Temporal Ordering of Intimate Relationship Efficacy and Conflict

Drawing from social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986) and data from 1,640 couples who remained together over the first 4 waves of the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (Pairfam) project, the authors examined the temporal ordering between each partner's relationship efficacy and conflict (constructive behaviors and frequency of negative exchanges) assessed at the dyadic and individual levels. The results revealed that each partner's constructive conflict behaviors and negatively valenced conflict frequency at the couple level temporally preceded relationship efficacy for male and female partners. There was no support for the reverse order or bidirectional linkages over time. These results challenge the prevailing theoretical and empirical suppositions regarding associations between relationship efficacy and couple interactions. The discussion theorizes a more complex efficacy process in couple relations, whereas specific efficacy beliefs shape behaviors in that domain, which subsequently inform each partner's global relationship efficacy over time.     

Blame It on the Alcohol: The Influence of Alcohol Consumption During Adolescence,the Transition to Adulthood,and Young Adulthood on One-Time Sexual Hookups

Using public-use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 3,733) and the life-span developmental perspective, the current study sought to determine whether global reports of alcohol use, binge drinking, and drunkenness are best represented as indicators of a latent alcohol consumption construct during adolescence, the transition to adulthood, and young adulthood. We also examined the predictive power of alcohol consumption during each developmental period on the total number of one-time sexual hookups reported in young adulthood. A confirmatory factor analysis revealed alcohol use, binge drinking, and drunkenness are consistent indicators of a latent alcohol consumption variable over time, although the mean levels of the indicators were significantly lower during adolescence. Structural equation modeling analyses found alcohol consumption during the transition to adulthood and young adulthood predicted one-time sexual hookups in young adulthood, but alcohol consumption during the transition to adulthood exhibited the strongest association with hooking up. Implications for research, theory, and practice are discussed.     

Determinants of Vaginal Cleansing,Application, and Insertion in Tete Province,Mozambique, and Products Used

Objective: In this article, we review insertion, application, and cleansing as they include the use of products other than water and have a number of harmful effects. Method: In 2007, a household survey of 919 women carried out in Tete Province, Mozambique, examined 8 vaginal practices. Results: Overall, 10% of the sexually active women reported regularly using these 3 vaginal practices concurrently. Of the women who practiced insertion, 65% used natural substances. A wider variety of products was used for applying substances on the external genitalia and for cleansing purposes. Conclusions: These findings have important implications for future HIV prevention, including in the use of microbicides.     

Experimental designs for detecting synergy and antagonism between two drugs in a pre‐clinical study

The identification of synergistic interactions between combinations of drugs is an important area within drug discovery and development. Pre‐clinically, large numbers of screening studies to identify synergistic pairs of compounds can often be ran, necessitating efficient and robust experimental designs. We consider experimental designs for detecting interaction between two drugs in a pre‐clinical in vitro assay in the presence of uncertainty of the monotherapy response. The monotherapies are assumed to follow the Hill equation with common lower and upper asymptotes, and a common variance. The optimality criterion used is the variance of the interaction parameter. We focus on ray designs and investigate two algorithms for selecting the optimum set of dose combinations. The first is a forward algorithm in which design points are added sequentially. This is found to give useful solutions in simple cases but can lack robustness when knowledge about the monotherapy parameters is insufficient. The second algorithm is a more pragmatic approach where the design points are constrained to be distributed log‐normally along the rays and monotherapy doses. We find that the pragmatic algorithm is more stable than the forward algorithm, and even when the forward algorithm has converged, the pragmatic algorithm can still out‐perform it. Practically, we find that good designs for detecting an interaction have equal numbers of points on monotherapies and combination therapies, with those points typically placed in positions where a 50% response is expected. More uncertainty in monotherapy parameters leads to an optimal design with design points that are more spread out. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DO HOUSE PRICES DRIVE CONSUMPTION GROWTH? THE COINCIDENT CYCLES OF HOUSE PRICES AND CONSUMPTION IN THE UK

This paper uses a realistic structural lifecycle model of consumption and housing decisions to understand how data might distinguish different mechanisms that explain the correlation between house prices and consumption. The model includes price and earnings shocks estimated from data (the latter including aggregate and idiosyncratic components), and incorporates realistic features of the UK mortgage market. We simulate the model using more than 30 years of realized shocks and under counterfactual scenarios. Our results confirm the intuition of earlier studies: house price shocks should have a larger effect on the consumption of older households and earnings shocks on young households.     

Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement

Drawing data from works of political non-fiction that help to reveal the moral and sensual underpinnings of political practice, this paper seeks to adumbrate a sensualist understanding of political engagement. After beginning with a brief discussion of Weber’s seminal essay “Politics as a Vocation,” I then construct an ideal type of political passion with which to highlight the inherent shortcomings that plague traditional explanations of political action. My argument is that these approaches are all vitiated by their reliance on Chinese-box epistemology. I go on to suggest that in order to obtain a genuinely sociological account of political engagement, one must develop methods that are true to the experiential specifics of politics while recognizing the conditions that shape the possibility of those very experiences.

Assessment of Inhalation Exposures and Potential Health Risks to the General Population that Resulted from the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers

In the days following the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers on September 11, 2001 (9/11), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initiated numerous air monitoring activities to better understand the ongoing impact of emissions from that disaster. Using these data, EPA conducted an inhalation exposure and human health risk assessment to the general population. This assessment does not address exposures and potential impacts that could have occurred to rescue workers, firefighters, and other site workers, nor does it address exposures that could have occurred in the indoor environment. Contaminants evaluated include particulate matter (PM), metals, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, asbestos, volatile organic compounds, particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, silica, and synthetic vitreous fibers (SVFs). This evaluation yielded three principal findings. (1) Persons exposed to extremely high levels of ambient PM and its components, SVFs, and other contaminants during the collapse of the WTC towers, and for several hours afterward, were likely to be at risk for acute and potentially chronic respiratory effects. (2) Available data suggest that contaminant concentrations within and near ground zero (GZ) remained significantly elevated above background levels for a few days after 9/11. Because only limited data on these critical few days were available, exposures and potential health impacts could not be evaluated with certainty for this time period. (3) Except for inhalation exposures that may have occurred on 9/11 and a few days afterward, the ambient air concentration data suggest that persons in the general population were unlikely to suffer short-term or long-term adverse health effects caused by inhalation exposures. While this analysis by EPA evaluated the potential for health impacts based on measured air concentrations, epidemiological studies conducted by organizations other than EPA have attempted to identify actual impacts. Such studies have identified respiratory effects in worker and general populations, and developmental effects in newborns whose mothers were near GZ on 9/11 or shortly thereafter. While researchers are not able to identify specific times and even exactly which contaminants are the cause of these effects, they have nonetheless concluded that exposure to WTC contaminants (and/or maternal stress, in the case of developmental effects) resulted in these effects, and have identified the time period including 9/11 itself and the days and few weeks afterward as a period of most concern based on high concentrations of key pollutants in the air and dust.     

Evaluation of a weighted multiple comparison procedure

We consider the problem of accounting for multiplicity for two correlated endpoints in the comparison of two treatments using weighted hypothesis tests. Various weighted testing procedures are reviewed, and a more powerful method (a variant of the weighted Simes test) is evaluated for the general bivariate normal case and for a particular clinical trial example. Results from these evaluations are summarized and indicate that the weighted methods perform in a manner similar to unweighted methods. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Sorting Out” collective leadership: How Q-methodology can be used to evaluate leadership development

Q-methodology has proven to be an effective way to solicit participants' perceptions of outcomes. In this article, Q-methodology is described as a data collection tool that can be used to better evaluate the development of collective leadership. Additionally, this methodology provided a valuable tool for participants themselves (leadership development) and evaluators (evaluation development). In writing this article, we drew upon data from a longitudinal study of the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change (KLCC) initiative at six sites from 2002 through 2007 where multiple data collection strategies were employed, including Q-methodology.     

Ethics in population-based genetic research

Population-based genetic research, including genetic epidemiology, shows tremendous potential to elucidate the role of genes as causal factors in complex and common human diseases. Like all research with human subjects, full realization of these benefits requires careful attention to its ethical conduct, establishing an appropriate balance between individual protections and the advancement of scientific and medical knowledge. This article reviews the growing literature on genetics research and ethics to describe some of the fundamental ethical issues in population-based genetics research, including research design, recruitment and informed consent, and dealing with research results. Its focus is on areas where consensus is forming and where future work is needed.