Questioning textbook truth: Suicide rates and the Hawthorne effect

Advocacy and interest groups routinely make fantastic and shocking claims in an effort to motivate the public to respond to what these groups perceive to be important but neglected social problems and/or incipient “crises.” When closer scrutiny impeaches these claims, these groups lose a measure of credibility, and the general public grows increasingly cynical of them and of the social sciences whose data and research presumably support the claim. Similar temptations and dangers may face sociology. I raise the possibility that the teaching of discredited findings and discoveries and the use of gimmicks that challenge conventional wisdom and common sense may turn our students off and trigger the same distrust and cynicism engendered by advocacy groups. Ironically, giving in to the temptation to shock and surprise rather than to inform and enlighten may foreclose the very real opportunities that exist for engaging our students and the public in the enterprise of sociology. He has been teaching introductory sociology for nearly thirty years, has published a number of articles on macrosociology and ecological-evolutionary theory, and is coauthor of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth editions of Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. I thank Sang-moon Kim for his help in assembling and analyzing the introductory texts, and Paul Nisbet for his help in reviewing recent research on religion and suicide. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the session, “Philosophical Foundations of Sociological Knowledge and Applied Sociology,” Joseph Gittler, organizer and présider, at the Annual Southern Sociological Society Meetings in 1995, in Atlanta, G A.     

Discipline and socialization of children in abusive and non-abusive families

This qualitative study examines how abusive parents' increasingly harsh administration of authoritative and punitive discipline socialized their children to act aggressively and asocially within their families' escalating interpersonal conflict. In comparison, non-abusive parents used successive instructive and authoritative discipline directing their children to engage in pro-social behaviors within their families' routine complementary role social interactions and mutual decision-making processes. These findings suggest that assessment procedures and interventive goals be changed to safeguard children in abusive families from both physical injury and dysfunctional socialization practices of their parents.     

Planning in a state of turbulence

This paper is concerned with an exploration of the role of the long range planner, whether in the private or public sector of the economy, and the impact made upon the processes of his work by government's increasing propensity to manipulate the economy. The authors' researches over the last 2 years into the comparative nature of planning processes in the U.K. economy have made it abundantly clear to them that planners are increasingly concerned at the dangerous potential of such impact upon their forecasting procedures. The emphasis here will rest upon the planner in private enterprises, although the authors' work in both local government and the nationalized enterprises suggest that the problem is of equal importance in these sectors.The authors consider first the past nature of the search processes in long range planning and the context of such attempts to narrow down the range of variables that form the enterprise's perception of its future. Secondly, they examine the emerging discontinuity and the changing role of government, with particular reference to indicative planning concepts. Then they introduce some of the findings of a recent survey of attitudes towards long range planning in the construction industry of the U.K., a sector vitally influenced by turbulence in the economy and with particular interest in government's ideas of macro-planning. Finally Edwards and Harris examine the implications to government and to planners of their findings.     

The Prospects for Digital Radio

Digital audio broadcasting is a major innovation in radio, one that is at its most advanced in Europe. It has the potential to deliver high-quality audio reception and to increase significantly the capacity of the radio spectrum, with the possibility of an expansion of both the range and diversity of radio programming. Nevertheless, in the UK and elsewhere it remains relatively unknown and under-adopted in comparison with other consumer technologies like digital television. This article examines the origins of digital radio, and considers how this technology is expected to become a mass communications technology, eventually supplanting analogue radio. However, in its present form, there is little that is novel currently being offered on digital radio, and the economic and political contexts in which it is being developed may encourage further concentration of ownership and reduce diversity of choice in listening. Unlike previous innovations then, such as FM broadcasting, there appear to be few compelling advantages of digital radio that will persuade listeners to adopt this new technology. If this new technological system is to succeed, alternative uses must be found for it, and one area for which it might be suited is mobile data communications. The article concludes by suggesting that this might mean that radio becomes of secondary importance to this potentially lucrative application of digital audio broadcasting technology.     

A KLEINIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE DIVORCE PROCESS: FROM THE PARANOID-SCHIZOID TO THE DEPRESSIVE POSITION

This paper looks at the divorce process from the perspective of Kleinan theory. It argues that during the early stages of divorce, most persons are in Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, characterized by splitting and persecutory anxiety, and that they move on to the depressive position, characterized by sadness and longing, only later. The movement occurs as the separated or divorced individual becomes able to tolerate ambivalence, and thus to integrate both the loved and hated aspects of the former spouse and marriage. The paper illustrates the claim in three case studies and recommendations are made for treatment and research.Nehami Baum Ph.D. is a lecturer of the School of Social Work at Bar Ilan University. She is a social worker with experience in both public and private practice. Her special interests include non-death related loss, divorce, men in therapy, treatment termination, social work students' professional identity formation, and guilt.     

Improvement of Highway Safety I: Identification of Causal Factors Through Fault-Tree Modeling1

As the first article of a two-part series, the purpose of this paper is to examine the functional factors that contribute to automobile accident occurrence and to model the causation structure in the form of a fault-tree. The fault-tree model provides an intuitive framework for qualitatively decomposing possible pathways to accident occurrence. Fault-tree analysis also provides a statistical representation of how interacting driver, vehicle, and environmental factors contribute to the likelihood of automobile accident occurrence. The application of this model facilitates pinpointing those factors that most contribute to accident causation and subsequently enables the identification and comparison of potential crash avoidance technologies.     

Measuring Social “Informatization”: A Factor Analytic Approach*

Some scholars have argued that we are witnessing a new social revolution—social “informatization”—that is comparable in scope and impact to that of the Industrial Revolu‐tion of the eighteenth century. Others have argued that it is a much more modest phase in the ongoing development of communication and information‐processing technology. While there are a number of reasons for disagreement about what exactly “informatization” is, and what its impact will be, two are paramount: (1) conceptual imprecision, and (2) issues of measurement. Using factor analysis, this study aims to clarify its conceptualization, and, then, rather than focusing on a single dimension (e.g., technological or economic), it will develop a comprehensive multiple‐indicator measure that captures the economic, technological, and size (stock) dimensions of social informatization. We find that this measure of social informatization strongly correlates with the general level of socioeconomic development. This result implies that social informatization may be a more continuous and cumulative process than a disjunctive or discontinuous “revolution.”     

Markov Chain Monte Carlo in small worlds

As the number of applications for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) grows, the power of these methods as well as their shortcomings become more apparent. While MCMC yields an almost automatic way to sample a space according to some distribution, its implementations often fall short of this task as they may lead to chains which converge too slowly or get trapped within one mode of a multi-modal space. Moreover, it may be difficult to determine if a chain is only sampling a certain area of the space or if it has indeed reached stationarity. In this paper, we show how a simple modification of the proposal mechanism results in faster convergence of the chain and helps to circumvent the problems described above. This mechanism, which is based on an idea from the field of “small-world” networks, amounts to adding occasional “wild” proposals to any local proposal scheme. We demonstrate through both theory and extensive simulations, that these new proposal distributions can greatly outperform the traditional local proposals when it comes to exploring complex heterogenous spaces and multi-modal distributions. Our method can easily be applied to most, if not all, problems involving MCMC and unlike many other remedies which improve the performance of MCMC it preserves the simplicity of the underlying algorithm.