The Emergence of Worthy Targets: Official Frames and Deviance Narratives Within the FBI

Sociological Forum - How do agencies of social control construct understandings of their targets, and how do these constructions shape subsequent outcomes? In the case of the FBI's...     

A similarity analysis of curves

The authors propose a method for comparing two samples of curves. The notion of similarity between two curves is the basis of three statistics they suggest for testing the null hypothesis of no difference between the two groups. They exploit standard tools from functional data analysis to preprocess the observed curves and use the permutation distribution under the null hypothesis to obtain p‐values for their tests. They explore the operating characteristics of these tests through simulations and as an application, compare the ganglioside distribution in brain tissue between old and young rats.     

Changes in Female Labour Supply in the Netherlands 1989–1998: The Case of Married and Cohabiting Women

It is well-known that married and cohabitingwomen differ in labour supply. But we know verylittle about the causes of this difference. Isit due to differences in characteristics, likeage, presence and ages of children, own netwage rate, and net income of the partner? Or isit a difference in behaviour that – even aftercontrolling for variation in characteristics –is the basic cause? In this article we try toanswer these questions for Dutch married andcohabiting women. We use data of nationalsurveys by Statistics Netherlands for 1989 and1998. This also allows us to investigatewhether there have been important changes inthe last decade. Because we are able to comparethe results with those of an analogous analysisthat two of the authors did on similar Dutchdata for 1981 we are able to draw conclusionsabout changes that took place over the lasttwenty years. The results show that the massivegrowth in female labour force participation isespecially due to the growth in participationby married women. A slight decrease in labourmarket participation of cohabiting women can beobserved in the last decade. This seems to bethe result of cohabitation becoming morenormal, including cohabitation when there areyoung children in the household.     

Low birth weight,social factors,and developmental outcomes among children in the United States

We used six waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Data (1986-1996) to assess the relative impact of adverse birth outcomes vis-à-vis social risk factors on children's developmental outcomes. Using the Peabody Individual Achievement Tests of Mathematics and Reading Recognition as our outcome variables, we also evaluated the dynamic nature of biological and social risk factors from ages 6 to 14. We found the following: (1) birth weight is significantly related to developmental outcomes, net of important social and economic controls; (2) the effect associated with adverse birth outcomes is significantly more pronounced at very low birth weights (< 1,500 grams) than at moderately low birth weights (1,500-2,499 grams); (3) whereas the relative effect of very low-birth-weight status is large, the effect of moderately low weight status, when compared with race/ethnicity and mother's education, is small; and (4) the observed differentials between moderately low-birth-weight and normal-birth-weight children are substantially smaller among older children in comparison with younger children.     

The Rayleigh–Lindley model: properties and applications

In this paper, the Rayleigh–Lindley (RL) distribution is introduced, obtained by compounding the Rayleigh and Lindley discrete distributions, where the compounding procedure follows an approach similar to the one previously studied by Adamidis and Loukas in some other contexts. The resulting distribution is a two-parameter model, which is competitive with other parsimonious models such as the gamma and Weibull distributions. We study some properties of this new model such as the moments and the mean residual life. The estimation was approached via EM algorithm. The behavior of these estimators was studied in finite samples through a simulation study. Finally, we report two real data illustrations in order to show the performance of the proposed model versus other common two-parameter models in the literature. The main conclusion is that the model proposed can be a valid alternative to other competing models well established in the literature.     

Disparities in access to residential plumbing: a binational comparison of environmental injustice in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez

Waterborne diseases are a serious concern in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where many residents still lack access to plumbing. After using a relative risk method to illustrate the characteristics of neighborhoods at risk for waterborne diseases based on lack of plumbing, we ran spatial regression models predicting lack of plumbing to uncover similarities and differences between the two cities. In terms of similarities, lower mean education and higher proportions of young children were associated with lacking plumbing in both cities. Lower population density and higher proportions of female-headed households were significant only in Juárez, and proportion renting was negatively associated with lacking plumbing in Juárez, but positively associated in El Paso, pointing to differences in socio-spatial structure between the cities. In framing this issue as an environmental injustice, this study draws attention of the existence of households lacking plumbing in the United States and Mexico.     

A flexible cure rate model based on the polylogarithm distribution

Models for dealing with survival data in the presence of a cured fraction of individuals have attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners in recent years. In this paper, we propose a cure rate model under the competing risks scenario. For the number of causes that can lead to the event of interest, we assume the polylogarithm distribution. The model is flexible in the sense it encompasses some well-known models, which can be tested using large sample test statistics applied to nested models. Maximum-likelihood estimation based on the EM algorithm and hypothesis testing are investigated. Results of simulation studies designed to gauge the performance of the estimation method and of two test statistics are reported. The methodology is applied in the analysis of a data set.