Moral Identity in Friendships between Gay,Lesbian, and Bisexual Students and Straight Students in College

People construct moral identities for being a supportive affiliate of stigmatized groups. To extend past research that focused on such identities within formal organizations, this study seeks to identify the process of moral identity construction in a personal setting—friendships between gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) people and straight people. Analyzing data from in‐depth interviews with college students, we show that straight students claim moral worth by emphasizing their deliberate decisions to develop and sustain friendships with GLB people and by highlighting how the friendships led them to personal enlightenment and political engagement. GLB students, as a stigmatized group, also claim moral worth by emphasizing their ability to transcend the community boundary and to be accepted in the larger society. Students make such claims as they strategically link these aspects of cross‐orientation friendships to existing moral discourses in the larger society and draw on resources available in the organizational and life course contexts.     

Comparative Studies in USA and Japanese Advertising during the Post–War Era

The goal of this essay can be summarized into the following three points: (i) based on the recent fruits of media effect studies, especially the argument of "frame analysis" which focuses on the interaction between media frames and audience frames, a model to analyze the processes of advertising is proposed; (ii) the model is applied to advertising history in the USA after WWII, referring to the recent development of studies in advertising history in the USA; and (iii) advertising history in the USA is compared to advertising history in Japan, exploring differences and similarities between them. A common process is identified in the advertising histories, represented by the differences and similarities between the Volkswagen campaign in the 1960s and the Nike campaign in the 1990s. This common process is the increase of "intertextuality", or the increasing complexity of advertising expression. This phenomenon implies the development of advertising literacy in audiences, the expansion of advertising media and the transformation of reality during the post–war era. The definition and implications of advertising, for both media and audiences, has changed in the USA and Japan across time, and the trend towards globalization is reducing the differences between them.     

Exact Estimation of Demand Functions under Block-Rate Pricing

This article proposes an exact estimation of demand functions under block-rate pricing by focusing on increasing block-rate pricing. This is the first study that explicitly considers the separability condition which has been ignored in previous literature. Under this pricing structure, the price changes when consumption exceeds a certain threshold and the consumer faces a utility maximization problem subject to a piecewise-linear budget constraint. Solving this maximization problem leads to a statistical model in which model parameters are strongly restricted by the separability condition. In this article, by taking a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to properly estimate the demand function. We find, however, that the convergence of the distribution of simulated samples to the posterior distribution is slow, requiring an additional scale transformation step for parameters to the Gibbs sampler. These proposed methods are then applied to estimate the Japanese residential water demand function.     

Bayes Estimation of Intraclass Correlation Coefficients Under Unequal Family Sizes

Bayesian inference for the intraclass correlation ρ is considered under unequal family sizes. We obtain the posterior distribution of ρ and then compare the performance of the Bayes estimator (posterior mean of ρ) with that of Srivastava's (1984) estimator through simulation. Simulation study shows that the Bayes estimator performs better than the Srivastava's estimator in terms of lower mean square error. We also obtain large sample posteriors of ρ based on the asymptotic posterior distribution and based on the Laplace approximation.     

The Kan-No-Mushi: An Inner Externalization that Enables Compromise?

This new section is devoted to explorations — to work-in-progress, ideas, free associations, perplexities, insights/outsights, musings, searches and experiments — with an emphasis on practicalities. Above all, it is aimed at the family therapist on the job. We hope to develop a section that is lively, interesting and informative. where practitioners can talk with one another about work they've been doing or thinking of doing, in an immediate way using a variety of short formats. will be led by David Epston (New Zealand), Sue Jackson (Victoria) and Andrew Relph (Western Australia). If you'd like to contribute to Explorations, please contact David. Sue or Andrew, or write direct to the Journal. — Editor.     

SAME‐SEX EXPERIENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH DURING THE TRANSITION BETWEEN ADOLESCENCE AND YOUNG ADULTHOOD

Previous research has demonstrated that people who report same‐sex experience tend to have poorer mental health than heterosexual people in adolescence and adulthood. Yet, little is known about how same‐sex experience is associated with changes in mental health between the two life stages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 12,056), this study assesses patterns of same‐sex experience between adolescence and young adulthood and their consequences for changes in depressive symptoms, binge drinking, and drug use. Compared to people with no same‐sex experience, those who report such experience only in adolescence show greater levels of mental health problems in adolescence, but they do not show any worse mental health changes during the transition into young adulthood. People who develop their first same‐sex experience in young adulthood, however, tend to show worse changes, consistent with the argument that entry into a stigmatized role is psychologically harmful. Among females, those who report same‐sex experience in both life stages also show worse mental health changes, indicating that the continuity in minority status contributes to their cumulative disadvantage. However, these differences are modest, and substantial amounts of variations in mental health changes are observed within each group. Findings are used to address the dynamic aspect of mental health disparity linked to sexuality.     

Estimating the Lyapunov exponent from chaotic time series with dynamic noise

In this paper, we propose an estimator of the Lyapunov exponent of the skeleton for chaotic time series with dynamic noise and prove the consistency of the estimator under some assumptions.     

Redistribution to the less productive: parallel characterizations of the egalitarian Shapley and consensus values

Theory and Decision - In cooperative game theory with transferable utilities (TU games), there are two well-established ways of redistributing Shapley value payoffs: using egalitarian Shapley...     

Asymptotic Theory of Taguchi’s Natural Estimators of the Signal to Noise Ratio for Dynamic Robust Parameter Design

This article discusses the asymptotic theory of Taguchi’s natural estimators of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) for dynamic robust parameter design. Three asymptotic properties are shown. First, two natural estimators of the population SNR are asymptotically equivalent. Second, both of these estimators are consistent. Finally, both of these estimators are asymptotically normally distributed.     

Estimation of Benchmark Dose as the Threshold Amount of Alcohol Consumption for Blood Pressure in Japanese Workers

In order to determine the threshold amount of alcohol consumption for blood pressure, we calculated the benchmark dose (BMD) of alcohol consumption and its 95% lower confidence interval (BMDL) in Japanese workers. The subjects consisted of 4,383 males and 387 females in a Japanese steel company. The target variables were systolic, diastolic, and mean arterial pressures. The effects of other potential covariates such as age and body mass index were adjusted by including these covariates in the multiple linear regression models. In male workers, BMD/BMDL for alcohol consumption (g/week) at which the probability of an adverse response was estimated to increase by 5% relative to no alcohol consumption, were 396/315 (systolic blood pressure), 321/265 (diastolic blood pressure), and 326/269 (mean arterial pressures). These values were based on significant regression coefficients of alcohol consumption. In female workers, BMD/BMDL for alcohol consumption based on insignificant regression coefficients were 693/134 (systolic blood pressure), 199/90 (diastolic blood pressure), and 267/77 (mean arterial pressure). Therefore, BMDs/BMDLs in males were more informative than those in females as there was no significant relationship between alcohol and blood pressure in females. The threshold amount of alcohol consumption determined in this study provides valuable information for preventing alcohol-induced hypertension.