Marginal and association regression models for longitudinal binary data with drop‐outs: A likelihood‐based approach

Longitudinal data often contain missing observations, and it is in general difficult to justify particular missing data mechanisms, whether random or not, that may be hard to distinguish. The authors describe a likelihood‐based approach to estimating both the mean response and association parameters for longitudinal binary data with drop‐outs. They specify marginal and dependence structures as regression models which link the responses to the covariates. They illustrate their approach using a data set from the Waterloo Smoking Prevention Project They also report the results of simulation studies carried out to assess the performance of their technique under various circumstances.     

Educational Issues for Children and Young People in Families Living in Emergency Accommodation—An Irish Perspective

The article explores how homelessness may impact on the educational participation of children and young people in families living in emergency accommodation in Dublin. Many difficulties arise in terms of maintaining consistent schooling for children when they are part of a homeless family, including problems getting to and from school if living at a distance from their original schools, frequent changes in school and inadequate facilities and overcrowding in their temporary accommodation. Despite the many difficulties involved in maintaining children's regular school attendance, it is evident that school may represent the only stability for a child in an otherwise insecure and changing routine. Copyright © 2006 Children's Research Centre.     

Becoming American/Becoming New Yorkers: Immigrant Incorporation in a Majority Minority City1

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states — California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According to the 2000 census, the two largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and New York, accounted for one third of all immigrants ( http://www.census.gov/Press‐Release/www/2002/demoprofiles.html ). While immigrants moved into many new areas during the 1990s, making the challenge of incorporating their children a national issue, their concentration in our largest cities remained pronounced.     

Successful collaboration between the nonprofit and public sectors

Public and private funding sources often require nonprofit organizations to provide evidence of partnership with a governmental entity before financing a project. However, the circumstances under which working partnerships between the nonprofit and public sectors are forged and sustained have not been fully studied. This article presents the findings of a case study of land trusts and local governments and identifies conditions that foster successful collaboration. Social factors such as experience on the part of key personnel in working with the opposite entity and genuine affection for each other are more important than economic benefits. This suggests that a nonprofit agency interested in creating a viable partnership to improve a project should give careful consideration to assigning staff.     

Consistent maximum likelihood estimation of a unimodal density using shape restrictions

It is well known that the unimodal maximum likelihood estimator of a density is consistent everywhere but at the mode. The authors review various ways to solve this problem and propose a new estimator that is concave over an interval containing the mode; this interval may be chosen by the user or through an algorithm. The authors show how to implement their solution and compare it to other approaches through simulations. They show that the new estimator is consistent everywhere and determine its rate of convergence in the Hellinger metric.     

Race, Risk, and the Emergence of Gender Boundaries: Kids Crossing Boundaries in Summer Camps

My study explores how children established and crossed gender boundaries in four recreational settings with different racial compositions and patterns. Children generally marked boys' gender boundary crossing as more deviant than girls' crossing. However, the amount of gender salience structured into each setting and the salience of race in each setting affected campers' perceptions of the risks from gender boundary crossing and, thus, their strategies for crossing. My findings suggest that the perceived race of the actor may be less important than the race of the audience. Also crucial are the ways in which race category membership gives meaning to gender boundaries and to gender deviance in a particular situation.     

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.