Documenting the quick and the dead: a study of suicide case files in a coroner's office

In keeping with recent critiques of literature on the body and the life course, the argument of this paper is that social identities can, to a certain extent, be constructed post‐mortem and in the absence of a living body. The authors make this case with reference to a sociological autopsy study of a hundred suicide case files in a coroner's office in a medium‐sized British city. The research draws on ethnographic approaches to the study of documents. There is discussion of some of the diverse artefacts in the coroners' files: medical reports, witness statements and suicide notes. The identity work revealed in these sources is as much about the living as the dead and is especially bound up in the process of avoiding blame.     

Robust estimates for GARCH models

In this paper we present two robust estimates for GARCH models. The first is defined by the minimization of a conveniently modified likelihood and the second is similarly defined, but includes an additional mechanism for restricting the propagation of the effect of one outlier on the next estimated conditional variances. We study the asymptotic properties of our estimates proving consistency and asymptotic normality. A Monte Carlo study shows that the proposed estimates compare favorably with respect to other robust estimates. Moreover, we consider some real examples with financial data that illustrate the behavior of these estimates.     

Chemically exposed children: The child welfare response

Child Welfare Agencies, especially in urban areas, are confronted with multiple problems as they attempt to deal with the complex needs of chemically dependent families. Maternal chemical use places children at an elevated risk of placement and other negative events. This article critiques research on incidence and consequence of maternal chemical use and suggests strategies Child Welfare Agencies can employ in working with these vulnerable families.This work was supported by a grant from the Program for International and Crosscultural Social Welfare, School of Social Work, University of Illinois.     

Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysisof voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election.Twenty-two percent of voters picked "moral values" from a listof "issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, morethan selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpretedthis single data point to conclude that moral values are anascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christiangroups with turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeatin 2000 into his three million–vote margin of victoryin 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values arecritical in informing political judgments, they represent personalcharacteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far morethan any discrete political issue. First by conflating moralsand values and then by further conflating characteristics andissues, the exit poll’s "issues" list distorted our understandingof the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flawsin the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s "most importantissue" question and explore the presumed rising electoral importanceof moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelminglyselected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moralvalues item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed asa discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that itsimportance to voters has not grown over time; and that whencontrolled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues listin predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll dataalso show that the voting behavior of conservative Christiansis relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarilyresponsible for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.     

Using Thin Slices for Behavioral Coding

This study investigated whether brief segments of nonverbal behavior or “thin slices” would be representative of behavior across a longer interaction. It was hypothesized that behavioral slices would correlate with behavior across a full 15-minute interaction. Five commonly investigated nonverbal behaviors were coded: gazing, gestures, nods, smiles, and self-touch. The findings showed moderate to high positive correlations between the thin slices (1-minute slice, total of two 1-minute slices, total of three 1-minute slices) and the full interaction for all five behaviors. In regards to behavioral coding, the thin-slice methodology proposed could save nonverbal researchers considerable time, energy, and money by decreasing resources dedicated to coding behavior in some types of interactions. Such results suggest that thin slices could represent an individual’s behavior across a longer length of time. Nora A. Murphy is now at the Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. The data was collected at Northeastern University and the research was supported by National Science Foundation grant SBR 97 09032 awarded to Judith A. Hall.     

The multiple service needs of drug dependent mothers

Maternal drug use has been the subject of much political discussion. Increases in the foster care population are reported to be a result of drug use by mothers. However, there is little information about the characteristics and service needs of drug using mothers. This study obtained data on drug dependent mothers referred to a child welfare agency, and suggests the need for coordinated treatment.     

Parents’ Experiences of Reporting Child Sexual Abuse in Urban Tanzania

This article reports parental experiences of legally reporting child sexual abuse in Tanzania. Based on in-depth interviews, four types of sexual abuse incidents are portrayed. Each evokes different reactions from parents and the community. An incident characterized as the innocent child was associated with a determination to seek justice. The forced-sex youth elicited feelings of parental betrayal of their child. The consenting curious youth resulted in uncertainty of how to proceed, while the transactional-sex youth evoked a sense of parental powerlessness to control the child because of low economic status. Differentiating between types of sexual abuse incidents may increase awareness of the complexities of child sexual abuse reporting. Education on laws regulating sexual offenses and a functional national child protection system are needed to address child sexual abuse complexities and safeguard the rights of children in Tanzania.     

How Too Little Can Give You a Little Too Much: Determining the Number of Household Phone Lines in RDD Surveys

Accurately assessing the number of household phone lines inrandom-digit dialed (RDD) surveys for use in weighting has becomemore complicated over time. This study evaluates phone lineweighting by asking an in-depth battery of seven questions designedto measure the number of available land lines in the home moreprecisely. The results show that this weighting correction isnot so simple, and that inadequately parsing the type and useof household phone numbers produces an inaccurate weight. Failingexplicitly to remove irrelevant phone numbers, especially cellphones, produces a larger-than-appropriate weighting adjustment.Potentially more important on a practical level is that, whendone correctly, and even when "overdone," phone line weightinghad little impact across a diverse set of opinion and demographicvariables.