender and age differences in these developmental tasks. Given that these tasks are not necessarily achieved at the same time, the second aim was to establish if it might be possible to identify different clusters of individuals according to their residential, economic and employment conditions. The third aim was to explore life satisfaction in different clusters. 191 Italian emerging adults (65 males) aged 20–30 years (M?=?24.40) completed the Satisfaction with Life Scale and a specific questionnaire assessing residential independence, economic autonomy, and job stability. Results showed no gender differences in the three developmental tasks. However, older participants reported a higher level of independence. Cluster analysis identified three different groups: ‘totally dependent’, ‘partially independent’ and ‘totally independent’ from parental family, differently composed in terms of partnering. These groups do not differ in life satisfaction levels. Results are discussed focusing on different independence-from-parents conditions that characterize Italian emerging adults.     

News and Comment

Holocaust education in the United States began as a grassroots movement during the 1970s. Today, more than 30 states mandate the teaching of the Holocaust; however, far less attention is given in schools to other 20th-century instances of genocide. Totten has suggested that by neglecting “other” genocides (e.g., Darfur, Rwanda, and Cambodia), these events may not be perceived as significant (when compared to the Holocaust), and moreover, students may fail to realize that genocide has occurred multiple times since 1945 and thus no longer a threat today. Given the implications surrounding Totten’s assertion and the global nature of genocide and its reach, we aim to provide social studies teachers and teacher educators with a series of accessible suggestions for incorporating “other” genocides into their practice—suggestions that are aligned and situated within Hanvey’s seminal conceptual frame for global education.     

Bayesian Random Segmentation Models to Identify Shared Copy Number Aberrations for Array CGH Data

Array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) is a high-resolution high-throughput technique for studying the genetic basis of cancer. The resulting data consists of log fluorescence ratios as a function of the genomic DNA location and provides a cytogenetic representation of the relative DNA copy number variation. Analysis of such data typically involves estimation of the underlying copy number state at each location and segmenting regions of DNA with similar copy number states. Most current methods proceed by modeling a single sample/array at a time, and thus fail to borrow strength across multiple samples to infer shared regions of copy number aberrations. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian random segmentation approach for modeling aCGH data that utilizes information across arrays from a common population to yield segments of shared copy number changes. These changes characterize the underlying population and allow us to compare different population aCGH profiles to assess which regions of the genome have differential alterations. Our method, referred to as BDSAcgh (Bayesian Detection of Shared Aberrations in aCGH), is based on a unified Bayesian hierarchical model that allows us to obtain probabilities of alteration states as well as probabilities of differential alteration that correspond to local false discovery rates. We evaluate the operating characteristics of our method via simulations and an application using a lung cancer aCGH data set.     

Effect of choice complexity on design efficiency in conjoint choice experiments

Conjoint choice experiments have become a powerful tool to explore individual preferences. The consistency of respondents' choices depends on the choice complexity. For example, it is easier to make a choice between two alternatives with few attributes than between five alternatives with several attributes. In the latter case it will be much harder to choose the preferred alternative which is reflected in a higher response error. Several authors have dealt with this choice complexity in the estimation stage but very little attention has been paid to set up designs that take this complexity into account. The core issue of this paper is to find out whether it is worthwhile to take this complexity into account in the design stage. We construct efficient semi-Bayesian D-optimal designs for the heteroscedastic conditional logit model which is used to model the across respondent variability that occurs due to the choice complexity. The degree of complexity is measured by the entropy, as suggested by Swait and Adamowicz (2001). The proposed designs are compared with a semi-Bayesian D-optimal design constructed without taking the complexity into account. The simulation study shows that it is much better to take the choice complexity into account when constructing conjoint choice experiments.     

Individual laboratory-measured discount rates predict field behavior

We estimate discount rates of 555 subjects using a laboratory task and find that these individual discount rates predict inter-individual variation in field behaviors (e.g., exercise, BMI, smoking). The correlation between the discount rate and each field behavior is small: none exceeds 0.28 and many are near 0. However, the discount rate has at least as much predictive power as any variable in our dataset (e.g., sex, age, education). The correlation between the discount rate and field behavior rises when field behaviors are aggregated: these correlations range from 0.09–0.38. We present a model that explains why specific intertemporal choice behaviors are only weakly correlated with discount rates, even though discount rates robustly predict aggregates of intertemporal decisions.