Psychosocial Problems Associated With Homelessness in Sexual Minority Youths

Sexual minorities are overrepresented among homeless youths, and this is often related to reactions to their status as sexual minorities. While on the streets, they are at increased risk for victimization, substance and alcohol use, sexual risk behaviors, and mental health issues compared to homeless heterosexual youths. This article uses ecological systems theory to examine psychosocial problems associated with homelessness among sexual minority youths and reviews empirical literature examining outcomes related to homeless sexual minority youths including mental health, substance use, and sexual risk behavior. Implications for social work are discussed including practice, policy, and suggestions for future studies.     

Correlational biases in mean response latency differences

Multifarious psychological constructs are indexed by the mean latency difference (MLD), the within-subject difference between mean response latency on two tasks. Two associations consistently emerge in mean latency data. Firstly, across subjects, mean latencies on distinct tasks are positively correlated. This correlation arises from individual differences in general rates of information processing that are a shared influence on response latency in diverse tasks. Secondly, across tasks, the mean and variance of mean latency are positively correlated. Compared to a simple task, a complex task has both a larger average mean latency and a larger variance of mean latency, across subjects. Taken together, these associations make the interpretation of the MLD problematic by biasing correlations between the MLD and (a) task mean latencies, (b) the average of the mean latencies, (c) external criteria, and (d) other MLDs. A variety of mean latency transformations were evaluated and, while they differed in their effectiveness, they did not satisfactorily rectify MLD biases. An alternative approach, focusing on scale invariant contrasts of within-subject response latency distributions, is introduced in the conclusion.     

On Response Surface Methodology and its Computer-Assisted Teaching

Since the teaching of response surface methodology involving the steepest ascent (descent) method requires a fair amount of instructor and student time even to complete one analysis, the routine aspects of the method were computerized. Flowcharts that contain the logic of first- and second-order experimentation to reach optimum conditions were also developed.     

The Job Demands-Job Control Model and absence behaviour: results of a 3-year longitudinal study

Empirical results of earlier studies only marginally supported the relevance of Karasek's Job Demands-Job Control Model for absence behaviour. Since longitudinal studies with respect to these relations were largely lacking, a four-wave panel study was carried out using data from 1755 male employees of a technical maintenance firm in the public sector. Job demands, job control, physical working conditions, and the employee's age, education, and health were measured in one year and absenteeism in the same year and in the next 3 years. Data were analysed with linear regression and Poisson regression techniques. The Poisson regression technique was superior to the linear regression technique in explaining absence. Age, health and prior absence were the best predictors of later absence behaviour. With respect to the Job Demands-Job Control Model, the main findings of the study were (1) that job control was significantly associated with a low number of simultaneous and later absence days, and (2) that, contrary to expectations, job demands were also related to a low number of simultaneous and later absence days. These results hold when age, health, education, prior absence, and working conditions are controlled for. Job control and job demands did not predict later absence frequency. In the discussion it is suggested that a high level of job demands may not only be harmful for the well-being of employees but also work as 'a pressure to attend'.     

THE BASIC SKILLS EVALUATION DEVICE

The Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education (COAMFTE) requires that accredited programs evaluate trainees' clinical skills at various times during trainees' programs. The Commission does not attempt, however, to describe for programs eigher the nature of the skills nor how they are to be evaluated, leaving this to the programs to create. This paper describes the development and uses of the Basic Skills Evaluation Device (BSED). Using a published list of skills (Figley & Nelson, 1989), data from the literature, and data collected from COAMFTE accredited and candidacy programs, the authors and their colleagues developed a device for supervisors to use in evaluating beginning family therapists. Data regarding the reliability of the device presented, along with limitations and suggestions for various ways of using the device.     

The Myth of a Systemic Crisis in Russia After the Great Reforms of the 1860s-1870s

The material situation of Russia's population measurably improved between 1861 and 1913.     

Identification of composite (∑+II) arma models by relatively simpler models

In the real world situations, many time series are aggregates of two or more time series. An aggregation may take place due to an addition or the product or both of two or more time series. We are often interested in the study of the properties of aggregates which are, in turn, dependent on the properties of the constituent series. Motivated by this problem, the authors study in this paper the properties of models generated by the operator (Σ+II) on autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) processes of orders (p_i,q_i), i = l→n . A few practical examples where such models have been used are given in the introduction and an illustrative numerical example is discussed at the end of the paper.     

Testing parallelism of regression lines against ordered alternatives

For the problem of testing the equality of slopes of several regression lines against the alternative that the slopes are in increasing (decreasing) order of magnitude, two types of tests are proposed. These are the likelihood ratio test and a test that depends on suitable linear combination of one group statistics. Rank analogues of the two tests are also examined.     

Nonparametric bayes estimation of the survival function from a record of failures and follow-ups

In some observational studies, we have random censoring model. However, the data available may be partially observable censored data consisting of the observed failure times and only those nonfailure times which are subject to follow-up. Suzuki (1985) discussed the problem of nonparametric estimation of the survival function from such partially observable censored data. In this article, we derive a nonparametric Bayes estimator of the survival function for such data of failures and follow-ups under a Dirichlet process prior and squared error loss. The limiting properties such as the mean square consistency, weak convergence and strong consistency of the Bayes estimator are studied. Finally, the procedures developed are illustrated by means of an example.     

Maximal inequalities for partial sums of independent random vectors with multi dimensional time parameters

We obtain upper and lower bounds on the distribution of the partial sums constructed from a multi-dimensional array of independent random vectors. These bounds include, among others, generalizations of some of the well known classical inequalities such as the converse Kolmogorov and the Skorokhod-Ottaviani maximal inequalities.