A Multilevel Analysis of Hispanic Youth,Exposure to the United States,and Retail Theft

Panel data in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) provide an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between Hispanic immigration, assimilation, and retail theft. This study examines the relationship between length of time Hispanic youth have spent in America, with the probability of stealing from a store. After controlling for traditional predictors of crime that are correlated with adolescence and immigrant status, random effects logistic regression models indicate that immigrants are less likely to steal than non-immigrants. However, calculating the marginal effects of time spent in the United States reveals that their probability increases with assimilation. Supplementary analyses specify that Hispanic youth who enter the United States within their first 5 years of age will have higher odds of engaging in retail theft. Supportive parenting and a structured home environment is a consistent protective factor in the models. Policies targeting pro-family and social identification are likely to benefit immigrant youth as they acculturate to America.     

The impact of ethnicity on attitudes toward health care reform in New Mexico

Latinos tend to have significantly lower levels of access to general and top quality medical care than do non-Latino whites, and although disparities in access to health care have diminished for all other minority groups over time, they have widened for Latinos. Given these trends, current attempts to provide universal health care at both the national and state levels across the United States have large implications for the health status of Latinos. The objective of this analysis is to determine whether Latinos have different attitudes regarding health reform than non-Latino whites. Our data are from a statewide random digit dialing telephone survey of New Mexico residents, age 18 and older, conducted in the Fall of 2007. With a Latino population of 44% and ongoing health care reform efforts by the state legislature, New Mexico is an ideal location for this analysis. After controlling for a host of individual level factors, our findings suggest that while Latinos are less likely to identify health care as a salient state issue relative to the economy and crime, they are more likely than non-Latino whites to believe affordable health care programs are important. Finally, Latinos view employers, more than government or individuals, to be responsible for expanding health care coverage.     

Orphans in Three Sahelian Countries: Exploratory Analyses from Census Data

Important investments in Africa have reduced slightly the levels child mortality but life expectancy still very low. The number of children without surviving biological parents is increasing and orphans are becoming an important social problem. Because Sahelian societies are mostly patriarchal, becoming fatherless or motherless will have different effects on the well being of the child. This paper examines the levels and trends of the survival status of the parents and then, living arrangements of orphans. We describe characteristics of these children with a special focus on education and economic activities. The paper uses the censuses from Chad, Niger and Senegal made available by the African Census Analysis Project (ACAP) held at University of Pennsylvania. These countries collected information on survival status of each biological parent to estimate adult mortality but the potential of this information for research on child well-being is rarely exploited.     

Affective and aesthetic dimensions of contemporary social movements in South West England

The paper examines contemporary social movement activity within South West England. It is argued that much social movement analysis has been too nation‐state orientated, that it has too readily framed diverse contemporary practices within a narrow, politically reductive and instrumentally rational frame. Increasingly, aesthetic and affective dimensions of everyday life must be examined if any coherent theoretical account of such activity is to be offered. Altering relations between states and their citizens in a global age and the emergence of an extended civil society are linked to a weakening of the capacity of nation states to manage identity formation. A series of excursuses link theoretical analysis of the expressive dimensions of the region's social movement activity, to these more extended global transformations.     

The Relationship of Adaptive and Maladaptive Behaviour to Social Outcomes for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities

The purpose of this study is to examine social outcomes including social interaction opportunities and self-expression, and how they relate to other quality of life indicators. These indicators include the overall assessment of adaptive skills, and the frequency and severity of challenging behaviour. The social interaction opportunities measured in this research include family contact, hours of habilitation, community outings, hours of employment and hours of education. Self-expression refers to the extent to which the individuals assessed indicated liking and choosing what they do in their everyday lives. The data utilised in this study were obtained from personal interviews from 3781 individuals with developmental disabilities and their caregivers. Interviewers received extensive training prior to conducting the assessments. The results indicate that people with higher adaptive ability had more contact with their families, received fewer hours of habilitation, were reported to participate in community outings more frequently, worked more hours and spent fewer hours in education. These significant correlations, however, were of marginal strength. Overall, the frequency and severity of challenging behaviour were not associated with the social interaction opportunities assessed in this study.     

The psychoanalytic structure of trauma: Spellbound

This essay engages in a close analysis of two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), in order to examine their approaches to trauma, especially in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of Nachträglichkeit (“afterwardsness”). A complex notion of afterwardsness is proposed whereby it is predicated on a relationship between two events, but where the importance of afterwardsness is not seen to lie in the nature of the events but rather on what determines the relationship between the two events. This determining relation thus leads to a notion of the structure of trauma and the argument that the crucial factor in a psychoanalytic approach to trauma lies not in an uncovering of traumatic events, but rather on the structure that retrospectively makes events traumatic.     

Sources of Variation in the Role Performance of University Teachers

Abstract

Based on data collected in a British provincial university this article examines the structural, material and ideal elements which are the sources of variation in academic activity. Teaching was influenced jointly by pedagogic and disciplinary perspectives, with the latter providing the major source of variation. Not only the style of research but also the pattern of research relationships could also be seen to vary with the theoretical character of a discipline. The external professional activities of faculty expressed several wide-ranging principles, but they also provided an important source of segmentation within the academic profession.     

Comments on specification of household expenditure functions and equivalence scales by nonparametric regression

This paper considers Lagrange Multiplier (LM) and Likelihood Ratio (LR) tests for determining the cointegrating rank of a vector autoregressive system. n order to deal with outliers and possible fat-tailedness of the error process, non-Gaussian likelihoods are used to carry out the estimation. The limiting distributions of the tests based on these non-Gaussian pseudo-)likelihoods are derived. These distributions depend on nuisance parameters. An operational procedure is proposed to perform inference. It appears that the tests based on non-Gaussian pseudo-likelihoods are much more powerful than their Gaussian counterparts if the errors are fat-tailed. Moreover, the operational LM-type test has a better overall performance than the LR-type test. Copyright O 1998 by Marcel Dekker, Inc.