Church-based organizing as participatory research: The northwest community organization and the pilsen resurrection project

Participatory research (PR) is a method of social investigation, an educational process and a process of collective action. Few examples of PR in the urban United States currently exist. Church-based community organizing’s process of systematically identifying values and concerns as a way of building relationships based on personal and social knowledge is fundamentally similar to the key characteristics of PR. Two examples of church-based organizing in inner city Chicago neighborhoods are the Northwest Community Organization and the Pilsen resurrection Project. Identification of such church-based organizing efforts as PR may help identify additional urban United States examples of PR, but also raises questions as to the role of the academic and the practical value of PR for community groups.     

Estimation of trade-offs with capture-recapture models: A case study on the lesser snow goose

Trade-offs between traits such as fecundity or survival are fundamental to much of our understanding of the evolution of life histories. There has been much renewed interest and controversy concerning methods for estimating trade-offs, in the wild or in captivity, and with or without experimental manipulations. In this paper, we assess the general question of the utility of modern capture-recapture methods as a robust tool for estimating trade-offs in natural populations. We present results from analyses of two forms of trade-offs: the cost of present reproduction on future survival and the cost of present reproduction on the probability of breeding in the future. We apply the methods to data from a long-term study of a snow goose population, and generally discuss the advantages and potential problems with various approaches.     

A Curriculum for Graduate-Level Marriage and Family Therapy Education*

The Delphi technique of refining group opinion was used to develop a graduate level marriage and family therapy curriculum. Opinions were synthesized from a national panel of 20 AAMFT Approved Supervisors and 25 training directors of graduate-level marriage and family therapy programs. Three rounds of questionnaires were employed and 101 content areas met the criteria for inclusion into the final curriculum. Discussed are the similarities and differences of this curriculum and the current “model” AAMFT curriculum. It is hoped that the curriculum devised from this study will lead to the continued rethinking, refinement, and evolution of marriage and family therapy education.     

Clustering of Microarray data via Clique Partitioning

Microarrays are repositories of gene expression data that hold tremendous potential for new understanding, leading to advances in functional genomics and molecular biology. Cluster analysis (CA) is an early step in the exploration of such data that is useful for purposes of data reduction, exposing hidden patterns, and the generation of hypotheses regarding the relationship between genes and phenotypes. In this paper we present a new model for the clique partitioning problem and illustrate how it can be used to perform cluster analysis in this setting.     

An alternative to the kolmogorov-smirnov test for goodness of fit

A test is proposed which requires a better fit in the extremes of a distribution than the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for H₀. not to be rejected. Critical values are calculated for sample sizes up to 100, and approximate critical values are found for larger samples. The power of the test is obtained for a number of distributions, and it is shown that the test is more powerful than some existing tests for a wide range of cases     

PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION RESEARCH: AN INTRODUCTION FOR FAMILY THERAPISTS

Participatory evaluation research empowers the consumers of services to become leaders in evaluation and change. Participatory research methods have been used widely in developing countries and are consistent with family therapy's recent emphasis on non-hierarchical, empowering, collaborative therapies. In this paper, the authors present several examples of participatory evaluation methods and discuss their applicability to the work of family therapists.