DISAGGREGATING THE EFFECTS OF RACIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ON EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EXECUTION RATES

This article examines how class inequality may have influenced the historical use of executions in the United States, both within the South and outside of the South. Specifically, this article asks whether executions acted as a mechanism to maintain an exploitative class system in the entire United States, just as lynching maintained a racial caste system in the South. Much of the literature on the historical determinants of macrolevel execution rates has examined these disparities in terms of racial inequality. This study demonstrates that racial inequality alone cannot account for the high number of executions that typified the early twentieth century United States and contends that it is important to expand our understanding of the effects of class inequality on both historical and contemporary trends in executions.     

Associations Between Past Bullying Experiences and Psychosocial and Academic Functioning Among College Students

Abstract. Objectives: This study examined whether childhood bullying victimization was associated with psychosocial and academic functioning at college. Participants: The sample consisted of 413 first-year students from a large northeastern university. Methods: Students completed an online survey in February 2012 that included items assessing past bullying involvement, current psychosocial and academic functioning, and victimization experiences since arriving at college. Results: Regression analyses indicated that reports of past bullying and other peer victimization were associated with lower mental health functioning and perceptions of physical and mental health, but were not associated with perceptions of social life at college, overall college experience, or academic performance. Conclusions: Childhood bullying victimization is associated with poorer mental and physical health among first-year college students. Colleges should consider assessing histories of bullying victimization, along with other past victimization exposures, in their service provision to students.     

North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address. Renewing Sociology: Integral Science,Solidarity, and Loving Kindness

Abstract

We contribute to the debate about the effects of immigration in the United States by analyzing the impact of recent (1980-2000) immigration on the economic outcomes of African Americans. We use Census 2000 data for a sample of 150 U.S. metropolitan areas to examine these outcomes. Our findings indicate that after controlling for a variety of theoretically relevant control variables, increases in recent immigration decrease labor force non-participation and poverty, and increase median earnings, among blacks. We argue that recent immigration expands blacks' job opportunities in or near the middle of the occupational hierarchy (e.g., protective services; office and administrative support). However, we also find a non-linear effect of immigration on black median earnings which indicates an immigrant population threshold where black earnings begin to decline. Thus, both sides of this debate may be correct: middle-class blacks benefit from increased immigration, but the gains of the black middle class do not always offset the fact that poor and lower-skilled blacks are losing out because of increased competition with immigrants.     

Social Work Practice and Education in the US and Canada

This paper discusses shared origins and differences in the social work professions and education programs in the United States and Canada. Consideration is given to how the social work professions in the two countries attempt to resolve the possible inherent conflict between an emphasis on dealing with problems of individuals, with intervention approaches such as casework and therapy, and an emphasis on addressing the problems of society, with social reform intervention approaches. The paper also discusses social work employment in the U.S. and Canada and the structure of social work education in both countries, including consideration of how the profession is legally regulated in each country.     

Decomposition of differences in health expectancy by cause

Health expectancy is a widely used measure for monitoring trends in the health of a population and assessing differences in health among population groups. However, no decomposition method is available to examine the contribution made by causes of death and disability to differences in health expectancy among population groups or periods. We present a method for decomposing differences in health expectancy, based on the Sullivan method. This method is an extension of the decomposition method for life expectancy developed by Arriaga. We illustrate the method and its added value by decomposing male-female differences in health expectancy for the Netherlands.     

Adapting the Own Children Method to allow comparison of fertility between populations with different marriage regimes

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we argue that the standard variants for calculating marital fertility can produce misleading results and require strong assumptions, particularly when applied to social or spatial subgroups. We present two new variants of the method for calculating marital fertility: the first of these allows for the presence of non-marital fertility and the second also permits the more robust calculation of rates for social subgroups of the population. We illustrate and test these using full-count census data for England and Wales in 1911.     

Modeling and Forecasting Health Expectancy: Theoretical Framework and Application

Life expectancy continues to grow in most Western countries; however, a major remaining question is whether longer life expectancy will be associated with more or fewer life years spent with poor health. Therefore, complementing forecasts of life expectancy with forecasts of health expectancies is useful. To forecast health expectancy, an extension of the stochastic extrapolative models developed for forecasting total life expectancy could be applied, but instead of projecting total mortality and using regular life tables, one could project transition probabilities between health states simultaneously and use multistate life table methods. In this article, we present a theoretical framework for a multistate life table model in which the transition probabilities depend on age and calendar time. The goal of our study is to describe a model that projects transition probabilities by the Lee-Carter method, and to illustrate how it can be used to forecast future health expectancy with prediction intervals around the estimates. We applied the method to data on the Dutch population aged 55 and older, and projected transition probabilities until 2030 to obtain forecasts of life expectancy, disability-free life expectancy, and probability of compression of disability.     

Scale estimators for symmetric stable distributions

This paper reports on a simulation comparison of scale estimators for symmetric stable distributions in terms of their ability to identify the population with the greater scale. The modified geometric mean is found to be superior to the sample standard deviation and the Fama-Roll estimator for the larger values of the characteristic exponent, while the Fama-Roll estimator is judged superior for the smaller values. Further, this study sheds some light on the question of the appropriate sample size for discriminating risk measurement in investment analysis when the samples are taken from symmetric stable distributions.     

Third order asymptotics: connections among test quantities

Saddlepoint methods, extended to distribution functions, can provide highly accurate tail probabilities for testing real parameters in exponential models. For extensions, asymptotic connections among various test quantities are needed. For five quantities, the maximum likelihood departure standardized by observed and expected information, the score function standardized by observed and expected information, and the signed square root of the likelihood ratio statistic, the needed connections to third order are recorded. Their use is illustrated by a simple integration proof of the Lugannani and Rice formula.