Effective Techniques: The Career‐in‐Culture Interview: A Semi‐Structured Protocol for the Cross‐Cultural Intake Interview

The authors introduce the Career‐in‐Culture Interview (CiCI), a flexible, semistructured interview protocol designed for the career counseling intake session. The contents of the CiCI are based on recent theoretical advances in multicultural counseling and on the social cognitive model of career development. The authors describe a pilot evaluation of the interview and present guidelines for using the CiCI in practice.     

Cure rate models: A unified approach

The authors propose a novel class of cure rate models for right‐censored failure time data. The class is formulated through a transformation on the unknown population survival function. It includes the mixture cure model and the promotion time cure model as two special cases. The authors propose a general form of the covariate structure which automatically satisfies an inherent parameter constraint and includes the corresponding binomial and exponential covariate structures in the two main formulations of cure models. The proposed class provides a natural link between the mixture and the promotion time cure models, and it offers a wide variety of new modelling structures as well. Within the Bayesian paradigm, a Markov chain Monte Carlo computational scheme is implemented for sampling from the full conditional distributions of the parameters. Model selection is based on the conditional predictive ordinate criterion. The use of the new class of models is illustrated with a set of real data involving a melanoma clinical trial.     

The work–family challenge and mental health

The work–family literature is dominated by studies of white middle-class workers. In this study, we sought to expand this focus by examining work–family issues from the perspective of Mexicans who have immigrated to the USA within the past five years. Using data from qualitative in-depth interviews (N?=?22) and quantitative structured interviews (N?=?150), we documented the work–family experiences associated with immigration, and we examined the extent to which these experiences differed by gender as well as their mental health effects. The in-depth interviews clearly indicated that separation from family and community was a common and poignant strain experienced by Mexican immigrants who came to the USA to find work, and that these experiences did not differ between women and men. Quantitative analyses corroborated the qualitative findings by indicating women and men had similar levels of work–family strain. Analyses also indicated that higher levels of work–family strain were associated with more perceived stress, anxiety and depression, and that these associations did not differ between women and men. Finally, modest evidence suggested that the effects of work–family strain on mental health may be lower when the realities experienced by immigrants in finding employment and sending money home matched their expectations. This study adds a new voice to the work–family literature and the context and results make clear the tension between work and family: families frequently benefit from adults’ paid work, but this paid work is not without costs.     

Students’ Vocational Choices and Voluntary Action: A 12-Nation Study

Previous research on student involvement suggested that business and engineering students manifest lowest rates of voluntary action. Similarly, it was thought that social science students are the most involved in voluntary action, with students of natural sciences and humanities in the middle. However, there were very few studies that empirically compared these assertions. Furthermore, these assertions were not investigated from cross-cultural perspectives. Based on a study of students in 12 countries (N = 6,570), we found that even when controlling for background variables, social science students are actually less engaged in voluntary action than other students. Engineering students are higher than expected on voluntary action while students of humanities are the most involved in voluntary action. When studying these differences in the 12 selected countries, local cultures and norms form different sets of findings that suggest that there is no universal trend in choice of academic field and voluntary action.     

The evolution of federal employment

The first federal employees (other than Founding Fathers) were clerks. As federal employment grew in the 1820s, its ranks came to be dominated by patronage workers. After the Civil War, bureaucrats slowly displaced patronage workers at the federal level. Now, federal employments are being privatized and the bureaucracy shrunk. I explain this evolution of federal employment with one simple model of politics in a changing environment. Politicians combine into political firms to promise benefits to subsets of voters in return for election. If elected, politicians provide the benefits as efficiently as possible. Thus, politicians choose the form and size of their political firms to maximize expected political profits. Environmental changes affect the choices. The breach of the Appalachians in the 1810s, defeat of the South in the Civil War and the simultaneous rise of big and transcontinental industry, and contemporary worldwide economic inte-gration (globalization) are three environmental changes that changed the efficient organization of federal political firms.     

Housing policy in Nigeria: towards enablement of private housing development

One of the continuing challenges posed by unprecedented urbanization in the developing countries is the provision of adequate housing. Over the last three decades, Nigeria, like several developing countries, has emphasised public housing schemes, but with little success. This coincides with global paradigm shift from direct public provision of housing to the enablement of private shelter initiatives and housing production. The paper discusses private housing development features and dynamics and the factors affecting the sector in the country. It argues for the creation of an enabling environment, including support of housing initiatives and investments by householders, small-scale providers, and entrepreneurial private firms. The paper identifies the implications of enabling strategy for housing finance, access to land, residential infrastructure, institutional regulations and building materials and related industry particularly in the light of the need for the private sector to play greater roles in housing. It draws from aspects of empirical study by the authors and some review of housing policy-related issues.     

A Journey with Symbolic Interaction

In this cranky and arrogant chapter I consider several aspects of my use of symbolic interactionist perspectives on my research and thinking. The following are the elements of the chapter: (1) the historical context of my initial encounter with symbolic interactionism (SI); (2) my interpretation of key ideas of SI; (3) its relation to specific research of mine; (4) the relation of other perspectives to my research; and (5) some critiques of SI. I conclude with a truncated discussion of my dissatisfaction with the overtheorizing and overscientizing of sociology. Seeking balance, I end with predictions of a grand and glorious future.