A Process for Incorporating Comparative Risk into Environmental Policymaking in Louisiana

The goal of Louisiana's 1990–1991 comparative risk project, also called the Louisiana Environmental Action Plan (LEAP), was to incorporate risk assessment into state environmental planning and policymaking. Scientists, government officials, and citizens were brought together to estimate the relative risk to human health, natural resources, and quality of life posed by 33 selected environmental issues. The issues were then ranked according to their relative estimated risks. It was hoped that this ranking of "comparative risks" would enable state policymakers to target the most important environmental problems and allocate scarce public resources more rationally and efficiently. As a result of the project, the governor issued an Executive Order forming a permanent Public Advisory Committee to continue this type of comparative risk assessment in Louisiana.     

FAMILY THERAPISTS' RESPONSE TO AIDS: AN EXAMINATION OF ATTITUDES,KNOWLEDGE, AND CONTACT*

As the number of individuals and families impacted by AIDS continue to multiply, family therapists will increasingly be asked to become engaged in the challenge of caring for those affected. To date, little has been written in family therpy journals regarding the response of family therapists to this crisis. This paper represents an initial attempt to examine the atitudes of clinical members of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy toward AIDS and persons with AIDS. Included in the study are data regarding the therapists' contact with persons with AIDS, gays, and lesbians, and the impact of such contact on attitudes. Implications for future research, training, and treatment of those affected by AIDS are also provided.     

The Social Context of Police Lying

This is an analysis of the social context of normal police lies. We define lies as speech acts which the speaker knows are misleading or false, are intended to deceive, and where evidence to the contrary is known to the observer. Lies are relative to a moral context, and what an audience will accept. Lies include excuses, which deny full responsibility for an act, but acknowledge its immorality, and justifications, which accept responsibility but deny blame-worthiness. Police learn to lie and to carefully distinguish normal (or acceptable) lies from unacceptable lies, suggesting that lies are a part of a negotiated occupational order. We show how and why some types of lies are rewarded by police using ethnographic data from an 18 month field study of a large urban force. Lies can be of little issue, or become troublesome. We report and analyze two kinds of troublesome lies: case lies, recognized stories an officer utilizes in a courtroom or on paper to facilitate the conviction of a suspect, and cover stories, lies an officer tells in court, to supervisors, and on the job with the aim of providing a verbal shield or mitigation in the event of discipline. Both excuses and justifications are woven together in these vignettes. An example of a refusal to lie is used to illustrate some of the limits on lying as well organizational factors in lying. Some implications for official lying are also noted.     

Bayesian analysis of outlier problems using divergence measures

A Bayesian approach is presented for detecting influential observations using general divergence measures on the posterior distributions. A sampling-based approach using a Gibbs or Metropolis-within-Gibbs method is used to compute the posterior divergence measures. Four specific measures are proposed, which convey the effects of a single observation or covariate on the posterior. The technique is applied to a generalized linear model with binary response data, an overdispersed model and a nonlinear model. An asymptotic approximation using Laplace method to obtain the posterior divergence is also briefly discussed.     

Who Gets What From Government? Distributional Consequences of Child‐Care Assistance Policies

Given the fragmented structure of child‐care assistance in the United States, it has been difficult to obtain accurate estimates of which families are assisted, through which mechanisms, and at what level. Making use of survey data from New York City, we analyze the distribution of several forms of public child‐care assistance. Results suggest that about 40% of all families with young children receive some form of child‐care assistance. Considering all forms of assistance, the distribution of child‐care help is targeted in both expected and some unexpected ways. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of U.S. child‐care policies governing access and benefit levels.     

The Continuing Significance of Race in the Occupational Attainment of Whites and Blacks: A Segmented Labor Market Analysis*

In this article we posit that racial discrimination is not uniform across the U.S. labor market. While it is likely that patterns of racial discrimination occur in some types of jobs more than others, little empirical research has examined the effect of race across segmented labor markets. Incorporating two decades of comparable General Social Survey data, this article revisits William J. Wilson's hypothesis that the significance of race in determining labor market outcomes is declining. We examine the effect of race within two dissimilar labor segments over time, dividing the labor market into technique‐versus social‐skills‐oriented segments. Using this theoretically useful dichotomy, we examine if the net effect of race (African American and white men) on occupational prestige has declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. Our multivariate analysis shows that the net effect of race is different in each labor market. This suggests that racial discrimination against African Americans is not uniform across the entire labor market, but instead is differentiately manifested within various labor market segments. Overall, our findings partially support Wilson's thesis indicating that while the effect of race is no longer a significant indicator of occupational prestige by the 1990s in a technique‐oriented job segment, it remains a significant predictive variable within a social‐skills‐oriented job segment, even when controlling for a range of social class and structural variables.     

The humorous construction of disability: 'stand-up' comedians in the United States

We examine how stand-up [sic] comedy constructs, circulates, perpetuates and/or disrupts stereotypical images of disabled persons in the United States. We use disabled people, rather than people-first language, to remind readers that disability is an ill-defined, culturally imposed attribute. Although humor is culturally specific, we draw on works of an international cadre of humanities scholars and social scientists to ground our analyses. We conclude that disability humor constitutes an emerging, liberatory art form. Disabled and non-disabled comedians elicit thought-provoking laughter and present disability as an interesting way to live. However, disabling humor still perpetuates stereotyping and isolation.     

A measure of slope-rotatability for second order response surface experimental designs

In the design of experiments for estimating the slope of a response surface, slope-rotatability is a desirable property. In this paper, a measure is introduced that enables us to assess the degree of slope-rotatability for a given response surface design. The measure takes the value zero if and only if the design is slope-rotatable, and becomes larger as the design deviates from a slope-rotatable design. Examples of applying this measure to some response surface designs are also given.