The Effects of Community Pluralism on Press Coverage of Health Risks from Local Environmental Contamination

Based on the conflict/consensus model of Tichenor, Donohue and Olien, we proposed that mass mediated information signalling that local agents are contaminating the local environment and posing health risks is conflict-generating information and, therefore, will be controlled in the interest of community stability. We expected such control to vary by community structure. A content analysis of nine months of coverage by 19 newspapers supported the hypothesis that papers in more pluralistic communities were more likely than papers in less pluralistic communities to link contamination from local agents to threats to human health in the community and to frame such stories as problems. Newspapers in less pluralistic communities were more likely to frame local contamination in the context of solutions to the problem and were more likely to link contamination to health risks if the contamination were in a distant community.     

Mismatched response predicts behavioral speech discrimination outcomes in infants with hearing loss and normal hearing

Children with hearing loss (HL) remain at risk for poorer language abilities than normal hearing (NH) children despite targeted interventions; reasons for these differences remain unclear. In NH children, research suggests speech discrimination is related to language outcomes, yet we know little about it in children with HL under the age of 2 years. We utilized a vowel contrast, /a-i/, and a consonant-vowel contrast, /ba-da/, to examine speech discrimination in 47 NH infants and 40 infants with HL. At Mean age =3 months, EEG recorded from 11 scalp electrodes was used to compute the time-frequency mismatched response (TF-MMR_SE) to the contrasts; at Mean age =9 months, behavioral discrimination was assessed using a head turn task. A machine learning (ML) classifier was used to predict behavioral discrimination when given an arbitrary TF-MMR_SE as input, achieving accuracies of 73% for exact classification and 92% for classification within a distance of one class. Linear fits revealed a robust relationship regardless of hearing status or speech contrast. TF-MMR_SE responses in the delta (1–3.5 Hz), theta (3.5–8 Hz), and alpha (8–12 Hz) bands explained the most variance in behavioral task performance. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using TF-MMR_SE to predict later behavioral speech discrimination.     

Small area estimation with auxiliary survey data

Large governmental surveys typically provide accurate national statistics. To decrease the mean squared error of estimates for small areas, i.e., domains in which the sample size is small, auxiliary variables from administrative records are often used as covariates in a mixed linear model. It is generally assumed that the auxiliary information is available for every small area. In many cases, though, such information is available for only some of the small areas, either from another survey or from a previous administration of the same survey. The authors propose and study small area estimators that use multivariate models to combine information from several surveys. They discuss computational algorithms, and a simulation study indicates that if quantities in the different surveys are sufficiently correlated, substantial gains in efficiency can be achieved.     

Peripheral Stimulus Localization by 5‐ to 14‐Week‐Old Infants During Phases of Attention

This study examined the effect of attention in young infants on the saccadic localization of peripheral stimuli. Infants ranging in age from 5 to 14 weeks were tested using a peripheral stimulus detection paradigm. The presence of a central fixation stimulus decreased detection probability, particularly if attention was engaged with the central stimulus. Peripheral stimulus localization usually was accomplished with a single eye movement. When localization was accomplished by multiple eye movements, corrective saccades occurred most frequently and fixed‐amplitude hypometric saccades occurred less frequently. A decrease in the slope of the linear component of the main sequence was found from 5 to 11 weeks of age, and this decrease was independent of attention.     

Cohabiting and Married Couples' Income Organization: Approaches in Sweden and the United States

Using 1994 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data, we examine the effect that cohabitation versus marriage has on couples' income organization approaches in Sweden and the United States, two legally and normatively different contexts. Previous research on this topic has focused almost exclusively on married couples, so our inclusion of both married and cohabiting couples helps fill a gap in the literature. The effects of ever having been divorced, socioeconomic homogamy, and traditional gender ideology also are explored. Type of relationship and ever having been divorced are the only variables that predict income organization approach in both countries, suggesting that relationship experiences are more important than socioeconomic or ideological factors.     

Theorising Disability as Political Subjectivity: work by the UIC Disability Collective on political subjectivities

Disability studies has shown how therapeutic professionals and people with disabilities occupy opposite sides of a deep cultural divide, one that artificially bisects normalcy from 'abnormalcy'. The philosophy of political subjectivity provides an opportunity to analyse the fraught nexus that exists between institutions and those who navigate them as professionals and 'clients'. Our essay seeks to theorise the subject positions that emerge as a result of this often volatile intersection by offering up four critical vignettes: (1) an analysis of the systems and networks that characterise disabled transport within the Chicago Transit Authority; (2) speech therapy training and clinical practices designed for those whose articulation is diagnosed as inferior; (3) an African American clinician's analysis of disability taxonomies applied to minority wards of the state of Illinois; and (4) an analysis of scapegoating at the national level in a class-action law suit regarding the 'missed' diagnosis of disability prior to birth. These overlapping cross-disability accounts seek to enact boundary crossings as the foundation for a new Chicago Model of interdisciplinary disability studies. The essay concludes with a discussion of the need to broaden disability coalitions as the terrain of political struggle becomes increasingly diverse and complex.     

The Eugenic Atlantic: race, disability, and the making of an international Eugenic science, 1800-1945

In this analysis the authors fold disability into a cross-national equation by including disabled people as part of a trans-Atlantic discussion of otherness. In naming this new cultural space the 'Eugenic Atlantic', we take up Paul Gilroy's analysis of cultural crossings in order to recognise the social construction of marginalised populations designated by virtue of their presumed biologically-based inferiorities. The analysis of a 'Eugenic Atlantic' seeks to analyse disability and race as mutual projects of human exclusion, based upon scientific management systems, successively developed within modernity. From the end of the eighteenth century to the conclusion of World War II, bodies designated as defective became the focal point of violent European and American efforts to engineer a 'healthy' body politic. While fears of racial, sexual and gender-based 'contamination' served as the spokes of this belief system, disability, used as a synonym for biological (or in-built) inferiority, functioned as the hub that gave the entire edifice its cross-national utility.     

African American Gay Family Networks: An Entry Point for HIV Prevention

Gay families are constructed support networks that gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals of color form, often in response to societal marginalization and rejection from biological families. Research on these family structures has been scarce, with little focus on the experience of African American gay family networks in the South. The current grounded theory qualitative study focused on the experiences of 10 African American male and transgender individuals between the ages of 18 and 29 from gay families in the Mid-South, and explored the ways these families addressed safe-sex issues and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) risk prevention. Results revealed that families can play a role in either increasing HIV risk (e.g., ignoring HIV issues, encouraging such unsafe behaviors as exchanging sex for money or drugs, stigmatizing HIV-positive people) or decreasing it (e.g., intensive, family-level prevention efforts at safe-sex practices and family support for HIV treatment adherence). The potential of these family networks for HIV prevention and adherence efforts is considered.