Determinants of presidential position taking in Congress, 1949–1995

In this paper we seek to explain the activity presidential position taking on roll call votes in the House. Position taking may help presidents pursue their policy agendas, but time and available resources constrain their ability to take positions. Even though position taking is a discretionary presidential action, it occurs in the legislative arena and, thus, presidents must consider elements in both institutions as well as outside conditions when making this decision. Accordingly, we posit a multiple perspectives approach to explain the number of presidential positions on votes in the House. Our multivariate two-stage least squares regression reveals that variables from all three environments (executive, legislative and exogenous) within our multiple perspectives approach are necessary to adequately explain presidential position taking overall and when divided according to domestic and foreign policy positions.     

Differential effects of parental control on preschool-age adjustment depending on child effortful control

This study examined whether parental control differentially predicted children's effortful control and adjustment depending on children's levels of executive control and delay ability. Using longitudinal data, the study included 241 preschool-age children and their mothers. Fifty-seven percent of the sample was lower income and included 64% White, 10% Latino/Hispanic, 9% Black, 3% Asian-American, 2% Native or American Indian, and 12% multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds. Interactions between aspects of parental and child control at 3-years-old were tested as predictors of mother-reported child effortful control at 4.5 years and teacher-reported adjustment at 5.5 years. Children's early levels of executive control and delay ability moderated the relations of some forms of parental control with child outcomes, although several hypothesized interactions were nonsignificant. Low parental autonomy respect predicted higher externalizing for children initially high in executive control but predicted lower externalizing for children initially low in executive control. Conversely, high autonomy respect predicted higher impulsivity for children low in delay ability but higher social competence for children high in delay ability. Finally, low maternal negative control predicted higher internalizing for children low in delay ability, whereas it predicted higher internalizing for children high in delay ability. These findings suggest that in some cases the type and degree of parental control should match a child's level of effortful control to support their social, emotional, and behavioral adjustment optimally.     

Auditing biochemical research data: A case study

There is little documentation in the literature of how to conduct a data audit of laboratory research. The purpose of such an audit is to verify the extent to which the published data agree with the corresponding laboratory notebook data and whether the data thus examined appear to be sufficient to justify the published conclusions. A case study is presented, which demonstrates a step by step approach towards conducting a data audit of a published research study.     

Hearing the voices of abused older women

This paper focuses on a qualitative research process that gathered responses from 64 older women aged fifty and older on their experience of violence and abuse. What older women said about abuse in their lives supports the use of a feminist framework as well as the age based analysis of the elder abuse field. Some respondents spoke of abuse from childhood into their later years. Some spoke of partners witnessing or experiencing abuse as children. Some women express concern about possible abuse by their adult children of their own children. Abused older women like younger women need a safe environment, emotional support, advocacy, information, and peer support. While it is important to consider the perspectives and knowledge of service providers when developing policy and practice on abuse of older women, it is critical to ask the women survivors of abuse or neglect what they believe would benefit them, and others in similar situations.     

The Role of Evaluator-Victim Relationships in Children's Evaluations of Peer Provocation

Second-, third-, fifth-, and sixth- grade children evaluated two hypothetical target peers in three provocation scenarios which differed as to the intent of a provocative act (Ambiguous, Accidental, Hostile). In addition to age and gender, evaluator-victim relationship was manipulated with children portrayed as being in a best friend, an acquaintance, or an enemy relationship with the victim, while the agent of the provocation was an unfamiliar peer. Evaluations were assessed in terms of attributions of aggressor's intentions, behavior response of the victim, evaluator's liking for victim, and evaluator's affect. Results indicated that older children evaluated aggressor's intentions and victim's behavior response more negatively than did younger children. Further, attributions of aggressor's intent significantly predicted the victim's subsequent behavioral response. Evaluator's affect was reported to be more negative when evaluating hostile provocation compared to accidental or ambiguous provocation and evaluators in acquaintance and enemy relationships with the victim reported liking the victim more after the provocation than before it occurred. Results are discussed in terms of the social relational and social situational influences on children's evaluations of peer interactions and the need to integrate these contextual factors in children's person perception research.     

Educational inequality across three generations in Australia

The transfer of advantage and disadvantage across multiple generations is receiving increasing attention in the international literature; however, transfers of resources across multiple generations in Australian families are less well understood. Using a longitudinal dataset of Australian children, we have the opportunity to not only investigate the transfer of educational resources across three generations in Australia, but also investigate the gendered nature of these transfers, which has been a limitation of other studies. We find no evidence of individual grandparent education effects on numeracy and reading scores for grandchildren in Year 3, independent of parent educational attainment and other covariates. However, significant effects on numeracy and reading scores were observed for children in families where both the grandmother and grandfather in maternal and paternal grandparent sets had high educational attainment (a diploma or university qualification), and where either or both the mother and father had a university qualification. These results suggest that the contribution of grandparents to the academic achievement of grandchildren cannot be fully explained by the parent generation and that the concentration of human capital in families contributes to educational inequalities across multiple generations that can be observed by eight years of age.     

We are not walking wave functions. A response to “Quantum Mind and Social Science” by Alexander Wendt

Alexander Wendt raises many interesting questions in this book, but to get to the answers he wants, he relies on a misunderstanding of the nature of the quantum states of macroscopic objects.     

Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement

Though many studies have suggested that social and behavioral skills play a central role in gender stratification processes, we know little about the extent to which these skills affect gender gaps in academic achievement. Analyzing data from the Early Child Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, we demonstrate that social and behavioral skills have substantively important effects on academic outcomes from kindergarten through fifth grade. Gender differences in the acquisition of these skills, moreover, explain a considerable fraction of the gender gap in academic outcomes during early elementary school. Boys get roughly the same academic return to social and behavioral skills as their female peers, but girls begin school with more advanced social and behavioral skills and their skill advantage grows over time. While part of the effect may reflect an evaluation process that rewards students who better conform to school norms, our results imply that the acquisition of social and behavioral skills enhances learning as well. Our results call for a reconsideration of the family and school-level processes that produce gender gaps in social and behavioral skills and the advantages they confer for academic and later success.     

Understanding the Ecological Validity of Relying Practice as a Basis for Risk Identification

Understanding the reliability of hazardous organizations and their protective systems is central to understanding the risk they produce. Work on “high reliability organization” has done much to illuminate the conditions in which social organization becomes reliable in highly demanding conditions. But risk depends just as much on how relying entities do their relying as it does on the reliability of the entities they rely on. Patterns of relying are often opaque in sociotechnical systems, and processes of relying and being relied on are mutually influencing in complex ways, so the relationship between relying and risk may not be at all obvious. This study was an attempt to study relying as a social practice, in particular analyzing how it had ecological validity in a social organization—how practice was responsive to the conditions in which it took place. This involved observational fieldwork and inductive, qualitative analysis on an offshore oil and gas production platform that was nearing the end of its design life and undergoing refurbishment. The analysis produced four main categories of ecological validity: responsiveness to formal organization, responsiveness to situational contingency, responsiveness to information asymmetry, and responsiveness to sociomateriality. This ecological validity of relying practice should be a primary focus of risk identification, assessing how relying can become mismatched to reliability in certain ways, both when relying practice is responsive to circumstances and when it is not.