New Frontiers: Territory,Social Spaces,and the State

Sociological Forum -     

Seed distributions for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament

Bracketology, the art of successfully picking all the winners in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) annual men’s Division I college basketball championship tournament, has become a favorite national activity. In spite of the challenges and uncertainty faced in this endeavor, patterns exist in how the seeds appear in each round, particularly the later rounds. This paper statistically analyzes tournaments from 1985 to 2010, finding that the distribution of seeds that win in the rounds beyond the Sweet Sixteen can be modeled as a truncated geometric random variable. This model allows one to consider any set of seeds in each tournament round and compute the probability that these seeds would win in that round; this methodology can evaluate the likelihood of each seed combination in each tournament round, based on past tournament history. Finally, each tournament from 1985 through 2010 is analyzed using this model to assess its likelihood and measure the probability of its occurrence.     

FIRM DEFAULT AND AGGREGATE FLUCTUATIONS

This paper studies the relationship between macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate defaults while conditioning on industry affiliation and an extensive set of firm‐specific factors. By using a panel data set for virtually all incorporated Swedish businesses over 1990–2009, a period which includes a full‐scale banking crisis, we find strong evidence for a substantial and stable impact from aggregate fluctuations on business defaults. A standard logit model with financial ratios augmented with macroeconomic factors can account surprisingly well for the outburst in business defaults during the banking crisis, as well as the subsequent fluctuations in default frequencies. Moreover, the effects of macroeconomic variables differ across industries in an economically intuitive way. Out‐of‐sample evaluations show that our approach is superior to models that exclude macro information and standard well‐fitting time‐series models. Our analysis shows that firm‐specific factors are useful in ranking firms’ relative riskiness, but that macroeconomic factors are necessary to understand fluctuations in the absolute risk level.     

Immigration,Bureaucracies and Policy Formulation: The Case of Quebec

Based on an ethnography of one illuminating case – the formulation of new immigration policy statement entitled “Together, we are Quebec” between 2014 and 2016 – this article argues that policy formulation is an important site of power and influence over immigration-related policies for bureaucrats. In dialogue with concepts and theories from public administration, it demonstrates that a broad mandate of reform and modernization, coupled with political tensions surrounding diversity, created opportunities for the bureaucracy to influence Quebec's immigration policy following its interests, relations, expertise and experience. In this case, the bureaucracy's influence operated through two pathways: problem definition and consensus building. While this influence is partially contingent on political and institutional characteristics of the Quebec context, this case shows that scholarship on immigration policy and politics should embrace a much broader reading of the influence of bureaucrats on the content and development of immigration-related policies.     

Local realities: a frontier perspective on child protection team practice

This article presents a case study of a child protection team in a frontier county in Montana. Narratives from individual and group interviews highlight team members' experiences and the structuring of team practice in their frontier community, the power and challenge of community culture and history, and the interplay of constructions of children and child abuse as key elements that influence and shape team practice. This exploration suggests a framework for rethinking child protection team practice in diverse locations.     

Rethinking professional quality of life for social workers: Inclusion of ecological self-care barriers

ABSTRACT

This study conducted a survey among social workers in a mid-Atlantic state in the U.S. and examined the relationship between self-care behaviors, self-care barriers and compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress (STS) from an ecological perspective. The study found that social workers had a moderate level of compassion satisfaction, low risk of burnout, and low risk of STS. Bachelor-degree social workers had higher levels of burnout and lower levels of compassion satisfaction than others. Multiple regression results showed that self-care behaviors and self-care barriers did not predict compassion satisfaction. Self-care behaviors and self-care barriers were significantly associated with the level of burnout. Self-care barriers significantly contributed to STS, while self-care behaviors did not significantly decrease STS. This study implies that promoting self-care behaviors and decreasing self-care barriers can promote higher levels of professional quality of life. In addition to social workers’ individual-level self-care activities that are often stressed in prior research on STS and burnout, employers, supervisors, family members, and community members play a critical role in promoting a manageable work-life balance for social workers, thereby allowing them to use more self-care behaviors, while reducing barriers to self-care and ultimately reducing risk of burnout and STS.     

Impact of child sexual abuse disclosure on the health of nonoffending parents: A longitudinal perspective

The impact of child sexual abuse (CSA) disclosure on parents’ psychological health has been documented among samples of nonoffending parents. Much less is known about the parents’ physical health. This study assesses the longitudinal impact of CSA disclosure on both the mental and physical health of parents and explores potential gender differences. Interviews with 92 mothers and 32 fathers were completed approximately 12 months and 18 months following disclosure. Generalized as well as mixed model analyses revealed that mothers reported more psychological distress, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms and activity limitation than fathers. With the exception of PTSD symptoms which showed a significant reduction over time, all other psychological and physical symptoms persisted. The findings highlight the importance of ensuring services for an extended period for the small proportion of parents who display especially high vulnerability.     

New frontiers: Remote sensing in social science research

An expedition is planned for highly detailed remote sensing of the physical and environmental aspects of planet Earth. However, the possibilities of such remote sensing for social and political research have been largely overlooked by sociologists. Remote sensing is a potentially revolutionary instrument with significant methodological and theoretical implications. Changes in the Earth's environment and surface features will be monitored continuously in an objective way. Some of these changes could be used by social scientists as indicators of social and political changes.