Toward Mutual Support: A Task Analysis of the Relational Justice Approach to Infidelity

Gender, culture, and power issues are intrinsic to the etiology of infidelity, but the clinical literature offers little guidance on how to work with these concerns. The Relational Justice Approach (RJA) to infidelity (Williams, Family Process, 2011, 50, 516) uniquely places gender and power issues at the heart of clinical change; however, this approach has not been systematically studied. Therefore a qualitative task analysis was utilized to understand how change occurs in RJA. The findings indicated four necessary tasks: (a) creating an equitable foundation for healing, (b) creating space for alternate gender discourse, (c) pursuing relational responsibility of powerful partner, and (d) new experience of mutual support. Therapists' attention to power dynamics that organize couple relationships, leadership in intervening in power processes, and socio‐cultural attunement to gender discourses were foundational to this work. These findings help clarify the processes by which mutual healing from the trauma of infidelity may occur and offer empirically based actions that therapists can take to facilitate mutual support.     

The resettlement in Canada of 4,527 Polish ex‐servicemen, 1946–47

After the Second World War, a Canadian immigration policy was negotiated with the United Kingdom whereby Polish ex‐servicemen were resettled in Canada. The policy was developed and presented with great care and resulted in 4,527 Polish ex‐servicemen coming to Canada in 1946 and 1947. Domestic and international functions and dysfunctions of the scheme for Canada and the Polish ex‐servicemen are analysed to determine its success or failure. With regard to the short‐ and long‐term contributions the Poles made to agriculture, the scheme was a failure.     

Reverse Mortgage Fraud Against Seniors: Recognition and Education of a Burgeoning Problem

With the senescent population and the popularity of aging in place, many seniors are attracted to reverse mortgages to plan for retirement and to maintain their existing housing situation. Although theoretically reverse mortgages represent a viable investment product for those considering retirement, several pitfalls are possible for seniors, who can be unsuspecting victims of fraud. This article provides information detailing the etymology of fraud activities within this market through a storyboard that depicts the various stages of the fraud process. It is hoped that such a tool can enhance the education of consumers on this mortgage product.     

On repeated measures analysis with misspecified covariance structure

In recent years various sophisticated methods have been developed for the analysis of repeated measures, or longitudinal data. The more traditional approach, based on a normal likelihood function, has been shown to be unsatisfactory, in the sense of yielding asymptotically biased estimates when the covariance structure is misspecified. More recent methodology, based on generalized linear models and quasi-likelihood estimation, has gained widespread acceptance as 'generalized estimating equations'. However, this also has theoretical problems. In this paper a suggestion is made for improving the asymptotic behaviour of estimators by using the older approach, implemented via Gaussian estimation. The resulting estimating equations include the quasi-score function as one component, so the methodology proposed can be viewed as a combination of Gaussian estimation and generalized estimating equations which has a firmer asymptotic basis than either alone has.     

HAC Corrections for Strongly Autocorrelated Time Series

Applied work routinely relies on heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) standard errors when conducting inference in a time series setting. As is well known, however, these corrections perform poorly in small samples under pronounced autocorrelations. In this article, I first provide a review of popular methods to clarify the reasons for this failure. I then derive inference that remains valid under a specific form of strong dependence. In particular, I assume that the long-run properties can be approximated by a stationary Gaussian AR(1) model, with coefficient arbitrarily close to one. In this setting, I derive tests that come close to maximizing a weighted average power criterion. Small sample simulations show these tests to perform well, also in a regression context.     

Influence functions applied to the estimation of mean rain rate

In this paper we illustrate the usefulness of influence functions for studying properties of various statistical estimators of mean rain rate using space-borne radar data. In Martin (1999), estimators using censoring, minimum chi-square, and least squares are compared in terms of asymptotic variance. Here, we use influence functions to consider robustness properties of the same estimators. We also obtain formulas for the asymptotic variance of the estimators using influence functions, and thus show that they may also be used for studying relative efficiency. The least squares estimator, although less efficient, is shown to be more robust in the sense that it has the smallest gross-error sensitivity. In some cases, influence functions associated with the estimators reveal counterintuitive behaviour. For example, observations that are less than the mean rain rate may increase the estimated mean. The additional information gleaned from influence functions may be used to understand better and improve the estimation procedures themselves.     

Estimating functions in the Bayesian paradigm

Received: August 3, 1998; revised version: June 9, 1999