Sexual functioning and self-reported depressive symptoms among college women

We conducted an exploratory study comparing 47 college-aged women reporting depressive symptoms but not receiving antidepressant medication to 47 age-matched controls. We examined various dimensions of sexual functioning, including sexual desire, arousal, orgasm, pain, pleasure, and satisfaction. The women with depressive symptoms reported more inhibited sexual arousal, more inhibited orgasm, more sexual pain problems, and less sexual satisfaction and pleasure than control participants. Novel to this study, the women with depressive symptoms reported greater desire for sexual activity alone (masturbation) than the nondepressed women. The findings are discussed in terms of primary reinforcers and depressive symptomology.     

Financial Penalties Under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program: Policy Discourse and Strategies for Reform

Many families did not leave welfare of their own accord but instead were forced off, sanctioned, for failure to conform to new, strict requirements (Bloom & Winstead, 2002). Studies of leavers indicate that many of these leavers are among the families that do not receive needed health insurance, food stamps, and child care assistance for which they remain eligible (Loprest, 2001; Zedlewski & Gruber, 2001). Sanctioned families are less likely to do well after leaving welfare compared to other leavers (Goldberg & Schott, 2000). As part of TANF reauthorization, Congress should prohibit states from sanctioning if they have not met certain requirements: conducted an assessment, made accommodations for people with physical/mental impairments or other barriers, and instituted strong pre-sanction and post-sanction procedures.     

A variable selection approach to monotonic regression with Bernstein polynomials

One of the standard problems in statistics consists of determining the relationship between a response variable and a single predictor variable through a regression function. Background scientific knowledge is often available that suggests that the regression function should have a certain shape (e.g. monotonically increasing or concave) but not necessarily a specific parametric form. Bernstein polynomials have been used to impose certain shape restrictions on regression functions. The Bernstein polynomials are known to provide a smooth estimate over equidistant knots. Bernstein polynomials are used in this paper due to their ease of implementation, continuous differentiability, and theoretical properties. In this work, we demonstrate a connection between the monotonic regression problem and the variable selection problem in the linear model. We develop a Bayesian procedure for fitting the monotonic regression model by adapting currently available variable selection procedures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through simulations and the analysis of real data.     

The Beginnings of Child Welfare Research in the United States

The author reviews the beginnings of child welfare research in the United States with an emphasis on the contributions of several outstanding individuals as well as the conflict between hereditarian and reformist values and attitudes. Both hereditarian and reformist values and attitudes had tremendous influence on the development of child welfare research as well as the helping professions.     

Purely Academic? Exploring the Relationship Between Theory and Political Activism

This paper discusses the relationship between political activism and theory and asks to what extent the production of disability theory is 'useful' in broad terms. Through out the paper I locate myself as part of the disabled peoples movement, and write from a position of a shared value base and analyses of a collective experience. In doing so, I make no apology for flouting academic pretentions of objectivity and neutrality. Rather, I believe I am giving essential information which clarifies my motivation and political position.     

The social construction of the meaning of acute stressors: a qualitative study of the personal accounts of police officers using a stress counselling service

The police profession is one in which acute stressors are encountered more frequently than in other occupations. Using the personal accounts of 35 police officers attending an in-house stress counselling clinic, the aim of the present study was to provide a qualitative examination of how the institutional context of policing influenced the ways in which acute stressors signified to individual police officers experiencing felt distress. Using the framework of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy as an analytical tool, it is argued that beliefs contributing to the experience of felt distress are related to the way in which policing as both an identity and an activity is constructed through the police organizational culture. Not only do these constructions influence the ways in which officers perceive themselves and their environments, but they also operate at the collective level to 'normalize' some emotional responses and to 'pathologize' others which, it is argued, could impact upon the outcomes of interventions such as stress counselling.     

Reviews

R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975), 256 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £6.50).

Colin Platt, The English Medieval Town (1976), 219 (Seeker and Warburg, £6.00).

James Axtell, The School Upon A Hill. Education and Society In Colonial New England (1974), xxi+298 (Yale University Press, New Haven, £7.50).

Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England. An Enquiry Into The Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (1974), 164 (W. W. Norton and Co., New‐York, $6.95).

Jean‐Claude Perrot, Genèse d'une ville moderns. Caen au XVIII'siècle (1975), 2 vols, 1157 (Mouton: Paris, the Hague, 250 fr.).

Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree (1975), 344+15 illustrations (Allen Lane, £7.50).

E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (1975), 300+17 illustrations (Allen Lane, £6.50).

Arthur E. Imhof (ed.), Historische Demographie als Sozialgeschichte. Giessen und Umgebung (1975), 2 vols, 626+495 (Historische Kommission für Hessen, Darmstadt und Marburg, DM 48).

Historical Demography as Social History. Giessen and Surrounding District.¹

Alan Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (1975), xi+300 (Oxford University Press, £8.00).

Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor (1974), 264 (Dawsons of Pall Mall, £4.50, paperback £1.50).

Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals. Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (197 5), xv+260 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £5.50).

Thomas S. Szasz, The Age of Madness, The History of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization Presented in Selected Texts (1973), xxi+372 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £5.95).

Harald Runblom and Hans Norman (eds.), From Sweden to America: a History of the Migration (1976), 391 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, and University of Uppsala).

Charlotte Erickson (ed.), Emigration from Europe 1815–1914: Select Documents (1976), 320 (A. and C. Black, £6.50).

T. J. Nossiter, Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North‐East, 1832–1874 (1975), xii+255 (Harvester, £7.50).

Robert J. Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (1974), xviii+271 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, £6.25).

Lawrence Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labour Force. Upper Silesia, 1865–1914 (1975), xvi+213 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, £7.80).

Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti‐Semitism. Volume III. From Voltaire to Wagner (1975), x+582 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, no price given).

Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (1975), 208 (Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, Göttingen, paperback DM 28).

Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany. Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (1975), 359 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, £10.70).

Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti‐Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (1975), 335 (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, no price given).

Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools. Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan‐Germanism (1975), x+404 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, £15.75).

Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: the remaking of British society (1975), xi+382 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £10.00).

Marc Fried, The World of the Urban Working Class (1975), x+410 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, £6.50).

Philip Gabriel Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907 (1974), xii+260 (E. J. Brill, Leiden, 64 guilders).

Peter H. Mcrkl, Political Violence under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (1975), xiv+735 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, $17.50, paper $6.30).     

A Perspective on Dioxin Emissions from Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators

This paper discusses the following key issues concerning human exposure to dioxins and furans emitted from typical, modern MSW incinerators: (1) Are MSW incinerators the major source of PCDD/PCDF input into the environment? (2) Are environmental concentrations around MSW incinerators substantially elevated relative to background levels? And (3) are MSW incinerators the major source of human exposure to PCDDs and PCDFs? Current scientific evidence indicates that (1) combustion sources in general (including steel mills, copper smelting plants, motor vehicles, pulp and paper mills, and MSW incinerators) are major sources of PCDD/PCDF input in the environment; (2) environmental concentrations of PCDDs and PCDFs around operating MSW incinerators are not substantially elevated; and (3) 99% of human exposure to PCDDs and PCDFs is from background contamination, even for individuals living near a modern MSW incinerator.     

Disability and identity: the challenge of epilepsy

Through examining the case of people with epilepsy (which, as we demonstrate, has an ambiguous status in relation to both popular and academic conceptions of disability) we explore the fluid, negotiable and contingent nature of identity and, in particular, the identification as ‘disabled’. Disability, we argue, cannot be reduced to either biology or social oppression, or even primarily to biological or social factors: it is the outcome of a complex interaction between a multiplicity of factors – biological, environmental, social, psychological, cultural and political – which will interact and be experienced differently by different people, at different times and in different situations. Rather than conceiving of disability in ‘all or nothing’ terms and of differing explanations as competing and mutually exclusive, it would be more productive to see them as partial and potentially complementary contributions to the better understanding of a complex and multifarious reality.     

Religion and the Rainbow Struggle: Does Religion Factor Into Attitudes Toward Homosexuality and Same-Sex Civil Unions in Brazil?

The provision of civil liberties to LGBT persons has become part of a global movement in societies across the world. In Brazil, a recent judicial ruling for the first time established the right for homosexual couples to enter into civil unions, despite the presence of widespread disapproval of homosexuality among the population and opposition from prominent religious groups. Picking up on this issue, the following study examines whether religion may factor into the attitudes Brazilians hold toward homosexuality and same-sex civil unions. Using data from the Brazilian Social Research Survey, we find that the most restrictive views toward homosexuality and the strongest opposition to same-sex civil unions are most prevalent among devoted followers of historical Protestant, Pentecostal, and Catholic faith traditions, whereas adherents of Afro-Brazilian and spiritist religions, as well as those with no religious commitment, are inclined to assume a more tolerant moral posture toward such issues. The findings point to religion as a potential influence in future public policy initiatives and social movements involving LGBT issues in Brazil.