Differential predictors of academic achievement: individual and familial factor interactions with community poverty

We present an analysis of the contexts within which adolescents graduate from high school and enroll in college. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health show that adolescents’ school engagement, maternal academic monitoring, and community poverty significantly interact to explain differences in high school graduation and college enrollment rates (n?=?7100). To examine this association, we performed weighted logistic regression analyses, controlling for gender, race, block level unemployment, and block level median income. Findings suggest that protective factors can help youth overcome the challenges associated with community poverty and achieve academically in low and medium levels of poverty, but that youth in high-poverty contexts may need more resources to reach higher levels of academic attainment.     

Risks Perception of Electromagnetic Fields in Taiwan: The Influence of Psychopathology and the Degree of Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Fields

Little is known about the perceived health risks of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and factors associated with risk perception in non‐Western countries. Psychological conditions and risk perception have been postulated as factors that facilitate the attribution of health complaints to environmental factors. This study investigated people's perceived risks of EMFs and other environmental sources, as well as the relationships between risk perception, psychopathology, and the degree of self‐reported sensitivity to EMFs. A total of 1,251 adults selected from a nationwide telephone interviewing system database responded to a telephone survey about the relationships between environmental sources and human health. The interview included questions assessing participants’ psychiatric conditions and the presence and degree of sensitivity to EMFs. One hundred and seventy participants were self‐identified as having sensitivity to EMFs, and 141 met the criteria for psychiatric conditions without EMF sensitivity. More than half of the survey respondents considered power lines and mobile phone base stations to affect people's health to a big extent. Higher sensitivity to EMFs, psychopathology, being female, being married, more years of education, and having a catastrophic illness had positive associations with perceived risks of EMF‐related environmental sources as well as for all environmental sources combined. We observed no moderating effect of psychopathology on the association between degree of sensitivity to EMF and risk perception. Thus, psychopathology had influence on general people's risk perception without having influence on the relationship between people's degree of sensitivity to EMF and risk perception. The plausible explanations are discussed in the text.     

On the type-B integral equation and the distribution of wilks statist for testing independence of several groups of variables

In this paper, WILKS'type-B integral equation is solved in the general form of a series of beta functions and a series of weighted gamma functions as proposed by WALD and BROOKNER 1941. The coefficients in both representations can be obtained by explicit recurrence relartions, therefore the results solve many distributional problems and have the fewest computational difficulties of any representation that has surfaced to date. The radius of convergence of the second series representation is given, whereas the convergence property of the first series representation is given, whereas the convergence property of the first series representation was studied by WALD and Brookner. The exact null distributions of WILKS' statistic A for testing the independence of several groups of variables and of V = -log A are given. The coefficients in all the series representration can be computed recursilvely and hence can be obtained easily with the help of modern computatinal facilities     

ON ENDOGENOUS BUSINESS CYCLES UNDER INCREASING RETURNS TO VARIETY AND SECTOR‐SPECIFIC EXTERNALITY

We examine the theoretical as well as quantitative interrelations between endogenous business cycles, increasing returns to product variety and sector‐specific productive externalities within a two‐sector real business cycle model. In a calibrated version of our benchmark closed‐economy setting, the threshold level of investment externalities needed for equilibrium indeterminacy is found to be monotonically increasing in the degree of market competitiveness. We also study the model's local stability properties (i) when the parameters that govern the level of intermediate‐good producers' market power and the strength of variety effects are disentangled; and (ii) in the context of a small open economy. (JEL E30, E32, O41)     

BOURDIEU'S CONCEPT OF REFLEXIVITY AS METALITERACY

For Bourdieu, the extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields is dependent upon, and explicable in terms of, two epistemological types. The first is a practical sense (the ‘logic of practice’), while the second involves a sort of conscious comprehension that he names ‘reflexivity’. Bourdieu defines reflexivity as an interrogation of the three types of limitations (of social position, of field and of the scholastic point of view) that are constitutive of knowledge itself. But the reflexive relation to the habitus, the demands and influences exerted by cultural fields, and one's own practices within those fields, cannot be understood simply as something that is obtained by the subject; rather, any reflexive relation to the doxa and illusio of the field must be a constitutive part of that field. This paper identifies a number of principles taken from Bourdieu's work that clarify how, where and why the reflexive ‘surpassing’ of literacy might occur. But we also suggest, contra Bourdieu, that only fields that are informed or characterized by the scholastic point of view are likely to be characterized by the set of conditions constitutive of reflexive knowledge; and that the scholastic point of view is therefore, simultaneously, both a potential impediment to, and a condition (almost necessary) of the production of reflexive knowledge.