Slavery: Current bibliographical supplement (1986)

Despite the considerable distance and danger in transporting slaves from the southwestern Indian Ocean region to the Americas, ships carried nearly 550,000 slaves to the Americas between 1624 and 1860. Prior attempts to understand the place of the Indian Ocean in the transatlantic slave trade have been limited in scope, but the transatlantic slave trade database provides us with access to unprecedented statistics and estimates that shed new light on this forced migration. The study of this slave trade also offers insights into the much larger movement of slaves across the Indian Ocean as a whole.     

From Damsels in Distress to Sexy Superheroes

Video games are an important form of media that have the potential to impact gender role attitudes. Sexist portrayals of characters may affect gender behaviors and attitudes. As such, it is important to discover how characters, particularly females, are portrayed in video games. The current study examined video game magazines analyzing the portrayal of female video game characters and how this portrayal has changed in the last twenty years. Results indicate a growing trend toward a decreased benevolent sexism portrayal and an increase in a hostile sexism portrayal over time.     

Therapist effects on dropout in couple therapy

Marriage and family therapy scholars have argued that therapists play a crucial role in successful couple therapy, yet little research has empirically documented that the therapist in couple therapy has a significant impact on outcomes. Known as the study of therapist effects, this study sought to assess the amount of variance attributed to the therapist in couple therapy outcomes. Using dropout as the outcome variable, this study analyzed data from 1,192 couples treated by 90 masters and doctoral student therapists at a university‐based training clinic. Results from multilevel analysis indicated that therapists in the sample accounted for 9.4% of the variance in couple dropout while controlling for initial couple impairment. Therapist gender and therapist experience did not significantly predict variability in therapist effects. These findings give promise to future research on therapist effects in couple therapy and encourage exploration into which therapist characteristics and behaviors contribute to successful clinical outcome.     

Risk perceptions in a resource community and communication implications: emotion, stigma, and identity

Communication targeting resource communities, sites of potentially damaging industries such as forestry, mining, and logging, requires an understanding of risk perceptions among residents living within these communities. Among concerns facing these communities is social stigmatization, an actual or feared negative psychological experience associated with living in a community with an undesirable industry. This study of a coal-mining resource community was conducted with the purpose of exploring a range of perceptions associated with ongoing exposure to a resource industry, including the experience of social stigma. This study used focus group interviews with stakeholders to highlight the personal voices of the resource community experience. A model of stakeholders' perceptions of industry risks and benefits is introduced, and important distinctions between hypothetical risk perceptions and perceptions of resource community stakeholders are explored. Implications for communicating with resource communities are also discussed.     

Maximum entropy in the mean methods in propensity score matching for interval and noisy data

Abstract

In this paper, we propose maximum entropy in the mean methods for propensity score matching classification problems. We provide a new methodological approach and estimation algorithms to handle explicitly cases when data is available: (i) in interval form; (ii) with bounded measurement or observational errors; or (iii) both as intervals and with bounded errors. We show that entropy in the mean methods for these three cases generally outperform benchmark error-free approaches.