Science,technology, and sexuality: New directions in the study of sexual knowledge

The sociology of sexualities and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology share many areas of theoretical and empirical interest, yet engagements between the fields have been limited. Work that has spanned both fields has tended to focus on sexuality from a biomedical perspective, neglecting other forms of knowledge production. This paper critically reviews existing areas of convergence between the fields, including measurement and classification, medicalization and risk, reproduction and families, politics and the state, and social movements. I offer suggestions for new avenues of research in these areas in addition to considering how greater theoretical exchange between the two fields could enrich both. I ultimately contend that analyzing forms of social knowledge making—such as law, religion, and the humanities and social sciences—and adopting a broader understanding of STS as method can provide a fresh direction in studying the production and circulation of sexual knowledge.     

Tokens or Stakeholders in Global Migration Governance? The Role of Affected Communities and Civil Society in the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

Focussing on the inclusion of those primarily affected as stakeholders (refugees and other migrants), this article addresses a key ambition of the compacts themselves. We employ an ‘inside‐outside’ perspective and firstly ask: which groups participated in the consultative processes, what agenda did they set ‘inside’ the meetings, what alliances did they establish and how did they influence the outcomes? Secondly, we investigate what kind of advocacy took place ‘outside’ of these formalized spaces and what impact it had? By this, we not only contribute to an evaluation of the processes themselves, but also advance current academic debates on strategies, spaces and political opportunity structures for civil society and particularly migrant involvement in global migration governance from below and the larger debate on democratizing global institutions.     

Die Organisation des Verdachts und „Das Leben der Anderen“

The film “The Lives of Others” relates two worlds to each other – the world of the Stasi (State Security Service of the GDR) and the world of arts, theater and literature in the mid-eighties during the GDR. A chief of Stasi eavesdrops and spies on life of an initially party-loyal playwright. Step by step the “operative process” transforms not only the life of the one, but also of the Stasi-chief himself, who becomes a secret accomplice of the opposition. The film gives an insight into the process of organizational erosion of surveillance and of cultural change, which by the end encompasses the entire political system. It emphasizes the question of a “good person”, the corruption and dependence on a power, and finally of resistibility against it by the good and the beautiful.     

Α Markov model for longitudinal studies with incomplete dichotomous outcomes

Missing outcome data constitute a serious threat to the validity and precision of inferences from randomized controlled trials. In this paper, we propose the use of a multistate Markov model for the analysis of incomplete individual patient data for a dichotomous outcome reported over a period of time. The model accounts for patients dropping out of the study and also for patients relapsing. The time of each observation is accounted for, and the model allows the estimation of time‐dependent relative treatment effects. We apply our methods to data from a study comparing the effectiveness of 2 pharmacological treatments for schizophrenia. The model jointly estimates the relative efficacy and the dropout rate and also allows for a wide range of clinically interesting inferences to be made. Assumptions about the missingness mechanism and the unobserved outcomes of patients dropping out can be incorporated into the analysis. The presented method constitutes a viable candidate for analyzing longitudinal, incomplete binary data.     

Single exposure to the word “Loving” and implicit helping behavior

Recent studies have reported that exposure to appeals for help containing the word “Love” increased donations. In this study, the effect of exposure to the single word “Loving” was examined on spontaneous helping behavior. Participants in the parking lots of several hypermarkets saw a male or a female confederate who was having difficulty loading a large heavy carton into a car. The confederate wore a T-shirt with a single word printed on the back: “Loving,” “Helping,” or no word. It was reported that more participants spontaneously offered to help the confederate when exposed to the word “Loving.” The importance of this word and further concepts are used to explain these results.     

Messung von Wertorientierungen: Ranking oder Rating?

In a methodological study recently published in this journal (No. 3, Vol. 51, 1999: 550–564), Klein and Arzheimer compared two competing methods for the measurement of personal value orientations, namely, rating and ranking. Focussing on postmaterialist value orientations, they concluded that ratings are superior. In this article, it is argued that this conclusion is based on a misleading interpretation of findings and a questionable research design. In particular, the authors do not address the validity of the two measurement methods, implicitly assuming that they both capture the same cognitive dimension. Since it is unclear whether or not this assumption holds, a broader research approach is suggested here, which allows assessment of both the validity and the reliability of the competing methods. Given the lack of empirical evidence regarding these points, theoretical considerations, briefly outlined in the last section, are crucial for the selection of an appropriate measurement strategy.     

Simulation of close-to-reality population data for household surveys with application to EU-SILC

Statistical simulation in survey statistics is usually based on repeatedly drawing samples from population data. Furthermore, population data may be used in courses on survey statistics to explain issues regarding, e.g., sampling designs. Since the availability of real population data is in general very limited, it is necessary to generate synthetic data for such applications. The simulated data need to be as realistic as possible, while at the same time ensuring data confidentiality. This paper proposes a method for generating close-to-reality population data for complex household surveys. The procedure consists of four steps for setting up the household structure, simulating categorical variables, simulating continuous variables and splitting continuous variables into different components. It is not required to perform all four steps so that the framework is applicable to a broad class of surveys. In addition, the proposed method is evaluated in an application to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC).     

Planning and analysis of measurement reliability studies

In the traditional plan for assessing the reliability of a measurement system, a number of raters each measure the same group of subjects. If the system has a large number of raters, we recommend a new set of plans that has two advantages over the traditional plan. First, the proposed plans provide greater precision for estimating the intraclass correlation coefficient with the same total number of measurements. Second, the plans are flexible and can be adapted to constraints on the number of times any subject can be assessed or the number of times any rater can make an assessment. We provide a simple tool for planning a reliability study, access to the software for the planning in the case where there are constraints and an example to demonstrate the analysis of data from the proposed plans. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 39: 344–355; 2011 © 2011 Statistical Society of Canada     

Factors Related to Homophobia Among Nursing Students

A convenience sample of 90 nursing students participated in an online survey measuring homophobia or sexual prejudice. Significantly higher scores were seen among those who endorsed the belief that being gay was a matter of personal choice, did not have a friend or family member who was gay or lesbian, and endorsed religiosity. A significantly higher level of sexual prejudice was seen among those who identified as non-Catholic Christians when compared to other religions. Asian/Pacific Islanders showed significantly higher scores on the scales compared to non-Hispanic Caucasian students. Nursing education should focus on those aspects of homophobia amenable to change.     

Kontaktgenerierung auf StudiVZ: Wie über Social Networking Platforms alte Freundschaften gepflegt und neue geschlossen werden

Virtual communication continuously gains importance in modern society, as the growing success of “social networking platforms”(SNPs) like Facebook, XING or StudiVZ indicates. In this article we compare such platforms in regard to their instrumental vs. expressive orientation. It is supposed, that amore expressive orientation of a platform like Facebook or StudiVZ is not only functional to manage contacts to friends already known outside the internet (“social searching”), like studies on user's reports on their own motivations have recently shown for Facebook, but also helps generating new contacts to people not already known before (“social browsing”). This more implicit function might be promoted by the trust-promising visuability of a person's network contacts, especially in the face of strangers. An online survey on StudiVZ with n = 1316 randomized participants confirms both hypotheses.