Why are social sciences and humanities needed in the works of IPBES? A systematic review of the literature

Despite the increased attention, which has been given to the issue of involving knowledge and experts from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) into the products and works of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), little is known on what the expectations towards the involvement of SSH in IPBES actually are. The aim of this paper is to close this gap by identifying the range of possible SSH contributions to IPBES that are expected in the literature, and discuss the inherent challenges of and concrete ways to realize these contributions in the particular institutional setting of IPBES. We address these two points by: firstly, assessing the literature dealing with IPBES and building a typology describing the main ways in which contributions from SSH to IPBES have been conceived between 2006 and 2017. We discuss these expected contributions in light of broader debates on the role of SSH in nature conservation and analyse some of the blind spots and selectivities in the perception of how SSH could substantially contribute to the works of IPBES. Then, secondly, by looking at one particular example, economics and its use in the first thematic assessment on pollinators, pollination and food production, we will concretely illustrate how works in a given discipline could contribute in many different and unprecedented ways to the works of IPBES and help identify paths for enhancing the conservation of biodiversity. Finally, we propose a range of practical recommendations as to how to increase the contribution of SSH in the works of IPBES.     

Professionalization through attrition? An event history analysis of mortalities in citizen journalism

ABSTRACT

Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition.     

A Content Analysis of Intake Paperwork: An Exploration of How Clinicians Ask About Gender,Sex, and Sexual/Affectual Orientation

In the United States, the transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) population has increased twofold since 2011. Although counseling professionals are called to provide competent services to TGNC clients, no empirical studies exist that examine one of the first points of contact: Intake paperwork. The authors conducted a content analysis (N = 128) of intake paperwork and assessed how and if clinicians asked for gender, sex, and sexual/affectual orientation, and whether they conflated these constructs. Findings indicate adjustments need to be made for intakes to be more inclusive of these constructs. The authors offer clinical implications and avenues for future research.     

Corporate Quotas and Symbolic Politics in Advanced Democracies

ABSTRACT

This article identifies trends in the adoption and implementation of quotas for corporate boards, an underresearched topic in political science. Corporate quotas—like legislative quotas—constitute the “fast track” to gender equality but appear more commonly in advanced democracies. These corporate quotas fall into three categories: laws covering all companies; laws covering state-owned companies only; and nonbinding (voluntary) measures in corporate governance codes. Despite on-paper differences, these corporate quotas are largely toothless. First generation corporate quotas, like first generation legislative quotas, operate symbolically. By raising the specter of stringent legislation in the long run, corporate quotas induce firms into voluntary compliance in the short run.     

Lex Cantandi,Lex Credendi: A Content Analysis of Organizational Identity-Constructing Pronouns in Pre- and Post-Vatican II Catholic Hymns

This article asks whether hymns written prior to and following the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) differ significantly in their use of self- and divine-referential pronouns and answers this question by content analyzing the lyrics of 196 hymns in two different hymnals used in Catholic parishes today. It finds that hymns written post-Vatican II contain significantly more self-referential pronouns as well as an interestingly different mix of divine-referential pronouns than hymns written pre-Vatican II. These findings contribute to our knowledge of how shifts in religious organizations’ identities find expression in liturgical texts, which is important for understanding how the religious identities of individuals and communities are socially constructed over time.     

Generalized Kerridge’s inaccuracy measure for conditionally specified models

Recently, conditional Renyi’s divergence of order α and Kerridge’s inaccuracy measures are studied by Navarro et al. (2014 Navarro, J., Sunoj, S.M., Linu, M.N. (2014). Characterizations of bivariate models using some dynamic conditional information divergence measures. Commun. Stat. Theory Methods 43:1939–1948.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In the present article, a generalized dynamic conditional Kerridge’s inaccuracy measure is introduced, which can be represented as the sum of conditional Renyi’s divergence and Renyi’s entropy. Some useful bounds are obtained using the concept of likelihood ratio order. The results are extended to weighted distributions. Sufficient conditions are obtained for the monotonicity of the proposed measure. Characterizations for bivariate exponential conditional distribution are presented based on the proposed measure.     

Trend estimation of multivariate time series with controlled smoothness

This paper extends the univariate time series smoothing approach provided by penalized least squares to a multivariate setting, thus allowing for joint estimation of several time series trends. The theoretical results are valid for the general multivariate case, but particular emphasis is placed on the bivariate situation from an applied point of view. The proposal is based on a vector signal-plus-noise representation of the observed data that requires the first two sample moments and specifying only one smoothing constant. A measure of the amount of smoothness of an estimated trend is introduced so that an analyst can set in advance a desired percentage of smoothness to be achieved by the trend estimate. The required smoothing constant is determined by the chosen percentage of smoothness. Closed form expressions for the smoothed estimated vector and its variance-covariance matrix are derived from a straightforward application of generalized least squares, thus providing best linear unbiased estimates for the trends. A detailed algorithm applicable for estimating bivariate time series trends is also presented and justified. The theoretical results are supported by a simulation study and two real applications. One corresponds to Mexican and US macroeconomic data within the context of business cycle analysis, and the other one to environmental data pertaining to a monitored site in Scotland.     

Application of an imputation method for variance estimation under pseudo-likelihood when missing data are NMAR

When data are outcome-dependent non response, pseudo-likelihood yields consistent regression coefficients without specifying the missing data mechanism. However, it is onerous to derive parameter estimators including their standard errors from the regression coefficients under pseudo-likelihood (PL). The present study applies an imputation method to compute the asymptotic standard errors of parameter estimators. The proposed method is simpler than Delta method and it showed similar effect size of the standard errors to bootstrapping in simulation and application studies.     

Characterization of Lindley distribution by truncated moments

In the past few years, the Lindley distribution has gained popularity for modeling lifetime data as an alternative to the exponential distribution. This paper provides two new characterizations of the Lindley distribution. The first characterization is based on a relation between left truncated moments and failure rate function. The second characterization is based on a relation between right truncated moments and reversed failure rate function.