The Meaning of Gender While Aging With Paralytic Polio

The purpose of this article is to report the influence of gender on aging with childhood onset paralytic polio. The hermeneutic phenomenological exploration of gender was done using multiple qualitative interviews with 25 women, age 55 to 75 years of age, who had polio since before 14 years of age. We noted three themes: (a) the movement of her body, (b) integrating body and gender, and (c) gender discrepancies. Findings are discussed in the context of gendered expectations and the women's bodies.     

Comparison of household-survey estimates with projections of mortality and orphan numbers in sub-Saharan Africa in the era of HIV/AIDS

The United Nations publishes estimates of HIV prevalence, AIDS mortality, and orphan numbers for all countries of the world. It is important to assess the validity of these model-based estimates since they underpin much policy concerned with care and prevention. Household surveys that ask questions about the survival of children's parents (orphanhood) offer an independent source of data with which these estimates can be compared. Survey estimates of maternal and paternal orphans are significantly lower than model estimates for 40 surveys in 36 countries of sub-Saharan Africa (p < 0.001, p = 0.002). This is probably because adult mortality from causes other than AIDS is lower than assumed in the models, although under-reporting of orphanhood in surveys may also play a role. Reducing adult mortality from causes other than AIDS brings the model estimates into close agreement with the surveys. This suggests that the fraction of orphans attributable to AIDS is greater than estimated previously.     

Treatment for Hoarding Behaviors: A Review of the Evidence

This article reviews the empirical literature on treating clients with hoarding behaviors, including psychosocial treatments, mainly cognitive behavioral, and pharmacotherapy. Standard treatments used for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) such as medication and/or behavior therapy have been associated with poor treatment response for those with hoarding. Recent prospective pharmacotherapy research suggests that serotonergic medication may be helpful to OCD patients with or without hoarding. A multi-component cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) designed specifically for hoarding has shown promising results especially in trials of individual therapy with periodic home visits. Social work researchers have played a prominent role in the development and testing of this CBT intervention and development of instruments to assess hoarding treatment outcomes. This CBT intervention has demonstrated modest success when delivered individually in an open trial and a waitlist-controlled trial, and in quasi-experimental studies of group treatment modalities, including in-person and web-based groups as well as bibliotherapy-based support groups. Overall, evidence supports the use of specialized CBT methods to improve hoarding symptoms. Future testing may include controlled trials with more diverse samples.     

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On Bayesian learning from Bernoulli observations

We provide a reason for Bayesian updating, in the Bernoulli case, even when it is assumed that observations are independent and identically distributed with a fixed but unknown parameter _θ0${\theta }_0$. The motivation relies on the use of loss functions and asymptotics. Such a justification is important due to the recent interest and focus on Bayesian consistency which indeed assumes that the observations are independent and identically distributed rather than being conditionally independent with joint distribution depending on the choice of prior.     

Estimation and interpretation of models of absolute risk from epidemiologic data,including family-based studies

Absolute risk is the chance that a person with given risk factors and free of the disease of interest at age a will be diagnosed with that disease in the interval (a, a + τ]. Absolute risk is sometimes called cumulative incidence. Absolute risk is a “crude” risk because it is reduced by the chance that the person will die of competing causes of death before developing the disease of interest. Cohort studies admit flexibility in modeling absolute risk, either by allowing covariates to affect the cause-specific relative hazards or to affect the absolute risk itself. An advantage of cause-specific relative risk models is that various data sources can be used to fit the required components. For example, case–control data can be used to estimate relative risk and attributable risk, and these can be combined with registry data on age-specific composite hazard rates for the disease of interest and with national data on competing hazards of mortality to estimate absolute risk. Family-based designs, such as the kin-cohort design and collections of pedigrees with multiple affected individuals can be used to estimate the genotype-specific hazard of disease. Such analyses must be adjusted for ascertainment, and failure to take into account residual familial risk, such as might be induced by unmeasured genetic variants or by unmeasured behavioral or environmental exposures that are correlated within families, can lead to overestimates of mutation-specific absolute risk in the general population.     

A Bayesian nonparametric estimator based on left censored data

Summary This paper introduces a Bayesian nonparametric estimator for an unknown distribution function based on left censored observations. Hjort (1990)/Lo (1993) introduced Bayesian nonparametric estimators derived from beta/beta-neutral processes which allow for right censoring. These processes are taken as priors from the class ofneutral to the right processes (Doksum, 1974). The Kaplan-Meier nonparametric product limit estimator can be obtained from these Bayesian nonparametric estimators in the limiting case of a vague prior. The present paper introduces what can be seen as the correspondingleft beta/beta-neutral process prior which allow for left censoring. The Bayesian nonparametyric estimator is obtained as in the corresponding product limit estimator based on left censored data.     

Class,work and family in women's lives

Interviews with white, working professional and working class mothers suggest that these women share values about work, family and on-the-job sociality. Respondents draw from a common value system, and many of the statements voiced by one group are echoed in the other. Work and motherhood are important paths to the development of individual identity for both working class and professional women. Differences in jobs, however, lead to differences in the actualization of values in their lives. Professional women are pulled in two directions and face continuing dilemmas in balancing careers which extract strong commitments from them and the demands of motherhood. Working class women's jobs do not require the same intensity of commitment, and they find it easier to meet their families' demands on their time. But conceptualizing their work as meaningful becomes more difficult than it is for professional women. Sociality is the third area of concern. Women in this study emphasized sociality because it allowed them to complete their work more effectively. It also served expressive functions; some women made friends at work. Some de-emphasized sociality if it interfered with their work identities. The importance of sociality was not necessarily dependent upon respondents' class location.I would like to thank Harold Bershady, Charles Bosk, and Robin Leidner for their comments and encouragement during the research and writing of this project. I would also like to thank M. E. Hughes, several anonymous reviewers, andQualitative Sociology for their helpful comments on earlier version of this article.     

Essential emotions: The place of passion in a feminist network

Using a case study, the authors argue that emotions play a highly significant part in voluntary organizations, and that present significant part in voluntary organizations, and that present academic approaches to emotions are unhelpful, both theoretically and practically. The distinction between emotional work and emotional labor is unclear in nonprofit organizations using volunteers. More research is needed in this area.