The Next Generation of Diversity and Intergroup Relations Research

Recent court decisions and cultural shifts have led to a new focus for work on equity and equality of outcomes in educational settings. This article reviews the contributions of recent diversity studies and then focuses on a longitudinal study of 4,403 college students attending nine public universities. Results show that student interaction with diverse peers during college results in changes in student cognitive, social, and democratic outcomes by the second year of college. Campus efforts to provide opportunities for students to learn about diverse groups inside and outside the classroom have an appreciable impact on students.     

A statistical procedure for representing state fragility and transition paths

State fragility is a concept that entered the political discourse in the last decades producing remarkable implications for aid allocation and international policies. The operationalization of this concept has generated a number of composite indices to produce rankings of fragile states. However, the temporal dimension of the driving forces leading to fragility has been rather neglected. This article discusses a statistical procedure that helps to represent the global fragility of a country and the path that a country has followed or will follow in the future when possibly entering into (or escaping from) a fragility condition. Specifically, multiple factor analysis is applied to depict vulnerable and weak countries, and to identify the fundamental forces that determine their overall fragility. Moreover, the trajectories of countries along the years are estimated using partial factor scores. Finally, the path of each country is predicted by means of parsimonious regression models, based on a reduced set of explanatory variables, and according to scenarios elaborated from available international outlooks.     

College students’ knowledge about Sickle Cell Disease

ABSTRACT

Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a serious health problem affecting millions around the world. Key to prevention is knowledge about the disease and the reproductive implications. This study explored college students’ knowledge about SCD. Participants included 416 college students at a North Texas campus between October and December 2014. A cross-sectional survey design using an 18-question survey was used. Although most participants had heard of SCD, 21% had never heard of the disease. Furthermore, participants lacked knowledge regarding the differences between the disease and carrier status, prevalence, reproductive implications, prevention, and testing. Findings showed that couples had more knowledge about SCD compared to singles and there were no significant differences between those with children and those without indicating a need for education before they start dating. Most participants had not undergone SCD carrier screening and had no interest in screening. The Universal Prevention approach would be a suitable approach and should be utilized in improving knowledge about SCD.     

Multi-step forecasts from threshold ARMA models using asymmetric loss functions

The forecasts generation from nonlinear time series models is investigated under general loss functions. After presenting the main results and some relevant features of these functions, the Linex loss has been used to generate multi-step forecasts from threshold autoregressive moving average models showing their main properties and some results connected to a proper transformation of the forecast errors. A simulation exercise highlights interesting properties of the proposed predictors, both in terms of their bias and their distribution, further clarifying how the Linex predictor can be helpful in empirical applications.     

Postural analysis of eight university student wheelchair users when performing written exercises in their classroom: a case study in Santiago de Cali, Colombia

In students with physical disabilities, the more energy and time required and invested into finding a good posture, the longer the learning process takes. For this reason, the objective of this study was to characterize the posture in the act of writing of wheelchair users in a classroom. Eight students, (three women) aged 18-40, of some of the main universities of the city of Santiago de Cali participated. An observational field study filming of approximately 10 minutes was done while they took notes in their classes. Posture of the head, trunk, and upper extremities was analyzed with respect to its axis and the type of movement in each joint. The postures were classified depending on the location of support surface finding five different postures in the eight students. In these five postures some biomechanical risk factors, usually present in wheelchair users, are increased when they are associated with those postures. Those associated risk factors are: possible disc spine deformation, muscular stress and causing of pressure ulcer. In conclusion, in four of these five postures a poor interaction among person, task and work desk was observed. Therefore, seven of the eight students in this study were found to have a posture that could be considered risky.     

Multilevel analysis exploring the links between stress,depression, and sleep problems among two-year college students

Objective: This study explored the association of stress and depression with a multidimensional sleep problems construct in a sample of 2-year college students. Participants: The sample consisted of 440 students enrolled in 2-year study from Fall 2011 to Fall 2013. Methods: Participants in an obesity prevention study completed surveys assessing sleep, stress, and depression at baseline, 4, 12, and 24 months. Multilevel models predicting sleep problems were conducted to distinguish episodic from chronic reports of stress and depression. Results: Participants were primarily women (68%), white (73%), young adults (M age = 22.8), with an average of 8.4 hours of sleep per night. Neither stress nor depression was predictive of sleep quantity; however, they were predictive of sleep quality. Conclusions: Results show that sleep quality rather than sleep quantity may be the greater health concern for young adults, suggesting that intervention programs targeting depression, stress management, and healthy sleep patterns are warranted.     

Social Support,Industrial Parks and FDI Location Choice Across Hungarian Counties

This study analyses the determinants of foreign direct investments in Hungarian counties in the period 2001–2011. Unlike previous studies, the role of local public policies was also tested. To this end, local government social welfare expenditures and special economic regulations are considered in the econometric model. The results highlight the importance of local government interventions in creating a favourable environment to attract FDI to Hungarian counties. Furthermore, market size, labour skills and agglomeration economies significantly influence FDI location choices.     

Everyday Disputes and Negotiations: A Video Observational Analysis of Mexican‐origin Mother–Daughter Conversations

Little is known about the nature of normative mother–daughter everyday disagreements in Mexican family contexts in which daughters are socialized to avoid conflict out of respect and deference to authority. Observations of videotaped conversations of 130 Mexican‐origin mothers and their adolescent (13‐ to 16‐year‐old) daughters discussing their disagreements were systematically coded. Analyses of the conversations showed that the most frequently recurring conflicts involved autonomy privileges (appearance, friendships, going out, media use), household responsibilities (chores, sibling caretaking), and family dynamics (sibling tensions, sibling differential treatment, mutual respect in communication). Daughters from traditional immigrant families who had lived longer in Mexico were just as assertive in expressing their viewpoints as daughters from less traditional families, although they were less likely to display negative affect.     

Understanding Multiple Group Identities: Inserting Women into Cultural Transformations

The study of cultural transformations in the United States has been studied predominantly from an assimilation/acculturation framework. There are several drawbacks to this theoretical perspective, chief among them being the exclusion of gender in examining what happens to different ethnic/racial groups when they come into contact. Feminist writings in the last twenty years provide a rich discussion of how inserting women into this social process would enrich our knowledge about human behavior in general and cultural change specifically. This paper reviews the literature on the assimilation/acculturation framework and integrates the most recent developments in feminist theory to provide a new alternative to studying cultural transformations. The social engagement model takes into account gender as well as other significant social identities like ethnicity/race, class, and sexuality to study how groups change as they come into contact with each other.