Transitions from employment among young Norwegian workers

In a large representative sample of young Norwegian workers, we estimate gross transitions to unemployment, education, and other exits in a multinomial logit. In line with received literature, we find that individuals with high education, experience, and income have significantly lower probabilities of job exits. While female education rates have increased to surpass those of males, female labour market outcomes are still more responsive to family related background characteristics as compared with the outcomes for males. Received: 17 October 1996/Accepted: 5 March 1999     

Demonstrations against demonstrations: the dispiriting emotions of the Kremlin’s social media ‘mobilization’

This article proposes a new approach to understanding Russian pro-regime counter-demonstrations, arguing that starting from 2014, they have acquired a distinctively demobilizational outlook: whereas the opposition seeks to mobilize the population to action, what suits the regime best is a safely de-mobilized majority. This interpretation requires a perspective different from that used for studying opposition demonstrations: instead of seeing the regime’s social media strategy for promoting counter-demonstrations as attempts to attract maximum involvement, the message should be judged on its capacity to discourage large-scale collective action. To show how this works in practice, the two biggest recent pro-regime counter-demonstrations are analysed: their context and background and the promotion of them on their official VKontakte pages and in related Twitter posts by prominent pro-regime tweeters. What may appear as strategies to mobilize for counter-demonstrations emerge as efforts to engender emotions that serve the regime’s purpose of keeping the population apolitical and passive.     

Post-truth and public relations: Special section introduction

With spindoctoring, publicity seeking stunts and evidence of mal-practice, public relations is easily associated with the development of post-truth society. The elevation of bullshit as political coinage presents a challenge for the rational public debate which the public relations profession at large should have an interest in maintaining. In this introduction, we briefly highlight some of these challenges for public relations. We point to how papers in the special section tie into these challenges, by for instance, helping to understand the construction of truth, how to construct a defense for legitimate public relations and engage with publics, as well as to build a professional practice through developing and measuring communication.     

Partial least squares Cox regression for genome-wide data

Most methods for survival prediction from high-dimensional genomic data combine the Cox proportional hazards model with some technique of dimension reduction, such as partial least squares regression (PLS). Applying PLS to the Cox model is not entirely straightforward, and multiple approaches have been proposed. The method of Park et al. (Bioinformatics 18(Suppl. 1):S120–S127, 2002) uses a reformulation of the Cox likelihood to a Poisson type likelihood, thereby enabling estimation by iteratively reweighted partial least squares for generalized linear models. We propose a modification of the method of park et al. (2002) such that estimates of the baseline hazard and the gene effects are obtained in separate steps. The resulting method has several advantages over the method of park et al. (2002) and other existing Cox PLS approaches, as it allows for estimation of survival probabilities for new patients, enables a less memory-demanding estimation procedure, and allows for incorporation of lower-dimensional non-genomic variables like disease grade and tumor thickness. We also propose to combine our Cox PLS method with an initial gene selection step in which genes are ordered by their Cox score and only the highest-ranking k% of the genes are retained, obtaining a so-called supervised partial least squares regression method. In simulations, both the unsupervised and the supervised version outperform other Cox PLS methods.     

The Estimation of Fertility Effects on Happiness: Even More Difficult than Usually Acknowledged

There have been many studies of how the number of children in a family affects the parents’ or the children’s lives. One strand of this research focuses on the implications of fertility for the parents’ level of self-reported well-being or happiness. It is argued in this paper that an overall “happiness effect” is not very informative because of the presumably large variation in individuals’ perceived gains from having children. Furthermore, it is explained that such an effect would be difficult to estimate. Most importantly, the highly varying ideas about how a child will affect life quality are important for the decision about whether to have a child. Many of those who have few or no children have chosen this because they think their life will be best this way, and their happiness therefore tells us little about how happy their more fertile counterparts—who to a large extent have different views about the consequences of childbearing—would have been if they had few or no children. This estimation problem that arises when effects of a certain event (here childbearing) are heterogeneous, and the individuals who experience that event tend to be among those for whom the effects are particularly positive or negative, is acknowledged in the treatment effect literature. However, there is little consciousness about it in the fertility–happiness research. In addition, there is a more “standard” selection problem: factors with implications for childbearing desires, or for the chance of fulfilling these, may also affect or be linked to happiness for other reasons. Unfortunately, even the most advanced statistical approaches that have been used in this research area fail to handle all these problems, so reported results should be interpreted very cautiously.     

Abused women with children or children of abused women? A study of conflicting perspectives at women's refuges in Norway

Women's refuges were established in Norway in the late 1970s by and for women. From the very outset, abused women have also brought their children to the refuges. With an increasing political, practical and research focus on the situation of children exposed to violence, the Norwegian refuge movement today is expected to apply both the woman's and the child's perspective in their work. By analysing the discourse of children staying at women's refuges, this paper discusses and sheds light on situations where the two perspectives come into conflict and the implications of these conflicts for the children and for the women's refuge movement as a whole.