Reading Sociology into Scholarship on School‐Based Sex Education: Interaction and Culture

School‐based sex education (SBSE), an institutional attempt to interrupt and correct the sexual socialization of young people, operates at the levels of structure, interaction, and culture. At the structural level SBSE has been found to endorse a particular set of cultural messages about sex and sexuality that reinforce patterns of inequality. This is often the case regardless of program type (e.g., abstinence versus comprehensive). However, there is little empirical focus on the actual classroom practices and other social interactions that constitute SBSE in the United States. In this paper, I will provide an overview of the field of SBSE research, reading the findings at the interactional level. In particular, I will review findings on curricula, stakeholder perspectives, and effects in a discussion of the importance of both interaction and culture in SBSE practices. Finally, I will use criticisms raised in existing SBSE scholarship to pose opportunities for sociological research into the topic.     

“That's so gay”: Language Use and Antigay Bias Among Heterosexual College Students

Using the word “gay” to refer to something that is “boring” is part of American slang, and heterosexual males commonly call one another a “fag.” The responses of 767 college students were analyzed to explore how this language relates to antigay bias. Results of multiple regression explained 14.8% of the variance for believing that “it's no big deal” to call someone a fag, and age, sex, major, and attitudes toward gay men were significant predictors. For the frequency of saying “that's so gay,” 17.5% of the variance was explained by age, sex, major, and friends’ attitudes toward sexual minorities. Implications for social work education and future research are discussed.     

Contingency tables with structural zeros

In this paper, the method of Hocking and Oxspring (1971) to estimate multinomial probabilities when full and partial data are available for some cells is extended to estimate the cell probabilities of a contingency table with structural zeros. The estimates are maximum likelihood, and the process is sequential. The gain in precision is due to the use of partial data and the bias of the estimates is also investigated.     

My Life in Huddersfield: Supporting Young Asylum Seekers and Refugees to Record Their Experiences of Living in Huddersfield

A project was undertaken with the aim of developing resources that would improve service delivery to asylum seeker children and young people by improving social worker training within the new social work degree. Funding was acquired to work with a group of children and young people. The workers engaged with them in a range of activities, designed to enable the expression of feelings in relation to immigration and asylum seeking. Participants were told they would be working towards producing resources for the training of health and social care staff. This became a strong motivating factor in the engagement of the young people and resulted in the production of teaching resources and a number of changes to the degree curriculum at the University of Huddersfield.     

Approaches to Manufacturing Regeneration: Some Empirical Data1

The study examined the efforts of 11 manufacturing companies to regenerate competitiveness through implementing improvement programmes. Data were collected about the activities seen to constitute improvement programmes as well as the reasons and intentions given for their implementation. Companies were found to have shared a common set of strategic intentions whilst having used differently constituted improvement programmes to achieve them. This similarity in strategic intent was seen as evidence of companies using improvement programmes to facilitate movement from mass to lean production paradigms. AU of the 11 companies studied exhibited widespread use of improvement activities. However, significant differences in individual company choice was interpreted as contra-evidence of improvements being driven solely by manufacturing fashions. This together with their similarities in strategic intent was seen as evidence that companies tailored their regenerative efforts to suit individual circumstances in pursuit of a generic strategic recipe. Some companies had discovered they had developed new capabilities through their regenerative efforts and these were seen as providing a distinctive competitive advantage. All of the companies set out with strategic intentions which centred on catching up with or imitating the best of their competitors – over a half discovered en route a means for changing the rules of the game.     

Contextualizing Business Ethics: Anomie and Social Life

The objective of this paper is to explore howthe current interest in Business Ethics can be locatedwithin an analysis of contemporary society which takesinto account the prevalence of moral uncertainty along with the concomitant desire to(re)establish some form of normative order. As such,Business Ethics may be seen as a socially constructedfield of study which reflects broaderchanges and controversies within society. Yet as a body of knowledge,Business Ethics articulates epistemological doubts. Twodistinctive themes in Business Ethics discourse areconsidered — the modernist/rationalist and thepostmodernist/relativist. It is argued that in different ways, each canbe seen as both an expression of, and a reaction to, theincreasing incidence of anomie in society. Theimplications for organizational practices are thenconsidered through the example of Corporate Codes ofEthics and the problem of establishing consensus wherethe grounds for any claim to moral authority areproblematic.     

Comparison of Six Dose-Response Models for Use with Food-Borne Pathogens

Food-related illness in the United States is estimated to affect over six million people per year and cost the economy several billion dollars. These illnesses and costs could be reduced if minimum infectious doses were established and used as the basis of regulations and monitoring. However, standard methodologies for dose-response assessment are not yet formulated for microbial risk assessment. The objective of this study was to compare dose-response models for food-borne pathogens and determine which models were most appropriate for a range of pathogens. The statistical models proposed in the literature and chosen for comparison purposes were log-normal, log-logistic, exponential, -Poisson and Weibull-Gamma. These were fit to four data sets also taken from published literature, Shigella flexneri, Shigella dysenteriae,Campylobacter jejuni, and Salmonella typhosa, using the method of maximum likelihood. The Weibull-gamma, the only model with three parameters, was also the only model capable of fitting all the data sets examined using the maximum likelihood estimation for comparisons. Infectious doses were also calculated using each model. Within any given data set, the infectious dose estimated to affect one percent of the population ranged from one order of magnitude to as much as nine orders of magnitude, illustrating the differences in extrapolation of the dose response models. More data are needed to compare models and examine extrapolation from high to low doses for food-borne pathogens.