Children's Challenges to Efforts to Save Them: Competing Knowledges in the Child Welfare System

The child welfare system is founded on a belief that children are sometimes endangered by their parents or caregivers and must be saved by agents of the state. Children are perceived as objects to be saved, but they are rarely seen as active strategists in their interactions with child welfare system social workers. Using ethnographic data collected during observations of social workers and juvenile court proceedings, this article shows how children have their own complex understandings of state intervention and strive—to varying degrees of success—to contest official views of their lives and provide competing forms of knowledge. Specifically, children attempt to rework state actors' perceptions of their families and familial problems, use state actors as an audience for their versions of their lives, and attempt to mobilize state power for personal or material gain.     

Positive events and quality of life

Research evidence that might either support or deny the substantive contribution of positive life experiences on health and well-being would be of great value. Regrettably clinical research has been concerned primarily with the disruption in well-being and adjustment associated with stressful or otherwise aversive events. While positive events and their effects have not been ignored altogether, investigators traditionally have given them short shrift in developing and testing models of mental health and psychopathology. This paper evaluates some of these beginning efforts at testing the positive events on psychological functioning, and suggests some new directions for future work in this area.     

Spatial prediction of crystalline defects observed in molecular dynamic simulations of plastic damage

Molecular dynamic computer simulation is an essential tool in materials science to study atomic properties of materials in extreme environments and guide development of new materials. We propose a statistical analysis to emulate simulation output with the ultimate goal of efficiently approximating the computationally intensive simulation. We compare several spatial regression approaches including conditional autoregression (CAR), discrete wavelets transform (DWT), and principle components analysis (PCA). The methods are applied to simulation of copper atoms with twin wall and dislocation loop defects, under varying tilt tension angles. We find that CAR and DWT yield accurate results but fail to capture extreme defects, yet PCA better captures defect structure.     

Pregnant with Possibility: Reflections on Embodiment, Access, and Inclusion in Field Research

Contributing to a body of theory that advocates for reflexivity and consideration of embodiment by social researchers, this article explores aspects of performing qualitative research—fieldwork and interviews—on intersections of the private family and the public state while visibly pregnant. Drawing on the author's personal experience of collecting data while pregnant, the paper shows how being pregnant facilitated access in the field, how it helped to reveal unspoken beliefs about normative and non-normative reproduction, and how pregnancy and parenthood provided a level of credibility with respondents. This article also considers the situated meanings of pregnancy in the context of academia.     

Power,Positionality, and the Ethic of Care in Qualitative Research

Qualitative Sociology - Building on the definition offered by Aspers and Corte, I argue that qualitative research is not qualitative simply because it encodes for the ability “to get...     

Disparities in the Quality of Pediatric Dental Care: New Research and Needed Changes

In the United States, there are significant disparities in the oral health of children from families with high and low socioeconomic status and between majority and minority children. Extant research on these health differences has focused predominately on caregiver knowledge, beliefs, and practices as well as structural barriers such as Medicaid coverage, dentist availability, and transportation issues. Little attention has been paid to the quality of care families experience when taking their child to the dentist or the ways in which dental schools train their students to work with young children. This policy report describes some of the experiences of low-income and ethnically diverse young children and their parents in dental clinics and highlights some of the weaknesses of dental training. We contend that increasing the standards for dental training and practice are necessary for improving young children's oral health and reducing these disparities.     

The Child Welfare System and State Intervention in Families: From Historical Patterns to Future Questions

The child welfare system remains one of the most important welfare institutions in regulating family life and meanings of gender. However, it has largely escaped sociological analysis. This article provides a framework for thinking about the meanings of state intervention in family life and describes the legal and procedural machinations of the system by providing an overview of the history of the system. In doing so, this article elucidates the complex and contradictory mandates the child-protective services system and its actors face and raises several questions or quandaries that remain under-explored and deserving of analytical attention.     

Multiple window discrete scan statistic for higher-order Markovian sequences

Accurate and efficient methods to detect unusual clusters of abnormal activity are needed in many fields such as medicine and business. Often the size of clusters is unknown; hence, multiple (variable) window scan statistics are used to identify clusters using a set of different potential cluster sizes. We give an efficient method to compute the exact distribution of multiple window discrete scan statistics for higher-order, multi-state Markovian sequences. We define a Markov chain to efficiently keep track of probabilities needed to compute p-values for the statistic. The state space of the Markov chain is set up by a criterion developed to identify strings that are associated with observing the specified values of the statistic. Using our algorithm, we identify cases where the available approximations do not perform well. We demonstrate our methods by detecting unusual clusters of made free throw shots by National Basketball Association players during the 2009–2010 regular season.