‘Something sensational…* The sexual diary as a tool for mapping detailed sexual behaviour

Reliable information about the detail and context of sexual behaviour is crucial for describing high-risk behaviours for the transmission of Aids/HIV, and for estimating parameters of epidemiological models. It is possible to adapt the method of systematic diary-keeping to this end and develop a tool which is also close to the subject's conceptions of the ‘chunks’ of sexual behaviour. The structure of reports of sexual behaviour is viewed as akin to linguistic structure, with a basic unit of the sexual act built into a ‘session’. Such structure leads naturally to a coding system which allows natural language accounts to be represented symbolically, and parsed and analysed formally. The coded version is easily learnt and used, and is incomprehensible to outsiders. Examples are given of its use to collect systematic data on homosexual and bisexual behaviour.     

Gender, home and family in cultural capital theory

The paper argues that Bourdieu's stress on early familiarization for the highest value of cultural capital is closely linked to his idea, strongly emphasized in Distinction, about the role of family and domestic life for individual development and social positions. The role of women, as mothers and homemakers, is crucial in this process. Yet, Bourdieu defines social origin as deriving from the father. The centrality to Bourdieu's thinking of a resilient traditional pattern of masculine domination and feminine submission constitutive of the Western gender habitus explains both his stress on ‘normalcy’ for the production of legitimate dispositions, and his resistance to incorporating into his thinking the implications of recent transformations in home family living, which have destabilized the gender order. It is thus important to consider contemporary feminist analyses of the family and home life and their significance for a renewed theory of cultural capital. The paper considers two sets of literature. Firstly, it addresses the manners in which home and family are conceptualized in Bourdieu's key texts where these issues were prominent in the development of his thinking on cultural capital. The second set of literature includes texts by feminist academics in the fields of family, gender and the body, which analyse the destabilizing of the gender order and everyday family living in contemporary society. Two questions are addressed on the basis of these reflections: (1) Is cultural capital an individual or a household resource? (2) How does cultural capital relate to personal interdependencies at the level of family and households?     

A case of mistaken identity? Debating the dilemmas of street-level bureaucracy with Musil et al.

Lipsky's Street-level Bureaucracy (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1980 Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-level Bureaucracy: The Dilemmas of Individuals in Public Service, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.  [Google Scholar]) has exerted a strong influence on the study of public service organisations. There has been a growing interest in using this perspective to understand the organisational context of social work and Musil et al.'s article in the EJSW (2004, ‘Do social workers avoid the dilemmas of work with clients?’, European Journal of Social Work, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 305–319) reflects this interest. Musil et al. argue that it is possible to identify two forms of practitioner response to the constraints of street-level bureaucracies: adapting working practices in ways that disadvantage service users or challenging working conditions in order to achieve more professionally acceptable practice. Their contribution to the debate is helpful, particularly with regard to their identification of responses by practitioners that seek to advance the interests of service users. However, we view their approach as constrained by lack of consideration of the construction of social work roles within particular street-level bureaucracies. We suggest that Lipsky's work should be approached as a tentative analytic framework, rather than as a fixed model and we argue that a productive approach to research on social workers as street-level bureaucrats is conjunctural analysis. Such analysis examines the contexts, circumstances and statuses of practitioners and how these factors shape the specific forms of street-level practice that operate in particular organisational settings. We illustrate this in our discussion of the factors that are likely to have had a bearing on the two practice settings used as case studies by Musil et al.     

A Note on Influence Assessment in Score Tests

Recently, [1] Ebrahimi, N. 1996. How to measure uncertainty about residual life time. Sankhya Ser. A, 58: 48–57.  [Google Scholar] proposed a dynamic measure based on differential entropy applied to the residual lifetime. This measure has been used for the classification and ordering of survival functions. More recently, [2] Ebrahimi, N. 1997. Testing whether lifetime distribution is decreasing uncertainty. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 64: 9–19. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] has considered the problem of testing the monotonicity of this measure. We propose and study several kernel type estimators of the entropy of residual life through the estimation of f(x) log f(x). These estimators can be applied to the classification and comparison of lifetime distribution.     

Nenparametric Two-Group Classification: Concepts and a SAS-Based Software Package

This article introduces BestClass, a set of SAS macros, available in the mainframe and workstation environment, designed for solving two-group classification problems using a class of recently developed nonparametric classification methods. The criteria used to estimate the classification function are based on either minimizing a function of the absolute deviations from the surface which separates the groups, or directly minimizing a function of the number of misclassified entities in the training sample. The solution techniques used by BestClass to estimate the classification rule use the mathematical programming routines of the SAS/OR software. Recently, a number of research studies have reported that under certain data conditions this class of classification methods can provide more accurate classification results than existing methods, such as Fisher's linear discriminant function and logistic regression. However, these robust classification methods have not yet been implemented in the major statistical packages, and hence are beyond the reach of those statistical analysts who are unfamiliar with mathematical programming techniques. We use a limited simulation experiment and an example to compare and contrast properties of the methods included in Best-Class with existing parametric and nonparametric methods. We believe that BestClass contributes significantly to the field of nonparametric classification analysis, in that it provides the statistical community with convenient access to this recently developed class of methods. BestClass is available from the authors.     

On sufficient conditions for the strong consistency of least-squares estimates

The strong consistency of the least-squares estimates in regression models is obtained when the errors are i.i.d. with absolute moment of order r, 0<r? 2. The assumptions presented for the random error sequence will permit us to obtain improvements of the conditions on the regressors in order to obtain the strong consistency of the least-squares estimates in linear and nonlinear regression models.     

Strong consistency of least squares estimates with i.i.d. errors with mean values not necessarily defined

We establish strong consistency of the least squares estimates in multiple regression models discarding the usual assumption of the errors having null mean value. Thus, we required them to be i.i.d. with absolute moment of order r, 0<r<2, and null mean value when r>1. Only moderately restrictive conditions are imposed on the model matrix. In our treatment, we use an extension of the Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund strong law to overcome the errors mean value not being defined. In this way, we get a unified treatment for the case of i.i.d. errors extending the results of some previous papers.     

New two-stage sampling designs based on neoteric ranked set sampling

Neoteric ranked set sampling (NRSS) is a recently developed sampling plan, derived from the well-known ranked set sampling (RSS) scheme. It has already been proved that NRSS provides more efficient estimators for population mean and variance compared to RSS and other sampling designs based on ranked sets. In this work, we propose and evaluate the performance of some two-stage sampling designs based on NRSS. Five different sampling schemes are proposed. Through an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study, we verified that all proposed sampling designs outperform RSS, NRSS, and the original double RSS design, producing estimators for the population mean with a lower mean square error. Furthermore, as with NRSS, two-stage NRSS estimators present some bias for asymmetric distributions. We complement the study with a discussion on the relative performance of the proposed estimators. Moreover, an additional simulation based on data of the diameter and height of pine trees is presented.