Women Rule: Gendered Leadership and State Supreme Court Chief Justice Selection

ABSTRACT

While women are underrepresented in many political institutions and leadership positions, nearly half of state supreme court chief justices are women. Is there something about the role of state supreme court justice that facilitates the recruitment of women to this important political position? We examine whether the selection of a woman chief is driven by the court’s institutional need for women’s leadership style or simply the supply of qualified justices. We find that ideological diversity drives demand for a woman chief. A supply of experienced women justices also has a significant impact on likelihood of selection.     

Racial/ethnic and socio‐economic biases in child maltreatment severity assessment in Spanish child protection services caseworkers

Evidence from several countries has shown the over‐representation of racial/ethnic minority groups in child protection services (CPS). The objective of the present study was to explore whether racial/ethnic and socio‐economic biases influence Spanish CPS caseworkers' judgements of the severity of child maltreatment. Moreover, the study attempted to explore the influence on these judgements of the use of structured instruments and professional experience. Two case vignettes of child maltreatment were presented to 405 CPS caseworkers and 169 students of social work and psychology. Family ethnic origin and income were manipulated in the vignettes. The findings showed no statistical evidence of biases related to family ethnic origin or socio‐economic status (SES) in Spanish CPS caseworkers' judgements of maltreatment severity. Biases related to family SES were found for students for the vignettes of physical abuse. CPS caseworkers and students who did not use a structured instrument to assess maltreatment severity tended to underestimate the severity for the vignettes of parental incapacity to control child/adolescent behaviour and to overestimate it for the vignettes of physical abuse. CPS caseworkers who used a structured instrument showed higher percentages of accuracy and inter‐rater agreement, supporting the relevance of structured tools in reducing potential caseworkers' biases.     

Some large trial properties of minimum likelihood allocation

The method of minimum likelihood allocation (MLA) for allocating subjects to treatments in a clinical trial amounts to checking at each stage which allocation would lead an outside observer to find the least evidence of a relationship between treatment and factors of prognostic significance, assuming that the observer would use a linear exponential model. One advantage of MLA is that results from game theory and likelihood theory can be used to prove it has desirable long run properties. Two of these demonstrated here are (1) ‘consistency’, in the sense that the average likelihood ratio which measures design imbalance tends to zero, and (2) ‘efficiency’ in the sense that the variance estimates of treatment effects will tend to be minimized in the long run.     

Decomposing Bayesian networks: triangulation of the moral graph with genetic algorithms

In this paper we consider the optimal decomposition of Bayesian networks. More concretely, we examine empirically the applicability of genetic algorithms to the problem of the triangulation of moral graphs. This problem constitutes the only difficult step in the evidence propagation algorithm of Lauritzen and Spiegelhalter (1988) and is known to be NP-hard (Wen, 1991). We carry out experiments with distinct crossover and mutation operators and with different population sizes, mutation rates and selection biasses. The results are analysed statistically. They turn out to improve the results obtained with most other known triangulation methods (Kjærulff, 1990) and are comparable to results obtained with simulated annealing (Kjærulff, 1990; Kjærulff, 1992).     

Performing Femininities: Listening to White Working-Class Girls in Rural Maine

In this article, I explore the ways in which sixth, seventh, and eighth grade White girls from poor and working-class families in rural Maine understand, express, and react to dominant cultural definitions of femininity. Using a qualitative method, The Listening Guide, to interpret data gathered over the course of a year from weekly videotaped focus group conversations and individual interviews, I identify and underscore the contradictory nature of what constitutes appropriately feminine discourse and behavior for these girls—discourse and behavior that is radically different from the dominant White middle-class cultural ideal and that offers these girls a wide range of physical and verbal expression not usually considered under the rubric of conventional femininity. I then examine the girls' ambivalent relationship with middle-class propriety, as well as their anger, their longing, and, in some cases, their resistance to dominant cultural ideologies of femininity. Although such resistance may serve them well in their local community, it puts them at odds with the expectations of their teachers and other adults invested in the conventional feminine ideal and thus underscores their displacement in school and society. The Listener's Guide, I contend, provides a way to elucidate the struggles these working-class girls experience as they negotiate and contest contradictory voices and visions of appropriately feminine behavior and constructions of self vying for their attention and allegiance.     

Adaptation to Divorce: An Attachment-Based Intervention with Long-Term Divorced Parents

ABSTRACT

The aim of this attachment-based intervention was to elaborate, through shared narratives in a divorce recovery group, a representation of the events, the self, and the relationship that contribute to a better adaptation to the situation of divorce. After an 8-month intervention, participants felt better (negative affect was reduced and positive affect was increased) and less lonely (scores in both social and romantic loneliness decreased). Participants were also rated as more secure after the intervention. These findings suggest positive changes in the model of self following the intervention.     

Straighten Up and Act Like a Lady: A Qualitative Study of Lesbian Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Although scholars have been studying domestic violence for decades now, it is only recently that domestic violence occurring in non-heterosexual relationships has received noteworthy attention. Several researchers have called for further study of lesbian intimate partner violence (IPV) and the experiences of lesbian survivors. This exploratory study was designed to uncover the experiences of lesbian survivors in regards to their background of violence, perception of lesbian community attitudes, and experience with seeking help. Using modified grounded theory, I was able to expose several recurring themes in the data, including the following: history of violence; gendered belief of violence; the reality of lesbian intimate partner violence; help seeking and the silence surrounding lesbian intimate partner violence in the lesbian community; and the roles of homophobia and heterosexism in lesbian intimate partner violence. Survivors repeatedly reported feeling silenced, isolated, and helpless due to the lack of acknowledgment of and support for lesbian survivors of intimate partner violence in their communities. The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of women who have endured violence at the hands of their same-sex intimate partners.     

Serial tests of multiple hypotheses

Serial testing is introduced as a general method for carryig out a large umber of hypothesis tests , while maintaining a reasonable bound on the simultaneous Type I error probabilities . The power properties of serial testing differ from those of other simultaneous test procedures, and serial P-values a reassociated with the models under consideration.