Falling Short of Highest Life Expectancy: How Many Americans Might Have Been Alive in the Twentieth Century?

Life expectancy at birth in the United States during the twentieth century was lower than in many other highly developed countries. We investigate how this mortality disadvantage in the last 100 years translates into the number of hypothetical lives lost and their sex and age structure. We estimate the hypothetical US population if it had experienced in each decade since 1900 the mortality level of the country with the then highest life expectancy and compare the results to the actual figures in 2000. By 2000, the number of additional people who could have been alive had the mortality levels in the United States been as low as those in countries with the highest life expectancy was 66 million. This number is distributed equally between males and females. Suboptimal mortality at reproductive ages is crucial for the cumulative effect of potential lives lost, resulting from premature deaths of women who could still become first‐time mothers or bear additional children. Out of the 66 million additional persons who could have been alive in 2000, 45 million are attributable to those indirect deaths. Although the differences in the composition of the population by sex and age under the two mortality regimes are minor, the majority of people who might have been alive—54 million—were of working age or younger.     

Narratives of race and nation: Everyday whiteness in Australia

Australia's history as a white nation has been riddled with not only mis-treatment of the ‘other’, but in more recent times of a type of invisibility of the ‘other’ that has disabled many within this nation from recognising the continuation of practices and policies of racial discrimination. This paper presents the findings from research conducted over 2001–03 during the ‘boat people’ crisis in Australia, when a number of everyday individuals volunteered time to assist refugees. It goes on to argue that while the policies of Multiculturalism of the 1970s had attempted to create a more inclusive society and had for the participants in this research transformed into nation-defining narrative, its failure to incorporate everyday people in its inception and continuation was productive of a blind spot in relation to racial treatment because most could believe all was well in this arena.     

Comparison of k independent,zero‐heavy lognormal distributions

Lachenbruch ( 1976 , 2001 ) introduced two‐part tests for comparison of two means in zero‐inflated continuous data. We are extending this approach and compare k independent distributions (by comparing their means, either overall or the departure from equal proportion of zeros and equal means of nonzero values) by introducing two tests: a two‐part Wald test and a two‐part likelihood ratio test. If the continuous part of the distributions is lognormal then the proposed two test statistics have asymptotically chi‐square distribution with $2(k-1)$ degrees of freedom. A simulation study was conducted to compare the performance of the proposed tests with several well‐known tests such as ANOVA, Welch ( 1951 ), Brown & Forsythe ( 1974 ), Kruskal–Wallis, and one‐part Wald test proposed by Tu & Zhou ( 1999 ). Results indicate that the proposed tests keep the nominal type I error and have consistently best power among all tests being compared. An application to rainfall data is provided as an example. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 39: 690–702; 2011. © 2011 Statistical Society of Canada     

Between citizen and bogus asylum seeker: management of migration in the EU through the technology of morality

The article examines the rationality behind the simultaneous enhancement and restriction of mobility of various categories of migrants in the European Union. Through Foucauldian understanding of economic man as a dominant subjectivity in neoliberal risk society, the article shows how the European migration law produces two types of economic men: EU citizens and bogus asylum seekers. Whereas migration of EU citizens is considered not only rational but also moral behaviour, migration of those perceived as bogus asylum seekers is condemned as immoral and irrational. This differing approach towards EU citizens on the one hand, and asylum seekers on the other, constitutes a mode of governing migration in the EU referred in this article as technology of morality.     

Ambivalent Homoprejudice towards Gay Men: Theory Development and Validation

ABSTRACT

Myriad social groups are targets of hostile and benevolent (i.e., ambivalent) prejudice. However, prejudice toward gay men is typically conceptualized as hostile, despite the prevalence of benevolence toward gay men in popular media. This article aims to compare gay men with other targets of ambivalent prejudice (i.e., women and elderly people) and draw on the stereotype content and microaggressions literatures in order to develop a theory of ambivalent homoprejudice. The resultant framework, comprising repellent, adversarial, romanticized, and paternalistic homoprejudice was investigated using seven focus groups of heterosexuals and gay men (N = 22), and the findings were consistent with stereotype content theory. Directions for future research into the deleterious effects of ambivalent homoprejudice and possible empowering interventions are discussed.     

Validation Theory and Research for a Population-Level Measure of Children’s Development,Wellbeing, and School Readiness

This paper delineates general validity and research questions that are underlying an ongoing program of research pertaining to the Early Development Instrument (EDI, Janus and Offord 2007), a population-level measure, on which teachers rate kindergarten children’s developmental outcomes in the social, emotional, physical, cognitive, and communicative domains. It describes the large-scale research projects that are using the EDI to measure children’s developmental outcomes for entire populations (e.g., provinces, cities). Given the uniqueness of the EDI’s use as monitoring tool, or social indicator, for children’s developmental health at an early age, we spell out the opportunities and challenges that these projects provide with regard to validation research. The article sets the stage for the special issue, as it is dedicated to showcase the different aspects of the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical validation research as well as the collaborative community-based projects that are currently being undertaken with respect to the EDI.     

Care of older people in migration contexts: local and transnational arrangements between Peru and Spain

Care arrangements for the elderly are becoming a main social process in contemporary societies due to socio-political and lifestyle changes over the last few decades. The family and the State play a basic role in the construction of care systems and in the establishment of strategies to access care resources. In the present context of migration, these resources interact at a transnational level, challenging family and State migratory regimes. These new realities need the recognition of basic international social rights, as the experiences of Peruvians living in a migration context in Spain show.     

Is the outcome of frailty syndrome gender dependent?

ABSTRACT

We assessed the relationship between the stages of the frailty syndrome and the development of limitations in the activities of daily living, hospitalization, and death among women aged ≥80 as compared to men over the course of 12 months. The Fried criteria and selected tests of comprehensive geriatric assessment were performed in 213 participants (phase 1). After 12 months, detailed feedback on the general health and functioning was collected (phase 2). Statistically significantly higher mortality (p < .05) was found among men as compared to women. The number of deaths in the frail group was higher among frail men than frail women (p < .007).     

ON THE EQUIVALENCE OF SOME INDICES OF SIMILARITY: IMPLICATION FOR BINARY PRESENCE/ABSENCE DATA

Cohen’s kappa, a special case of the weighted kappa, is a chance‐corrected index used extensively to quantify inter‐rater agreement in validation and reliability studies. In this paper, it is shown that in inter‐rater agreement for 2 × 2 tables, for two raters having the same number of opposite ratings, the weighted kappa, Cohen’s kappa, Peirce, Yule, Maxwell and Pilliner and Fleiss indices are identical. This implies that the weights in the weighted kappa are less important under such assumptions. Equivalently, it is shown that for two partitions of the same data set, resulting from two clustering algorithms having the same number of clusters with equal cluster sizes, these similarity indices are identical. Hence, an important characterisation is formulated relating equal numbers of clusters with the same cluster sizes to the presence/absence of a trait in a reliability study. Two numerical examples that exemplify the implication of this relationship are presented.