Punjabi orchard farmers: an immigrant enclave in rural California

Examination of the adaptation patterns of Punjabi Sikh orchard farmers in rural California provides further evidence of ways in which strong ethnic enclaves help to promote rapid economic self-sufficiency among immigrant groups. The discussion emphasizes the need to consider not only the cultural traditions of group members, but also the historical context of immigration and the immigrants' perceptions of their particular situation. The Punjabi case indicates, too, how the 1965 Immigration Act, with its preference for family reunification, has promoted the formation of immigrant enclave.     

Readers' responses ... medical noncompliance

The Second Opinion staff invited a number of its readers who are physicians to respond to our recent Case Stories section on medical noncompliance, which included a case story by Kevin Coleman and commentary and overview by Arthur W. Frank (Second Opinion 17, no. 3 [January 1992]). Our thanks to those who shared their reflections, a number of which have been excerpted here.     

Gaining Competitive Advantages: Analyzing the Gap between Expectations and Perceptions of Service Quality

Universities have obligations to fulfill the needs of two customers –students and industry. Students must be intellectually prepared to meet the challenges of a highly competitive global environment. One approach in meeting this challenge is to focus on `Service Quality.' The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant research literature and theorize several propositions about SERVQUAL in the higher educational environment. The research considers the gap between expected services and perceived services and how these dimensions of SERVQUAL may be utilized to improve service quality and customer satisfaction.     

HIV Risk and the Freedom to Act Without Thinking: Alcohol Use and Sexual Behavior Among Adolescents on Probation

Through in-depth phenomenological interviews, 18 adolescents currently on probation describe how they make decisions about using alcohol and engaging in sexual behaviors. Two main threads emerge: they value spontaneity in sex and believe that they act spontaneously in regard to both sex and alcohol. At the same time, they describe being highly influenced by parents and peers. The researchers discuss the potential implications of these and other findings for HIV prevention and intervention.     

ADOLESCENTS' INCONSISTENCY IN SELF-REPORTED SMOKING: A COMPARISON OF REPORTS IN SCHOOL AND IN HOUSEHOLD SETTINGS

Extent and sources of inconsistency in self-reported cigarette smoking between self-administered school surveys and household interviews was examined in two longitudinal multiethnic adolescent samples, the urban Transition to Nicotine Dependence in Adolescence (TND) (N = 832) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (N = 4,414). Inconsistency was defined as a positive report of smoking in school followed by a negative report in the household. Smoking questions were ascertained with paper-and-pencil instruments (PAPI-SAQ) in school in both studies, and computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) in TND but audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) in Add Health in the household. In TND, 23.5 percent of youths who reported smoking lifetime and 20.4 percent of those who reported smoking the last 12 months in the school survey reported in the household never having smoked; in Add Health, the latter was 8.6 percent. Logistic regressions identified five common correlates of inconsistency across the two studies: younger age, ethnic minority status, lesser involvement in deviant activities, having nonsmoking parents and friends. In TND, interviewing of youth and parent by the same interviewer increased inconsistent reporting. Matching the definition of inconsistent reporting and the age, gender and race/ethnic distributions of TND on an urban Add Health subsample reduced the predicted rate of inconsistency in TND. The estimated bias attributable to CAPI compared with ACASI methodology did not reach significance in the aggregated matched samples suggesting that irrespective of administration mode, household interviews decrease reporting of smoking, especially among younger, minority and more conventional youths embedded in a social network of nonsmokers.     

Partitioning Pearson's Chi-Squared Statistic for a Completely Ordered Three-Way Contingency Table

The paper presents a partition of the Pearson chi-squared statistic for triply ordered three-way contingency tables. The partition invokes orthogonal polynomials and identifies three-way association terms as well as each combination of two-way associations. This partition provides information about the structure of each variable by identifying important bivariate and trivariate associations in terms of location (linear), dispersion (quadratic) and higher order components. The significance of each term in the partition, and each association within each term can also be determined.
The paper compares the chi-squared partition with the log-linear models of Agresti (1994) for multi-way contingency tables with ordinal categories, by generalizing the model proposed by Haberman (1974).     

Commitment to Work Among Welfare‐Reliant Women

The purpose of this article is to describe the work of welfare‐reliant women and to reveal commitment to work in the experiences of 84 welfare‐reliant, rural women interviewed for this study. Understanding the domains where welfare‐reliant women exhibit commitment to work may help policy makers, trainers, and employers design and implement interventions that enhance chances of success for these women in the formal, paid workforce. Discussion focuses on the women's formal labor force participation in the past and desire for wage work in the future; barriers to labor force participation, both personal and in the rural job market; informal work and the work of care; support networks; survival strategies for making ends meet while receiving welfare; and the stigma of welfare receipt.     

Contributions to adaptive estimation

There are many statistics which can be used to characterize data sets and provide valuable information regarding the data distribution, even for large samples. Traditional measures, such as skewness and kurtosis, mentioned in introductory statistics courses, are rarely applied. A variety of other measures of tail length, skewness and tail weight have been proposed, which can be used to describe the underlying population distribution. Adaptive statistical procedures change the estimator of location, depending on sample characteristics. The success of these estimators depends on correctly classifying the underlying distribution model. Advocates of adaptive distribution testing propose to proceed by assuming (1) that an appropriate model, say Omega , is such that Omega { Omega , Omega , i i 1 2 … , Omega }, and (2) that the character of the model selection process is statistically k independent of the hypothesis testing. We review the development of adaptive linear estimators and adaptive maximum-likelihood estimators.