Student-faculty sexual relationships: An empirical test of two explanatory models

Media reports, stereotypes in popular literature, and a limited number of research studies describe student-faculty sexual relationships as either an exchange of sex for grades (initiated either by a lascivious professor or a self-serving student) and/or as the result of the psychological process of transference. Results from in-depth interviews with 11 students and 14 faculty members who had had student-teacher sexual affairs show only minimal support for either the exchange or transference models. We present two case histories that are typical of the student-faculty sexual liaisons we studied; they illustrate that these relationships are in many ways like other sexual relationships insofar as they are based on mutual attraction, as well as sex-related, power-discrepant roles. Student-faculty relationships are problematic (i.e., unethical) not so much because of the power discrepancy between a (usually male) professor and a (usually female) student, but because there is a confounding of public and private roles. This study contributes to this largely unresearched subject area in that it seriously questions the validity of negative sex stereotypes explicit in the exchange model and examines student-faculty relationships in sociological terms.     

Different routes,common directions? Activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK

This article analyses and compares the development of activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK from the mid-1990s. Despite their diverse welfare traditions and important differences in the organisation and delivery of benefits and services for the unemployed, both countries have recently introduced large-scale compulsory activation programmes for young people. These programmes share a number of common features, especially a combination of strong compulsion and an apparently contradictory emphasis on client-centred training and support for participants. The suggested transition from the 'Keynesian welfare state' to the 'Schumpeterian workfare regime' is used as a framework to discuss the two countries' recent moves towards activation. It is argued that while this framework is useful in explaining the general shift towards active labour-market policies in Europe, it alone cannot account for the particular convergence of the Danish and British policies in the specific area of youth activation. Rather, a number of specific political factors explaining the development of policies in the mid-1990s are suggested. The article concludes that concerns about mass youth unemployment, the influence of the 'dependency culture' debate in various forms, cross-national policy diffusion and, crucially, the progressive re-engineering of compulsory activation by strong centre-left governments have all contributed to the emergence of policies that mix compulsion and a commitment to the centrality of work with a 'client-centred approach' that seeks to balance more effective job seeking with human resource development. However, attempts to combine the apparently contradictory concepts of 'client-centredness' and compulsion are likely to prove politically fragile, and both countries risk lurching towards an increasingly workfarist approach.     

Group-based Criminal Trajectory Analysis Using Cross-validation Criteria

In this article, we discuss the challenge of determining the number of classes in a family of finite mixture models with the intent of improving the specification of latent class models for criminal trajectories. We argue that the traditional method of using either the Proc Traj or Mplus package to compute and maximize the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) is problematic: Proc Traj and Mplus do not always compute the MLE (and hence the BIC) accurately, and furthermore, BIC on its own does not always indicate a reasonable-seeming number of groups even when computed correctly. As an alternative, we propose the new freely available software package, crimCV, written in the R-programming language, and the methodology of cross-validation error (CVE) to determine the number of classes in a fair and reasonable way. In this article, we apply the new methodology to two samples of N = 378 and N = 386 male juvenile offenders whose criminal behavior was tracked from late childhood/early adolescence into adulthood. We show how using CVE, as implemented with crimCV, can provide valuable insight for determining the number of latent classes in these cases. These results suggest that cross-validation may represent a promising alternative to AIC or BIC for determining an optimal number of classes in finite mixture models, and in particular for setting, the number of latent classes in group-based trajectory analysis.     

Emotional labor in social workers' practice

The meeting between service users and social workers is emotional, since it is centered on significant challenges and changes in the service users' lives. Emotions are thus always at play in social work, but are managed in various ways by the professional. In an explorative qualitative case study at two Danish social services departments, we identified three types of emotional labor: (1) when the social worker shuts off emotions both during and after the meeting; (2) when the social worker defers emotions and processes them at a later time; and (3) when emotions dominate, and a case gets ‘under the skin’ of the social worker. Emotional labor can have both positive and negative effect on the work, and knowledge about different kinds of emotional labor can aid professional discussion about emotions at the work place as well as the psychosocial working environment for the social workers, factors which help improve practice. The study showed that emotional labor is a multidimensional concept, hence it is not just managed in different ways by social workers; it is always related to the specific emotion culture and the community of practice at the work place.     

Boundary and Bias Correction in Kernel Hazard Estimation

A new class of local linear hazard estimators based on weighted least square kernel estimation is considered. The class includes the kernel hazard estimator of Ramlau-Hansen (1983), which has the same boundary correction property as the local linear regression estimator (see Fan & Gijbels, 1996). It is shown that all the local linear estimators in the class have the same pointwise asymptotic properties. We derive the multiplicative bias correction of the local linear estimator. In addition we propose a new bias correction technique based on bootstrap estimation of additive bias. This latter method has excellent theoretical properties. Based on an extensive simulation study where we compare the performance of competing estimators, we also recommend the use of the additive bias correction in applied work.     

Immigrant over-education: evidence from Denmark

This paper uses register-based panel data to examine over-education amongst immigrants in Denmark. Foreign-educated immigrants are found to be more prone to over-education than both native Danes and immigrants educated in Denmark. Labour market experience reduces this risk, whereas periods of unemployment make a person more likely to accept a job for which he is over-qualified. Over-educated workers earn slightly more than their adequately matched colleagues, but less than if they had been appropriately matched in a higher level job. Foreign-educated immigrants gain the least from over-education.     

Local linear regression with adaptive orthogonal fitting for the wind power application

Short-term forecasting of wind generation requires a model of the function for the conversion of meteorological variables (mainly wind speed) to power production. Such a power curve is nonlinear and bounded, in addition to being nonstationary. Local linear regression is an appealing nonparametric approach for power curve estimation, for which the model coefficients can be tracked with recursive Least Squares (LS) methods. This may lead to an inaccurate estimate of the true power curve, owing to the assumption that a noise component is present on the response variable axis only. Therefore, this assumption is relaxed here, by describing a local linear regression with orthogonal fit. Local linear coefficients are defined as those which minimize a weighted Total Least Squares (TLS) criterion. An adaptive estimation method is introduced in order to accommodate nonstationarity. This has the additional benefit of lowering the computational costs of updating local coefficients every time new observations become available. The estimation method is based on tracking the left-most eigenvector of the augmented covariance matrix. A robustification of the estimation method is also proposed. Simulations on semi-artificial datasets (for which the true power curve is available) underline the properties of the proposed regression and related estimation methods. An important result is the significantly higher ability of local polynomial regression with orthogonal fit to accurately approximate the target regression, even though it may hardly be visible when calculating error criteria against corrupted data.     

Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India: Gramscian Reflections on Land Acquisition Legislation

Abstract

This article explores how, in the context of an unfolding process of neoliberalisation in India, new terrains of resistance are crystallising for subaltern groups seeking to contest the marginalising consequences of this process. We focus particularly on the emergence of India's ‘new rights agenda’ through a study of the making of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2013. Conceiving of the emergence of the ‘new rights agenda’ as a hegemonic process, we decipher how law-making is a complex and contradictory practice seeking to negotiate a compromise equilibrium between, on the one hand, subaltern groups vulnerable to marginalisation and capable of mobilisation; and, on the other, dominant groups whose economic interests are linked to the exploitation of the spaces of accumulation recently pried open by market-oriented reforms. The negotiation of this equilibrium, we suggest, is ultimately intended to facilitate India's process of neoliberalisation.     

Chinks in Gender?

This comment argues that differences between clinical and normal populations, between clinical data and sociological data, and differences in social class and cultural settings should be taken into account in order to understand the varying psychological dynamics behind self representations. Research from the Nordic countries indicates that young women's relationships with their mothers and fathers are becoming more similar. The daughters appreciate their mothers' ability to combine independent lives of their own with care for children and family, and fathers are to a higher degree than before perceived as warm and caring figures. This may imply that the gender-differentiated psychological roles of the mother and the father in the heterosexual nuclear family are becoming less distinct. If chinks undermine not only the merged attachment but also gender as such, this question arises: What ways and to what extent are the new psychological dispositions Susie Orbach describes actually gendered?