A Case Study of a Maltreated Thirteen-Year-Old Boy: Using Attachment Theory to Inform Treatment in a Residential Program

This paper presents therapeutic interventions from an attachment perspective with a thirteen-year-old boy with a history of maltreatment, living in a residential treatment facility. Attachment theory holds that accumulated memories of experiences with caregivers become organized into representational structures called internal working models. The guiding principles of the therapy begin with the critical role played by the individual therapist as an attachment figure. The central purposes of the therapy are conceived as promoting the restructuring of the internal working models of others to reflect expectations of trustworthiness and reliability, and models of the self as worthy to receive care. The approach described is contrasted with common approaches to residential treatment that rely on environmental behavioral contingencies, modeled on social learning theory.     

Partners and processes in HIV services for inmates and ex-offenders. Facilitating collaboration and service delivery

The elevated rates of HIV/AIDS among inmates are due in part to the high concentration of incarcerated persons with behavioral risk factors for HIV infection. Corrections, public health, and community-based organizations should partner to take full advantage of the opportunity to maximize effectiveness and efficiency in addressing HIV/AIDS in inmate populations. The purpose of this study is to document issues inhibiting collaboration, service delivery, and multisite evaluation as identified by members of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Health Resources and Services Administration Corrections Demonstration Project (CDP). Examining the barriers (and identifying ways to resolve them) is important in developing and maintaining successful programs that ultimately benefit HIV-infected inmates and the communities to which they return.     

Remembering Sartre

In this article reviewing three books on Sartre written by Ronald Aronson, Bernhard-Henri Lévy, and Ronald Santoni, I note that an enduring interest in Sartre’s life and philosophy centers on the justifiability of revolutionary violence and terror. I argue that critics too often, and sometimes obsessively, focus on the same texts and actions, typically related to his support for communism in the 1950s. They thus often reproduce a Cold War narrative of his life and work, wrongly obscuring his other great political engagement on behalf of national liberation and anticolonial resistance movements around the world. When critics do, however, consider his views in relationship to decolonization, they are often reduced to the muckracking pages of his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a text that is in fact unrepresentative of positions he took in more sustained works, such as The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the 1964 “Rome Lecture” on ethics. I suggest that this “Cold War lens” ought to be removed, so that a fuller and more nuanced understanding of Sartre’s views on political violence might be achieved. Indeed, Aronson’s book is the only one among the three that begins to make this move.

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Custodial Citizenship in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding

In contemporary processes of citizenship, parents and other caregivers often must make claims to the state on behalf of children with disabilities. In this article, we draw from data on the Omnibus Autism Proceedings (OAP), which were a series of hearings in 2007 and 2008 in which parents of children with autism attempted to receive compensation from a federal program for vaccine injury. During these hearings, parents and their attorneys obfuscated the children's subjectivity and instead showcased the children's physical suffering in order to claim that their children had suffered a legitimate injury from vaccines that warranted compensation. We develop the concept of custodial citizenship to account for the process by which a legible rights‐bearing subject appropriates the bodily suffering of the injured party in order to gain citizenship rights on behalf of that individual. In doing so, we trace the slippages of harm that occur in the lived experience of disability among family members and caregivers, in contrast to the individualizing rights‐granting framework of the court system.     

A comparison of models for clustered binary outcomes: analysis of a designed immunology experiment

The lymphocyte proliferative assay (LPA) of immune competence was conducted on 52 subjects, with up to 36 processing conditions per subject, to evaluate whether samples could be shipped or stored overnight, rather than being processed on fresh blood as currently required. The LPA study resulted in clustered binary data, with both cluster level and cluster-varying covariates. Two modelling strategies for the analysis of such clustered binary data are through the cluster-specific and population-averaged approaches. Whereas most research in this area has focused on the analysis of matched pairs data, in many situations, such as the LPA study, cluster sizes are naturally larger. Through considerations of interpretation and efficiency of these models when applied to large clusters, the mixed effect cluster-specific model was selected as most appropriate for the analysis of the LPA data. The model confirmed that the LPA response is significantly impaired in individuals infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The LPA response was found to be significantly lower for shipped and overnight samples than for fresh samples, and this effect was significantly stronger among HIV-infected individuals. Surprisingly, an anticoagulant effect was not detected.     

Coupling the Biophysical and Social Dimensions of Wildfire Risk to Improve Wildfire Mitigation Planning

We describe recent advances in biophysical and social aspects of risk and their potential combined contribution to improve mitigation planning on fire‐prone landscapes. The methods and tools provide an improved method for defining the spatial extent of wildfire risk to communities compared to current planning processes. They also propose an expanded role for social science to improve understanding of community‐wide risk perceptions and to predict property owners’ capacities and willingness to mitigate risk by treating hazardous fuels and reducing the susceptibility of dwellings. In particular, we identify spatial scale mismatches in wildfire mitigation planning and their potential adverse impact on risk mitigation goals. Studies in other fire‐prone regions suggest that these scale mismatches are widespread and contribute to continued wildfire dwelling losses. We discuss how risk perceptions and behavior contribute to scale mismatches and how they can be minimized through integrated analyses of landscape wildfire transmission and social factors that describe the potential for collaboration among landowners and land management agencies. These concepts are then used to outline an integrated socioecological planning framework to identify optimal strategies for local community risk mitigation and improve landscape‐scale prioritization of fuel management investments by government entities.     

An empirical saddlepoint approximation based method for smoothing survival functions under right censoring

The Kaplan–Meier (KM) estimator is ubiquitously used for estimating survival functions, but it provides only a discrete approximation at the observation times and does not deliver a proper distribution if the largest observation is censored. Using KM as a starting point, we devise an empirical saddlepoint approximation‐based method for producing a smooth survival function that is unencumbered by choice of tuning parameters. The procedure inverts the moment generating function (MGF) defined through a Riemann–Stieltjes integral with respect to an underlying mixed probability measure consisting of the discrete KM mass function weights and an absolutely continuous exponential right‐tail completion. Uniform consistency, and weak and strong convergence results are established for the resulting MGF and its derivatives, thus validating their usage as inputs into the saddlepoint routines. Relevant asymptotic results are also derived for the density and distribution function estimates. The performance of the resulting survival approximations is examined in simulation studies, which demonstrate a favourable comparison with the log spline method (Kooperberg & Stone, 1992) in small sample settings. For smoothing survival functions we argue that the methodology has no immediate competitors in its class, and we illustrate its application on several real data sets. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 238–261; 2019 © 2019 Statistical Society of Canada     

A Twin Study of Objective and Subjective Pubertal Timing and Peer Influence on Risk‐Taking

This study used a behavioral genetic design to test whether three measures of pubertal timing moderated peer influence on risk‐taking in a sample of 248 female adolescent twin pairs (M_age = 16.0, SD = 1.5) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Peer influence was operationalized as the quasi‐causal association between girls' self‐reported risk‐taking and the risk‐taking reported by their friends. Girls with earlier ages at menarche and who perceived themselves as more developed than peers were more susceptible to peer influence on risk‐taking. However, age‐standardized ratings of body changes did not moderate peer influence. This study highlights distinctions between multiple measures of pubertal timing, using an innovative synthesis of genetically informative data and peer nomination data.