Values and Vegetarianism: An Exploratory Analysis1

The American diet has changed substantially over the last few decades. These changes provide a test for social theory and have substantial effects on the demand for various food products, thus impacting U.S. agriculture. In this paper a rapidly growing dietary choice—vegetarianism—is explored. Prevalence of various forms of vegetarianism is estimated in a representative sample of a suburban population and factors that influence choice of a vegetarian diet are examined. About 7 percent of the sample report they are vegetarians. The prevalence of vegetarianism is not influenced by age, gender, or education, but individuals holding traditional values are less likely to be vegetarian than others. There also is some evidence mat individuals holding altruistic values are more likely than others to be vegetarians.     

Telling and Re‐telling Stories: The Use of Narrative and Drawing in a Group Intervention with Parents and Children in a Remote Aboriginal Community

The Let's Start Parent‐Child Program is a manualised parent‐child program which aims to improve educational, social and emotional outcomes for Aboriginal parents and their four‐ to seven‐year‐old children. It has been implemented in the Northern Territory, Australia on the Tiwi Islands and in Darwin since 2005. This paper outlines the adaptation of the program to include narrative approaches, the sharing of stories and the use of expressive arts as a way to build understanding between program leaders and participating families. An example from a recent program is used to illustrate how the sharing of stories and expressive use of art engages and binds group participants together. It supports parents to tell their own stories, to speak about their lived experience, to reconsider aspects of their own and their children's experiences and to achieve an increased awareness of their personal resources and a sense of self‐empowerment. The program is designed and delivered with sensitivity to individual parents, children and families, where cultural and interpersonal differences and different developmental and family situations can be taken into account.     

Reputation spillover effects from grant‐providing institutions

There is a broad academic discussion about the impact of funding grants from a foundation or a government department on individual support intentions toward the nonprofit organization receiving the grant. However, the role of the grant provider's reputation has frequently been overlooked. In this study, we experimentally tested whether there is a reputation spillover effect of a grant‐providing organization. Based on a real‐life example, we asked citizens to rate their willingness to donate to a nonprofit organization, and we experimentally manipulated the available information on funding sources. We test this for both a government department and a foundation as a grant provider. Our results suggest that not the act of receiving a grant, but the citizens' awareness about the funding organization—at least in the case of a foundation—has an impact on support intentions. In contrast, for a prominent government department as a grant provider, we did not find support for a reputation spillover effect.     

The behavioural wedge

When nations fail to agree, can individual citizens make a difference? The third of our post-Copenhagen features is by Jonathan Gilligan, Thomas Dietz, Gerald T. Gardner, Paul C. Stern , and Michael P. Vandenbergh . They look at the effects that voluntary actions by individuals can have, and at the policies that can best encourage such actions.     

Tolerance‐based error reduction in multi‐agent bioassays

Some degree of error is inevitable in multi‐agent bioassays regardless of design or measurement technology. Estimation error can be reduced post facto by exploiting the matrix partial ordering of the bioassay survival estimates. The standard method for this is order‐restricted regression (ORR). If the joint action of the bioassay agents admits a tolerance‐based interpretation, additional structure beyond matrix partial ordering is available, leading to a new method of error reduction. This tolerance‐based error reduction (TBER) procedure almost always outperforms ORR. Like ORR, TBER applies to complete factorial bioassay designs and, using weighting, to incomplete designs.     

On the Utility of Robust and Resampling Procedures1

Abstract Kassab (1990) makes an important methodological contribution by urging the use of robust regression methods in the study of community economic impacts and by indicating the utility of the bootstrap in assessing standard errors in robust regression. By introducing the notion of a contaminating distribution, we reconcile differences between her claim that ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is biased when outliers are present and standard linear model theory that does not make assumptions about the shape of the residual distribution in proving OLS an unbiased estimator. The contaminating distribution provides a framework for rural sociologists to link their statistical assumptions to a substantive understanding of the phenomena being studied. We suggest an alternative regression estimation strategy that may be more robust than the technique she uses. We also discuss an approach to bootstrapping that is more appropriate for macro-level social indicator data than the one she describes. An appendix discusses the software available for implementing these methods.     

Coaching und Internet? Chancen und Grenzen des Internets für Coaches und Klienten

Coaching and internet? Chances and limitations of the internet to coaches and clientsThis article describes potentials and limitations of Internet-based coaching and counseling. It focuses on the capabilities of the Internet as a medium of information and communication and its significance for coaches, clients and newbies. Some suggestions are given on how coaches and clients could use the Internet for working purposes. The necessity to analyze and integrate important medium-specific, individual-specific and interpersonal factors should be kept in mind. This follows the fact that they function together in a dynamic way, as the media-ecologic model of Döring (2003) postulates.     

Domestic violence beliefs and perceptions among college students

This study builds on current research, investigating the relationships between sociodemographic variables and domestic violence attitudes and beliefs among college students. Data from the Relationship Characteristics Study conducted in 2001, which includes a sample of 1,938 college students, are used to replicate and extend the research of Carlson and Worden (2001, 2005), the developers of the attitudes and beliefs items. In addition, the research portends to analyze factors associated with domestic violence causation endorsement, physical and sexual abuse, stalking, and verbal abuse beliefs, including gender, race and ethnicity, university year, parents' education, family income, parents' marital status, and relationship status. Results are consistent with the rates reported by the item developers. Further, results demonstrate that sociodemographic variables are correlated with physical and sexual abuse and verbal abuse beliefs and causation endorsement.     

The zero-inflated Poisson model and the decayed, missing and filled teeth index in dental epidemiology

For frequency counts, the situation of extra zeros often arises in biomedical applications. This is demonstrated with count data from a dental epidemiological study in Belo Horizonte (the Belo Horizonte caries prevention study) which evaluated various programmes for reducing caries. Extra zeros, however, violate the variance–mean relationship of the Poisson error structure. This extra-Poisson variation can easily be explained by a special mixture model, the zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) model. On the basis of the ZIP model, a graphical device is presented which not only summarizes the mixing distribution but also provides visual information about the overall mean. This device can be exploited to evaluate and compare various groups. Ways are discussed to include covariates and to develop an extension of the conventional Poisson regression. Finally, a method to evaluate intervention effects on the basis of the ZIP regression model is described and applied to the data of the Belo Horizonte caries prevention study.