The impact of touch‐tone data entry on reports of HIV and STD risk behaviors in telephone interviews

Respondents’ concerns about privacy can decrease reporting of HIV and STD risk behaviors in general population telephone surveys. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of an experimental study evaluating whether one method for increasing privacy, touch‐tone data entry (TTDE), is effective in increasing estimates of sexual behaviors from a population‐based survey. We conducted a random‐digit‐dial telephone survey of adults in New Jersey (n = 405), with half the respondents using TTDE for answering sexual behavior questions. TTDE led to increased reports of same‐sex sexual behavior, certain HIV and STD risk factors, and concern about one's risk for HIV and STD transmission. TTDE also narrowed the difference between men's and women's reports of the number of different sexual partners over the past 10 years. The feasibility and limitations of TTDE are discussed, along with possible alternative interpretations that consider the impact of TTDE on the dynamics of the interaction between the respondent and the interviewer.     

Nobody’s business? White male privilege in media coverage of intimate partner violence

ABSTRACT

Portrayals of celebrities perpetrating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are ideal for understanding the association between gender and racial privilege in representations of social problems. Unlike prior scholarship on framing of IPV, with celebrity perpetrators, race can be analyzed as an important aspect. Using 330 news articles about 66 celebrities, I find patterns of reporting consistent with male privilege that sanctions men’s violence against women, whereas the differential treatment of Black men fosters a racialized interpretation that pathologizes Black men. Black men's IPV is more often criminalized, with criminal imagery included 3 times more often in articles about Black celebrities than White celebrities. By presenting violence as an escalation of mutual conflict and excusing it due to mitigating circumstances, such as inebriation, White men's violence is justified 2½ times more often than Black men's IPV. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of racial privilege in the social construction of IPV.     

Beyond a Strong State and Docile Women Reproductive choices,state policy and skewed sex ratio in South Korea

The rapid decrease in South Korea's fertility rate since the 1960s has often been noted as an extraordinary case of a demographic transition due to an extremely successful state population policy. This common observation fails to address how women actively and deliberately negotiated with different kinds of authorities within social and material constraints. The two most glaring examples of women's agency in reproductive decision making are (1) the consistently high abortion rate in a country where abortion has never been legal and (2) the persistent boy preference. The persistent boy preference combined with sex discerning technology, which became readily available in the 1980s, produced a skewed sex ratio at birth. Using Guttentag and Secord's theoretical model, this article explores how a broad range of cultural norms relating to women's roles, marriageable age, ethnic exogamy/endogamy and homosexuality will be affected when the birth cohorts of twenty years with the skewed sex ratio begin to enter the marriage market. This article also suggests a different way of thinking about the issues of women's reproductive behavior and state control. Population research often overlooks the thinking processes of individual women, and consequently misses how women negotiate with complex local conditions. This article discusses women' s reasoning and decision-making processes, their world views and values and dynamics within their intimate environments. Oftentimes women's own accounts defy clichéd understanding and popular imaginations.     

VII. Foster children: The Jewish home finding society and the institute for Juvenile research 1

Although there is a body of literature that applies Gestalt therapy techniques to clinical practice, little has been written about the use of Gestalt therapy theory as a comprehensive framework for social work practice as a whole. Gestalt therapy theory unifies social work's ecological and strength perspectives and is highly consonant with the core values of the profession. Four major theoretical aspects of Gestalt therapy that are highly applicable to social work practice are described: field theory, “I-Thou” relationship, creative adjustment, and the phenomenological perspective. Case examples are provided to demonstrate a Gestalt approach to social work practice.     

Accounting for a Nonviolent Mass Demonstration*

A 1963 nonviolent mass demonstration for civil rights at Durham, N.C., is here described on the basis of interviews with participants, businessmen, and political figures. A utility model to help account for the personnel, form, and site of such a protest includes the processes of evolution, contagion, and reinforcement.     

Adverse Health Experiences,Environmental Attitudes,and Pesticide Usage Behavior of Farm Operators

Water pollution from agricultural pesticides continues to be a public concern. Given that the use of such pesticides on the farm is largely governed by voluntary behavior, it is important to understand what drives farmer behavior. Health belief models in public health and social psychology argue that persons who have adverse health experiences are likely to undertake preventive behavior. An analogous hypothesis set was tested here: farmers who believe they have had adverse health experiences from pesticides are likely to have heightened concerns about pesticides and are more likely to take greater precautions in dealing with pesticides. This work is based on an original survey of a population of 2700 corn and soybean growers in Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania using the U.S. Department of Agriculture data base. It was designed as a mail survey with telephone follow-up, and resulted in a 60 percent response rate. Farm operators report experiencing adverse health problems they believe are associated with pesticides that is equivalent to an incidence rate that is higher than the reported incidence of occupational pesticide poisonings, but similar to the reported incidence of all pesticide poisonings. Farmers who report experiencing such problems have more heightened concerns about water pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, and illness and injury from mixing, loading, and applying pesticides than farmers who have not experienced such problems. Farmers who report experiencing such problems also are more likely to report using alternative pest management practices than farmers who do not report having such problems. This implies that farmers who have had such experiences do care about the effects of application and do engage in alternative means of pest management, which at least involve the reduction in pesticide use.     

A Survey of Approaches for Assessing and Managing the Risk of Extremes

In this paper, we review methods for assessing and managing the risk of extreme events, where extreme events are defined to be rare, severe, and outside the normal range of experience of the system in question. First, we discuss several systematic approaches for identifying possible extreme events. We then discuss some issues related to risk assessment of extreme events, including what type of output is needed (e.g., a single probability vs. a probability distribution), and alternatives to the probabilistic approach. Next, we present a number of probabilistic methods. These include: guidelines for eliciting informative probability distributions from experts; maximum entropy distributions; extreme value theory; other approaches for constructing prior distributions (such as reference or noninformative priors); the use of modeling and decomposition to estimate the probability (or distribution) of interest; and bounding methods. Finally, we briefly discuss several approaches for managing the risk of extreme events, and conclude with recommendations and directions for future research.     

Coverage Bias in Traditional Telephone Surveys of Low-Income and Young Adults

The proportion of adults with only wireless telephones is growingrapidly. Using 2006 data from the National Center for HealthStatistics’ National Health Interview Survey, this articleis among the first to reveal that noncoverage of this populationcan result in nonnegligible bias for traditional random-digit-diallandline telephone surveys that do not call wireless telephonenumbers. In 2006 in the United States, 17 percent of low-incomeadults with household income below 200 percent of the federalpoverty thresholds, 25 percent of young adults aged 18–29years, and 32 percent of low-income young adults lived in householdswith only wireless telephones. Within each of these three subgroups,we compared wireless-only adults and adults with landline telephoneson demographic characteristics and 13 key indicators of healthstatus, health behaviors, health care service use, and healthcare access. Even after statistical adjustments that accountfor demographic differences between adults living in householdswith and without landlines, telephone surveys of landlines willunderestimate the prevalence of health behaviors, such as bingedrinking, smoking, and HIV testing. Obesity may be overestimatedand physical activity may be underestimated for low-income youngadults. No significant bias is predicted for other measuresof health status and health insurance coverage. Sample weightingprocedures that incorporate adjustments for multiple demographiccharacteristics are necessary to help attenuate coverage biasin traditional telephone surveys, but may not be sufficientfor behavioral risk factor surveys of low-income and young adults.     

Scheduling Problems in a Practical Allocation Model

A parallel computational model is defined which addresses I/O contention,latency, and pipe-lined message passing between tasks allocated to differentprocessors. The model can be used for parallel task-allocation on either anetwork of workstations or on a multi-stage inter-connected parallel machine.To study performance bounds more closely, basic properties are developed forwhen the precedence constraints form a directed tree. It is shown that theproblem of optimally scheduling a directed one-level precedence tree on anunlimited number of identical processors in this model is NP-hard. Theproblem of scheduling a directed two-level precedence tree is also shown tobe NP-hard even when the system latency is zero. An approximation algorithm is then presented for scheduling directedone-level task trees on an unlimited number of processors with anapproximation ratio of 3. Simulation results show that this algorithm is, infact, much faster than its worst-case performance bound. Better simulationresults are obtained by improving our approximation algorithm usingheusistics. Restricting the problem to the case of equal task executiontimes, a linear-time algorithm is presented to find an optimal schedule.