Social Work Internship in Public Housing: An Interdisciplinary Experience

A prior experience with a community organization fieldwork unit in public housing ensured the School of Social Work's participation in a federally sponsored demonstration project. A social work internship in public housing provided an opportunity for change in the nature of student tasks and the environment for field experience. Principles shaping the focus and content of the internship included: an interdisciplinary framework providing for faculty and student development from the Schools of Public Health, Engineering, Architecture, Business Administration, and Social Work; and total responsibility for task assignment, which afforded students an opportunity to organize and develop major programs.     

Soft Repression and the Current Wave of Social Mobilisations in Spain

The current political and economic crisis has fuelled a new cycle of collective action in Spain. The response of the Spanish authorities to this wave of mobilisations has been to strengthen public order. But on some occasions, the excessive use of police force has given rise to problems of image for the Spanish government. To avoid public criticism, the Ministry of the Interior has tried to camouflage police repression by combining the use of truncheons with other, more subtle, coercive measures. The silent nature of such repressive tactics means that their existence is rarely discussed in the specialised literature, which tends to focus on the violent acts committed by the State. However, this type of ‘soft repression’ plays an important pre-penal role within the official strategies to contain the new and challenging social conflict in Spain.     

Educating for difference in a Romany community in Spain: an exercise in integration

The marginalization of the Romany community in Spain, as elsewhere in the world, has its roots in a centuries‐old history of ethnic segregation. In response, the Romany community has come to feel intimidated and rejected. This has led to the establishment of communities on the outskirts of cities, generally with very poor living standards. In this paper I shall describe the social integration process of Romanies in one particular state school, presenting ethnographic information gathered in the course of fieldwork carried out within a project funded by the European Union on disruptive behaviour in contemporary schooling. A key focus in the project was the creation of a safe learning environment in schools, a matter of concern for all involved in education. Using participant observation and in‐depth interviews I was able to gather abundant ethnographic information on the school relating to the perceptions of students, families and teachers. Where informative, I also relate our findings to the existing anthropological literature on cultural differences and schooling.     

A Bayesian HMM with random effects and an unknown number of states for DNA copy number analysis

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been shown to be a flexible tool for modelling complex biological processes. However, choosing the number of hidden states remains an open question and the inclusion of random effects also deserves more research, as it is a recent addition to the fixed-effect HMM in many application fields. We present a Bayesian mixed HMM with an unknown number of hidden states and fixed covariates. The model is fitted using reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo, avoiding the need to select the number of hidden states. We show through simulations that the estimations produced are more precise than those from a fixed-effect HMM and illustrate its practical application to the analysis of DNA copy number data, a field where HMMs are widely used.     

In Memoriam: George Zyskind 1929–1974

Improving the quality of presentations is an important goal of the American Statistical Association. This article summarizes information presented in workshops held at annual meetings to provide guidance for the presentation of statistical papers to general and technical audiences. Four key areas are emphasized in these workshops: (1) careful selection and organization of key themes and results to be presented; (b) construction and use of high-quality visual aids; (c) use of handouts for methodologic details; tables, graphs, and references; and (d) rehearsal, critique, and revision of oral delivery.     

The Fate Worse than Death and other Curiosities and Stupidities

The problem of finding confidence intervals for the success parameter of a binomial experiment has a long history, and a myriad of procedures have been developed. Most exploit the duality between hypothesis testing and confidence regions and are typically based on large sample approximations. We instead employ a direct approach that attempts to determine the optimal coverage probability function a binomial confidence procedure can have from the exact underlying binomial distributions, which in turn defines the associated procedure. We show that a graphical perspective provides much insight into the problem. Both procedures whose coverage never falls below the declared confidence level and those that achieve that level only approximately are analyzed. We introduce the Length/Coverage Optimal method, a variant of Sterne's procedure that minimizes average length while maximizing coverage among all length minimizing procedures, and show that it is superior in important ways to existing procedures.     

An Analysis of the Relationship between Environmental Motivations and ISO14001 Certification

The objectives of this paper are both to identify the environmental motivations associated with the decision to initiate the process for ISO14001 certification and to check whether such motivations undergo any changes once the company obtains its certification and experiences the actual effects of this process. Based on the work of Bansal and Roth, we distinguish between ethical, competitive and relational motivations, and compare the importance of these motivations in four company stages with respect to the ISO14001 certification: not considered, considered, in process and awarded. This comparison was performed through a logit analysis applied over the data supplied by 184 Spanish manufacturers from three different industrial sectors. It was concluded that the decision to pursue the ISO14001 certification responds to ethical and competitive motivations, and that once the company gets its certification, the company portfolio of environmental motivations does not change significantly.     

Rethinking the construction of welfare in Mexico: Going beyond the economic measures

This study utilized a multidimensional measure of social welfare composed of 26 social indicators integrated in nine categories: education, employment and social protection, income, health, housing conditions, subjective wellbeing, social capital, use of technology, and culture and leisure to help understand social welfare in Mexico. We also compared the integrated measure with the Human Development Index. Estimation was performed using the method. Our analysis indicated that the health and housing conditions categories contributed the most to social welfare across the 32 Mexican States. In relation to the indicators, income and trust in other people were associated with welfare. Further, results on the welfare ranking of Mexican states revealed variations between the two indices and the HDI). Specifically, only four states occupied the same position on both indices, ten recorded different positions on moving up or down from their levels of social welfare. Implications of observed correlations are presented.