It's Not Whether You Win or Lose,It's How You Place the Blame: Shifting Perceptions of Recreancy in the Context of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

A key theoretical concept in the study of technological disasters is “recreancy,” which refers to perception that institutional actors have failed to carry out their responsibilities in a manner that engenders societal trust. Using household survey data from the Community Oil Spill Survey (COSS) to assess recreancy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we analyze four waves of the COSS collected between 2010 and 2013 to explore respondents’ perceptions of blame and distrust in relation to key institutional actors associated with the disaster, paying special attention to the influence of time and employment in natural resource occupations. We show that BP is clearly viewed as the principal responsible party at fault for the disaster and that the odds of blaming BP and the federal government have held relatively steady over time, while the odds of blaming state government increased over time. We find high levels of distrust of BP and the federal government, but show that odds of being distrustful of both institutional actors was significantly lower three years after the spill. Fishing households were significantly more likely to blame and be distrustful of institutional actors, a finding that is strongly consistent with theoretical expectations.     

Problematic Eating and Food-related Behaviours and Excessive Weight Gain: Why Children in Out-of-home Care Are at Risk

Emerging evidence suggests that abuse and neglect in childhood may play a role in subsequent development of obesity. One population group particularly at risk is children and young people living in out-of-home care (OOHC). Given this population is already a vulnerable group, identifying potential mechanisms by which childhood abuse and neglect increases risk for obesity is essential. A possible explanation is that problematic eating and food-related behaviours (i.e., emotional eating, compulsive eating, overeating, binge eating, stealing or hoarding food) might mediate the association between adverse childhood experiences and obesity. Hence, the overall goal of this paper was to provide a narrative review of eating and food-related difficulties for children in care and their possible association with unhealthy and excessive weight gain. This review revealed a shortage of existing empirical papers and signalled particular need for further examination of the mediating effects of problematic eating.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

Path independent choice and the ranking of opportunity sets

The indirect utility principle provides an instrumentalist basis for ranking opportunity sets, given an underlying preference ranking on alternatives. Opportunity set A is weakly preferred to B if A includes at least one preference-maximising element from $A\cup B$ . We introduce the Plott consistency principle as a natural extension of this logic to decision-makers who choose amongst alternatives according to a path independent choice function. Such choice functions need not be rationalisable by a preference order. Plott consistency requires that A is an acceptable choice from $\left\{ A, B\right\} $ if A includes at least one element from the set of acceptable choices from $A\cup B$ . We explore necessary and sufficient conditions (imposed on a choice function defined on collections of opportunity sets) for Plott consistency.     

Paths to Intimate Relationship Quality From Parent–Adolescent Relations and Mental Health

Using a developmental systems perspective and public‐use longitudinal data from participants currently in a romantic relationship at Wave 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 2,970), the current study explored direct and indirect paths from parent–adolescent relationship quality to young adult intimate relationship quality. Structural equation modeling tested whether mental health (depressive symptoms and self‐esteem) in the transition to adulthood mediated the association between parent–adolescent relations and young adult intimate relations. The results indicated that higher quality parent–adolescent relations predicted higher self‐esteem and lower depressive symptoms during the transition to adulthood as well as higher young adult intimate relationship quality, controlling for adolescent mental health and parent–young adult relationship quality. Higher self‐esteem during the transition to adulthood was associated with greater intimate relationship quality, whereas greater depressive symptomatology predicted reduced intimate relationship quality. One significant indirect path emerged: parent–adolescent relationship quality → self‐esteem → intimate relationship quality.     

Evaluation Logics in the Third Sector

In this paper I provide a preliminary sketch of the types of logics of evaluation in the third sector. I begin by tracing the ideals that are evident in three well-articulated yet quite different third sector evaluation practices: the logical framework, most significant change stories, and social return on investment. Drawing on this analysis, I then tentatively outline three logics of evaluation: a scientific evaluation logic (systematic observation, observable and measurable evidence, objective and robust experimental procedures), a bureaucratic evaluation logic (complex, step-by-step procedures, analysis of intended objectives), and a learning evaluation logic (openness to change, wide range of perspectives, lay rather than professional expertise). These logics draw attention to differing conceptions of knowledge and expertise and their resource implications, and have important consequences for the professional status of the practitioners, consultants, and policy makers that contribute to and/or are involved in evaluations in third sector organizations.     

Telling the Story of Stepfamily Beginnings: The Relationship between Young-adult Stepchildren's Stepfamily Origin Stories and their Satisfaction with the Stepfamily

The current study adopts a narrative perspective in examining the content of 80 stepchildren's stepfamily origin stories. Results reveal five types of stepfamily origin stories: Sudden, Dark-sided, Ambivalent, Idealized, and Incremental. Results support the hypothesis that story type would predict differences in family satisfaction; stepchildren who described their stepfamily origins as Idealized were more satisfied than those whose origins were Dark-sided or Sudden. Overall, participants framed their stepfamily identity more positively when their stepfamily beginnings were characterized by closeness, friendship, and even expected ups and downs, rather than when they were left out of the process of negotiating or forming the stepfamily and when the beginnings were tainted by issues they considered to be dark. Stepparents or practitioners may benefit from these findings by examining the means by which stepparents may involve stepchildren in the process of stepfamily courtship, facilitate closeness, and set up realistic expectations for negotiating stepfamily life.     

Quantitative Comparison of Approximate Solution Sets for Bi‐criteria Optimization Problems*

We present the Integrated Preference Functional (IPF) for comparing the quality of proposed sets of near‐pareto‐optimal solutions to bi‐criteria optimization problems. Evaluating the quality of such solution sets is one of the key issues in developing and comparing heuristics for multiple objective combinatorial optimization problems. The IPF is a set functional that, given a weight density function provided by a decision maker and a discrete set of solutions for a particular problem, assigns a numerical value to that solution set. This value can be used to compare the quality of different sets of solutions, and therefore provides a robust, quantitative approach for comparing different heuristic, a posteriori solution procedures for difficult multiple objective optimization problems. We provide specific examples of decision maker preference functions and illustrate the calculation of the resulting IPF for specific solution sets and a simple family of combined objectives.