Role of workplace safety: a revisit of the relationship between job satisfaction and employment status

This study evaluated the relationship between employment status (i.e., part- and full-time) and job satisfaction, with the focus on the moderating roles of perceived injury risk and injury incidence. The results found that the level of job satisfaction for full-time workers was about the same regardless of the level of injury risk they perceived. In contrast, job satisfaction of part-time workers was significantly higher when they perceived low injury risk rather than high injury risk. The findings also supported the potential adverse impact of injury incidence and injury risk on job satisfaction for both part- and full-time workers. This study highlighted the importance of understanding both workplace safety and job satisfaction when attempting to understand the differences between part-time and full-time workers.     

Women and toxic waste protests: Race,class and gender as resources of resistance

In recent years, women have been at the forefront of grassroot toxic waste protests in the United States. Out of their experience of protest, women construct ideologies of environmental justice, which reveal broader issues of inequality underlying environmental hazards. I examine the environmental discourse of white working class, African American and Native American women activists. The voices of these women show the ways in which their traditional role as mothers becomes a resource for their resistance. At the same time, their emerging analysis of environmental justice is mediated by different experiences of class, race, and ethnicity.     

Elicitation of Expert Judgments of Uncertainty in the Risk Assessment of Herbicide-Tolerant Oilseed Crops

One of the lay public's concerns about genetically modified (GM) organisms (GMO) and related emerging technologies is that not all the important risks are evaluated or even identified yet--and that ignorance of the unanticipated risks could lead to severe environmental or public health consequences. To some degree, even the scientists who participated in the analysis of the risks from GMOs (arguably the people most qualified to critique these analyses) share some of this concern. To formally explore the uncertainty in the risk assessment of a GM crop, we conducted detailed interviews of seven leading experts on GM oilseed crops to obtain qualitative and quantitative information on their understanding of the uncertainties associated with the risks to agriculture from GM oilseed crops (canola or rapeseed). The results of these elicitations revealed three issues of potential concern that are currently left outside the scope of risk assessments. These are (1) the potential loss of the agronomic and environmental benefits of glyphosate (a herbicide widely used in no-till agriculture) due to the combined problems of glyphosate-tolerant canola and wheat volunteer plants, (2) the growing problem of seed lot contamination, and (3) the potential market impacts. The elicitations also identified two areas where knowledge is insufficient. These are: the occurrence of hybridization between canola and wild relatives and the ability of the hybrids to perpetuate themselves in nature, and the fate of the herbicide-tolerance genes in soil and their interaction with soil microfauna and -flora. The methodological contribution of this work is a formal approach to analyzing the uncertainty surrounding complex problems.     

How Sexual Identities Change: Pragmatism,Habit, and Creativity in the ‘Situation’ of the Lascivious Costume Ball

How do individuals’ sexual identities, in the sense of who they are as sexual beings, change? Research addressing this question in the modern U.S. setting points to several factors, including macrolevel societal transformations, vernacular culture, interpersonal interactions, psychodynamics, and life course transitions. Yet it is less clear how these diverse factors are configured in broader social processes. This article draws on and extends the pragmatist mechanism-based approach to social theory to illuminate a key causal pathway whereby individuals’ sexual identities may change. I argue that habits, specifically taken-for-granted ways of doing and thinking about sexuality, are a crucial constituent of sexual identities. But when individuals encounter problem situations to which existing habits are inadequate responses, they are more likely to do and think about sexuality creatively. Incorporation of these creative responses into stocks of habits can readily encompass shifts in sexual identities. The argument is illustrated using people’s dramatic reflections on the first three iterations of the Lascivious Costume Ball, a sexuality-themed party that occurred at the University of Chicago. The Ball dramatized the radical historical moment of the Sixties and functioned as an exceptional problem situation for all but three of my respondents. The utility of the theory centers on its capacity to (1) generate more precise explanations of how individuals’ sexual identities change; (2) integrate distinct literatures on sexual identity into a carefully generalizable theory of individual change; and (3) highlight a crucial relational dimension of certain problem situations.     

Models of the Aging Self

Older adults are faced with numerous physical, psychological, and social role changes that challenge their sense of self and capacity to live happily. In addition, they are inundated by our youth-oriented culture with negative ageist stereotypes. Nevertheless, most older adults live happy, fulfilling lives. In this article, we review theories of the aging individual that address this apparent paradox. These theories can be largely divided into those that emphasize control and goal attainment, and those that emphasize the self's organizational capacity. Of the self-oriented theories, we will highlight Whitbourne's (1996) identity process perspective, which is specific to the aging process and attempts to explain the self's unique capacity to remain stable yet change over time.     

Semiparametric principal component poisson regression on clustered data

In modeling count data with multivariate predictors, we often encounter problems with clustering of observations and interdependency of predictors. We propose to use principal components of predictors to mitigate the multicollinearity problem and to abate information losses due to dimension reduction, a semiparametric link between the count dependent variable and the principal components is postulated. Clustering of observations is accounted into the model as a random component and the model is estimated via the backfitting algorithm. Simulation study illustrates the advantages of the proposed model over standard poisson regression in a wide range of scenarios.