Migrants' social networks and weak ties: accessing resources and constructing relationships post‐migration

Within migration studies literature there is a tendency to assume that migrants have ready access to kin and friendship networks which facilitate the migration and settling processes. Through tight bonds of trust and reciprocity, these networks are considered to be sources of social capital, providing a counter‐balance to the disadvantages that migrants may encounter in the destination society. This paper argues that more attention is needed to the ways in which migrants access, maintain and construct different types of networks, in varied social locations, with diverse people. I suggest that the often simplistic dichotomy of bonding and bridging capital needs to be re‐appraised and instead offer an alternative way of thinking about these social ties. The distinction between them tends to be understood on the basis of the ethnicity of the people involved – bonding involves close ties with ‘people like us’ while bridging involves links beyond ‘group cleavages’. Insufficient attention has been paid to the actual resources flowing between these ties or the kinds of relationship developing between the actors involved. The nature of these social networks may be better understood by focusing on the relationship between the actors, their relative social location, and their available and realisable resources. Data from a qualitative study of Polish migrants in London is used to illustrate this approach.     

Trying to come home: Substance exposed infants, mothers, and family reunification

Substance abusing mothers comprise a significant proportion of caregivers in public child welfare, and achieve low reunification rates. Unfortunately little is known about treatment options intended to facilitate recovery and increase reunification. This study focuses particular attention on the relationship between specific treatment modalities (e.g., residential and outpatient), recovery from substance abuse and family reunification. Analyzing a sample of 160 mothers and their substance exposed infants, the findings clearly identify the benefits of residential treatment in terms of both treatment progress (directly) and family reunification (indirectly), but only when residential services are delivered in combination with transitional services.     

Does Relationship Lending Still Matter in the Consumer Banking Sector? Evidence from the Automobile Loan Market*

Objective. This article examines the role of relationship lending in the automobile loan market at a community development credit union (CDCU) and at a traditional community bank. Method. Data collected from actual car loan applications are used in a probit analysis to estimate the importance of selected demographic, financial, and loan‐specific variables on the probability of loan approval at the two types of financial institutions. Results. We first show that the community bank relies on credit scoring, not relationship lending. Relationship lending is, however, a critical factor in the loan decision at the CDCU. Low‐income households with strong ties to the CDCU are likely to receive loans, despite poor credit histories. Conclusions. If consolidation, deregulation, and technology move mainstream financial institutions away from relationship lending and toward credit scoring, CDCUs will occupy an increasingly critical niche for low‐income households.     

Proportional Hazards in Information Security

Nonparametric methods can be used to analyze failure times and estimate probability distributions for failures of systems due to successful attacks on confidentiality, integrity, and availability in information security. However, such methods do not take full advantage of supplemental information regarding the configurations of systems in an information infrastructure that is usually also available. One approach, which does take advantage of such information, views the risks of systems failing from various causes as competing risks and determines the correlation coefficients of different treatments to system longevity. Since the times and causes of failure in such studies are usually uncorrelated, the hazards associated with each risk are proportional. By correlating system survival times to the use of specific design enhancements and security countermeasures, as well as to system exposure based on choice of operational functionality, guidance can be obtained for making investments in information security.     

A view from above: The evolving sociological landscape

How has sociology evolved over the last 40 years? In this paper, we examine networks built on thousands of sociology-relevant papers to map sociology’s position in the wider social sciences and identify changes in the most prominent research fronts in the discipline. We find first that sociology seems to have traded centrality in the field of social sciences for internal cohesion: sociology is central, but not nearly as well bounded as neighboring disciplines such as economics or law. Internally, sociology appears to have moved away from research topics associated with fundamental social processes and toward social-problems research. We end by discussing strategies for extending this work to wider science production networks.     

Risk and Ideology in Sexual Harassment

One explanation of sexual harassment is that it is the result of differences in organizational or individual authority between harasser and victim. A competing conceptualization suggests that much of what is termed sexual harassment is the result of a particular definition of the situation by women possessing nontraditional or feminist gender-role ideologies. Using a sample of university faculty, students and staff, this study examines the relationship among organizational position, demographic risk factors, and gender-role ideology on the self-reported incidence of sexual harassment. The findings show little relation exists between the various risk factors and the report of harassment in this sample.     

Autocorrelation in real-time continuous monitoring of microenvironments

Interpretation of continuous measurements in microenvironmental studies and exposure assessments can be complicated by autocorrelation, the implications of which are often not fully addressed. We discuss some statistical issues that arose in the analysis of microenvironmental particulate matter concentration data collected in 1998 by the Harvard School of Public Health. We present a simulation study that suggests that Generalized Estimating Equations, a technique often used to adjust for autocorrelation, may produce inflated Type I errors when applied to microenvironmental studies of small or moderate sample size, and that Linear Mixed Effects models may be more appropriate in small-sample settings. Environmental scientists often appeal to longer averaging times to reduce autocorrelation. We explore the functional relationship between averaging time, autocorrelation, and standard errors of both mean and variance, showing that longer averaging times impair statistical inferences about main effects. We conclude that, given widely available techniques that adjust for autocorrelation, longer averaging times may be inappropriate in microenvironmental studies.