Navigating the Transition to Multi‐Ethnic Urban High Schools: Changing Ethnic Congruence and Adolescents' School‐Related Affect

This short‐term longitudinal study investigated 918 students' school‐related affect across the transition to high school. The study focused specifically on the moderating effect of change in student ethnic congruence from middle to high school. Results indicate that students experiencing more ethnic incongruence from middle to high school, in particular African American and male students, reported declining feelings of school belonging over time. Moreover, students experiencing ethnic incongruence also had increasing worries about their academic success. These results suggest that the changing school demographics from middle school to high school may negatively impact students' school‐related affect, especially if they move to high schools which include fewer students who are ethnically similar to themselves.     

Influence Diagnostics for Simultaneous Equations Models

This paper presents influence diagnostics for simultaneous equations models. It proposes residuals, leverage and other influence measures. A missing data method is adopted to minimize the masking effect due to case deletions. The assessment of local influence is also considered. The paper shows how to evaluate the effects that perturbations to the endogenous variables, predetermined variables and case weights may have on the parameter estimates. The diagnostics are illustrated with two examples.     

Complaining Our Way to Quality: Complaints, Contracts and the Voluntary Sector

The research on which this paper is based is part of a wider study of quality assurance and the voluntary sector. The focus of this paper is on complaints procedures, as part of quality assurance mechanisms, where voluntary agencies are the contracted service providers. The authors argue that, with the introduction of contracting and particularly with its further development, the way in which complaints mechanisms currently operate will need to be revised if they are to be an effective part of the quality assurance process.     

Thinking possibilistically in a probabilistic world

We cannot live on the knife edge of disaster all the time. We cannot even think about disastrous extremes with any clarity, says Lee Clarke . For 300 years we have equated thinking probabilistically with thinking rationally, but is that enough for thinking about terrorism, air crashes—or even God?     

Learning across Communities of Practice: An Examination of Multidisciplinary Work

Communities of practice (CoPs) have been identified as important sites of learning. Novices learn from masters whilst participating in situated practice and becoming more central members of the community. Empirical studies highlight the difficulty of learning across CoPs, although few studies specifically examine how learning develops in such a multidisciplinary context. We examine the processes of learning occurring when members of different CoPs, in this case various cancer specialists, are required to meet together as a formally constituted multidisciplinary team, and to establish multidisciplinary collaboration as a basis for decision making and action. Our paper highlights that while learning in CoPs develops through repetition, gaining legitimacy and achieving mastery, learning across CoPs in multidisciplinary contexts emphasizes key boundary processes to negotiate and broaden meaning. As such, multidisciplinary collaboration is not so much to learn from each others' talk, but to learn to talk in this new arena. We identify three practices which facilitate learning across CoPs: organizing discussions, acknowledging other perspectives and challenging assumptions. We also discuss the boundary processes which are promoted through brokers and the use of boundary objects in facilitating multidisciplinary work.     

Breast‐Feeding Advocacy,Risk Society and Health Moralism: A Decade’s Scholarship

This article reviews research published this century that engages critically with the mantra ‘Breast is Best’ and the associated expansion of official breast‐feeding promotion programmes. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of such studies published. They mostly explore experience in English speaking, industrialised countries (the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain) which are in some social and cultural respects dissimilar, yet where very similar developments and problems are detected in regards to breast‐feeding promotion. We highlight how this exploration of breast‐feeding promotion internationally has developed understanding of wider sociological themes. This scholarship, we suggest, has provided a powerful illustration of the relation between risk society (more particularly a heightened consciousness of risk) and the evolution of a code of conduct that regulates behaviour, that has been termed ‘health moralizm’. The article covers three themes: ‘Science, risk society, authority and choice’; ‘Public health policy and infant feeding’; and ‘Moralization and women’s identity work’. We conclude that the research discussed shows how the sociological imagination continues to shed light on the relation between private troubles and public issues. We also suggest one conclusion that can be drawn from this research is that official discourse and everyday maternal experience appear increasingly distant from each other.     

Random-effect models with singular precision

We show that smoothing spline, intrinsic autoregression (IAR) and state-space model can be formulated as partially specified random-effect model with singular precision (SP). Various fitting methods have been suggested for the aforementioned models and this paper investigates the relationships among them, once the models have been placed under a single framework. Some methods have been previously shown to give the best linear unbiased predictors (BLUPs) under some random-effect models and here we show that they are in fact uniformly BLUPs (UBLUPs) under a class of models that are generated by the SP of random effects. We offer some new interpretations of the UBLUPs under models of SP and define BLUE and BLUP in these partially specified models without having to specify the covariance. We also show how the full likelihood inferences for random-effect models can be made for these models, so that the maximum likelihood (ML) and restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimators can be used for the smoothing parameters in splines, etc.     

A divergence test for autoregressive time series models

In this paper, we study the normality test for the innovations of unstable autoregressive models based on the divergence test. In order to investigate the asymptotic behavior of the tests, we use the link between the divergence test and the residual empirical process. Simulation results are provided for illustration.     

奖金激励与学术成果——来自浙江大学SCI论文奖励效果的证据

本文利用浙江大学的数据,讨论奖金激励对高校论文产出的影响.浙大在1999、2003和2005年做了学术激励机制改革,对SCI论文按影响因子大小分区和分等,对在高影响因子的SCI期刊发表论文给予相对更高的奖励.其后,浙江大学教师发表的高水平SCI论文的数量和比例出现显著的增加.进一步分析后发现,浙大学术生产力的提升,并不是由于浙江大学引进了更多“高水平”学者,而是因为激励制度产生了效果.本文的发现,对高校的管理机制改革,有现实指导意义.