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.     

Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims‐making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference‐rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes.     

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.     

Using Conditioned Reinforcers to Improve Behavior-Change Skills: Clicker Training for Practitioners

We evaluated the use of a clicker sound as a conditioned reinforcer to teach behavior interventionists appropriate clinical skills during in-situ training. A multiple-baseline-across-behaviors design indicated that the intervention was effective in increasing all target behaviors for all participants. For two of the participants, we conducted maintenance probes one to five weeks after the final training session and performance continued to occur at a high level. Although the participants ranked the contingent clicker presentation as less disruptive and more fair than typical feedback methods, they ranked it as slightly less helpful, less worthwhile, and less pleasant than typical feedback methods. These findings suggest that clicker training can play a valuable role in training mental health professionals.     

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.     

Communicating Research to Policymakers

This piece offers suggestions based on some things we expected to learn and from some things we did not expect to learn about communicating research to congressional policymakers. Some of these are insider discoveries from working as a professional staff member for a joint committee of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives. Other things we learned came largely as surprises from attempts to provide basic information and issue awareness about socioeconomic conditions in the Southern Black Belt directly to the Congress as well as indirectly through public interest and grassroots groups. One of the surprising discoveries, working professionally both on the inside of Congress and on the outside as social scientists, is how well social interaction actually works. And there were other surprises as well. This article is based on an August 16 panel presentation by the first author at the 2003 meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta. The panel was organized by Larry Burmeister of the University of Kentucky. Material written in the first person singular in the first section of this article, “From the Inside,” is from the first author’s experiences. Later, portions of the text beginning with the subhead, “On the Outside,” and stated in the first person plural are by both authors.     

Under the skin: Exploring 2-month-olds' thermal reactions in different social interactions with mother and stranger

Physiological adaptations to external stressors can reveal socio-cognitive health in infancy. With the use of thermal imaging and behavioural analyses, the current study examined the arousal markers accompanying infants’ interactions with a familiar and an unfamiliar person. To address the current research question, the mother and a complete stranger interacted with 2 to 3 month-old infants (N= 10, 2 boys)in three different conditions: Neutral, Play, and Compliment. Behavioral analyses showed that overall gaze was longer to the Stranger compared to the Mother independent of condition. Physiological findings showed that skin temperature was significantly higher with the stranger independent of condition. The regions of the face that passed the significance threshold included the maxillary area, the nose, and the forehead. Both behavioral and physiological findings emphasize the ability of the infant to distinguish between a familiar and an unfamiliar person. Most importantly, however thermal imaging has proven to be a promising tool in physiologically differentiating between variable social conditions in very young infants opening up a new experimental portal for identifying healthy physiological development.