The Timing of Cohabitation and Engagement: Impact on First and Second Marriages

Using a multistate sample of marriages that took place in the 1990s, this study examined associations between premarital cohabitation history and marital quality in first (N = 437) and second marriages (N = 200) and marital instability in first marriages (intact N = 521, divorced N = 124). For first marriages, cohabiting with the spouse without first being engaged or married was associated with more negative interaction, higher self‐reported divorce proneness, and a greater probability of divorce compared to cohabiting after engagement or marriage (with patterns in the same direction for marital positivity). In contrast, there was a general risk associated with premarital cohabitation for second marriages on self‐reported indices of marital quality, with or without engagement when cohabitation began.     

Real Wage Cyclicality in Italy

This paper analyses the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Italy, distinguishing between North and Centre‐South, using the European Community Household Panel 1994–2001. We separate job stayers (remaining in the same job), from within‐ and between‐company job movers. Stayers are the large majority. We find stayers in the North to have high procyclicality of real wages, higher in fact than the USA and the UK. Procyclicality is highest in small firms and the private sector, as expected. In contrast, we find that real wages in the Centre‐South exhibit little cyclicality, responding rather to Northern than to local unemployment conditions.     

Suicide reports in the news – impact of Chief Coroner's call to open up suicide reporting

ABSTRACT

Aim: In 2010, the then Chief Coroner called for an opening up of suicide reporting in the press. We aimed to discover if this controversial action influenced the nature and extent of reporting of individual suicide cases in the newsprint media.

Method: A Factiva search of news reports from high circulation newspapers was conducted over four years. We counted the number of news reports of individual suicides and examined any mention of demographics, methods, location and contributing factors.

Results: We retrieved 291 individual suicide reports, 161 before and 130 after the Chief Coroners’ call. Reporting was more detailed after the call, with increased reporting of demographics, contributing factors and methods but less reporting of location. Most of these differences did not reach statistical significance.

Conclusion: The press did not appear to take the action of the Chief Coroner as a licence to report more frequently on individual suicide cases.     

Racial Quotas and the Culture War in Brazilian Academia

Dozens of Brazilian universities recently adopted racial quotas for negros, read Afro-Brazilians, in higher education. Anyone familiar with the Brazilian context will recognize this step as a paradigm shift in the state’s approach to ‘race’. State discourse in past decades touted a mixed-race population not beset by overt discriminatory practices. In response to this new approach, two well-defined clusters of professors in Brazil’s universities authored several dueling manifestos supporting and opposing race-based affirmative action. This article suggests a ‘culture war’ framing of the debate and delineates the contrasting historic ideologies of racialism and antiracialism that inform the divergent racial worldviews of each academic camp. It then explores four points of contention from the manifestos that characterize their conflicting perspectives. They differ in terms of (1) their images of the Brazilian nation, (2) their diagnoses of the mechanisms behind non-white underrepresentation in Brazilian universities, (3) their prognoses for a remedy via racial quotas, and (4) their motivations for entering the debate. At the same time, the article locates some possible common ground.     

Structural Flaws in the Bridge From Basic Research on Marriage to Interventions for Couples

In an article that received widespread media attention, Gottman, Coan, Carrère, and Swanson (1998) reported on a longitudinal study of newlywed couples and recommended major changes in the practice of marital therapy and education. Most notably, they called for the abandonment of interventions that promote active listening, they concluded that anger was not detrimental to marital outcomes, and they advocated an interaction pattern wherein wives raise issues more gently and husbands more readily accept wives' influence. Because of several methodological and conceptual shortcomings, the recommendations of Gottman et al. appear to us to be premature at best. We raise methodological concerns about the nonrandom selection of research subjects, failure to control for factors that may have differentiated couples initially, procedural issues regarding observational and physiological data, and ambiguity about statistical tests employed. We raise conceptual concerns about how the labeling of patterns affects the conclusions drawn and also about the use of correlational data to make strong causal inferences. We conclude that the article by Gottman et al. risks influencing couples and practitioners alike in a manner that, in our view, exceeds the scope and methods of the underlying research.     

Establishing auditory-tactile-visual equivalence classes in children with autism and developmental delays

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The current study sought to evaluate the efficacy of a stimulus equivalence training procedure in establishing auditory–tactile–visual stimulus classes...     

How Effect Size (Practical Significance) Misleads Clinical Practice: The Case for Switching to Practical Benefit to Assess Applied Research Findings

ABSTRACT

Relying on effect size as a measure of practical significance is turning out to be just as misleading as using p-values to determine the effectiveness of interventions for improving clinical practice in complex organizations such as schools. This article explains how effect sizes have misdirected practice in education and other disciplines. Even when effect size is incorporated into RCT research the recommendations of whether interventions are effective are misleading and generally useless to practitioners. As a result, a new criterion of practical benefit is recommended for evaluating research findings about the effectiveness of interventions in complex organizations where benchmarks of existing performance exist. Practical benefit exists when the unadjusted performance of an experimental group provides a noticeable advantage over an existing benchmark. Some basic principles for determining practical benefit are provided. Practical benefit is more intuitive and is expected to enable leaders to make more accurate assessments as to whether published research findings are likely to produce noticeable improvements in their organizations. In addition, practical benefit is used routinely as the research criterion for the alternative scientific methodology of improvement science that has an established track record of being a more efficient way to develop new interventions that improve practice dramatically than RCT research. Finally, the problems with practical significance suggest that the research community should seek different inferential methods for research designed to improve clinical performance in complex organizations, as compared to methods for testing theories and medicines.