Still-births among the offspring of male radiation workers at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant: detailed results and statistical aspects

Summary. This study investigates whether there was evidence of increasing risk of still-birth with increasing paternal exposure to ionizing radiation received during employment at the Sellafield nuclear installation before the child was conceived. A significant positive association is found between the total paternal preconceptional exposure to external ionizing radiation and the risk of still-birth (after adjustment for year of birth, social class, birth order and paternal age, odds ratio at 100 mSv 1.24 (95% confidence interval 1.04–1.45)). A summary of the principal scientific findings of this study has been published in the Lancet . This paper describes in detail the statistical methods that were used in the investigation and presents the results in full.     

BUILDING THE EVIDENCE BASE FROM LONGITUDINAL DATA

Survey data from cross-sectional snapshots give an incomplete picture of the social fabric. Without longitudinal information, planners, practitioners, social scientists and policy makers would be in the dark about dynamics, durations and pathways of human development. Longitudinal data collected in birth cohort studies give a better guide to long-term processes and outcomes and are more informative about the causal relations that are the drivers of disadvantage or success. The content and structure of Britain's Birth Cohort Studies are described to illustrate the challenges of creating and studying longitudinal evidence. Examples of findings and policies based on these prospective longitudinal studies are given, along with a discussion of the practical decisions that have to be confronted in undertaking them.     

Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation: Influences of Word Familiarity

Previous studies have shown that 7.5‐month‐olds can track and encode words in fluent speech, but they fail to equate instances of a word that contrast in talker gender, vocal affect, and fundamental frequency. By 10.5 months, they succeed at generalizing across such variability, marking a clear transition period during which infants' word recognition skills become qualitatively more mature. Here we explore the role of word familiarity in this critical transition and, in particular, whether words that occur frequently in a child's listening environment (i.e., “Mommy” and “Daddy”) are more easily recognized when they differ in surface characteristics than those that infants have not previously encountered (termed nonwords). Results demonstrate that words are segmented from continuous speech in a more linguistically mature fashion than nonwords at 7.5 months, but at 10.5 months, both words and nonwords are segmented in a relatively mature fashion. These findings suggest that early word recognition is facilitated in cases where infants have had significant exposure to items, but at later stages, infants are able to segment items regardless of their presumed familiarity.     

Tasmania Together? A disability critique of a social plan

The 'Tasmania Together' social futures plan for Tasmania is critically examined. Authored by a Tasmanian Government appointed Community Leaders Group, on behalf of the people of Tasmania, the plan is supposed to deliver a better Tasmanian society by 2020, based upon community consultation. Rather than a step-forward in democracy, the process serves to remove the democratic rights of people, especially those who are disadvantaged. A critique from a disability perspective is offered, which suggests that this social plan constitutes a form of institutionalised disablism.     

A Re-Introduction to Family Therapy Clarification of Three Schools

Family therapy is not easily understood, especially by the beginner therapist. This is not surprising given the confusing overlap between the various models and proliferation of new and often unexplained concepts and terms. This article serves to reverse this trend by presenting an overview of family therapy that can be understood by the novice. It clarifies the assumptions, terms, methods and goals of the main three schools of thought, namely structural, strategic and systemic. The similarities and differences between these schools are discussed and a summary table has been inserted for comparison purposes. A glossary has been included to assist the reader in defining commonly used terms and concepts.     

The Role of Shocks in Employee Turnover*

This paper reports the findings from a recent study of nurse leavers at eight large hospitals in the National Health Service (NHS) of England and Wales. The study develops and extends an influential theory of employee turnover by describing how for some leavers a single, jarring event or shock triggers the decision to quit. By elaborating on the nature of shocks for this sample of 352 nurse leavers, the paper allows for improved understanding of nursing turnover and thus offers an example of relevant management research. The analysis of shock illustrates how conventional research methodologies can lead to a distorted picture of turnover. This has wider implications, both for any organization wishing to manage turnover effectively and for future research. The paper adds to the limited body of empirical analysis on actual leavers, thereby contributing to an ongoing methodological debate concerning the use of proxy variables. By highlighting flaws in the dominant methodology used to study turnover, the paper offers an example of management research that is also rigorous, and thus ‘pragmatic’.     

Bayes linear analysis for graphical models: The geometric approach to local computation and interpretive graphics

This paper concerns the geometric treatment of graphical models using Bayes linear methods. We introduce Bayes linear separation as a second order generalised conditional independence relation, and Bayes linear graphical models are constructed using this property. A system of interpretive and diagnostic shadings are given, which summarise the analysis over the associated moral graph. Principles of local computation are outlined for the graphical models, and an algorithm for implementing such computation over the junction tree is described. The approach is illustrated with two examples. The first concerns sales forecasting using a multivariate dynamic linear model. The second concerns inference for the error variance matrices of the model for sales, and illustrates the generality of our geometric approach by treating the matrices directly as random objects. The examples are implemented using a freely available set of object-oriented programming tools for Bayes linear local computation and graphical diagnostic display.     

Sixteen years ofJapa: A content analysis of theJournal of the Australian Population Association

This paper presents results of a content analysis of all articles published in theJournal of the Australian Population Association during its sixteen-year history, 1984–99. The findings show that geographic focus, principal subject area and analytical procedure did not change significantly over the period. About three-quarters of articles focused exclusively on Australia and the most common subject areas were fertility and migration. Most articles had one author but this declined over time. Females constituted only one-fifth of sole and first authors and one-quarter of all authors; these proportions decreased in recent periods. About two-fifths of first and all authors were affiliated with the Australian National University. The findings are compared with those of a similar analysis ofDemography.     

Oppositional Girlhoods and the Challenge of Relational Politics

Over the last five years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have problematized the discourse of “adolescent female exceptionalism” (Switzer in Fem Theory 14(3):345–360, 2013, p. 4) popularized by the NIKE Foundation’s Girl Effect. Arriving at similar conclusions, scholars point to the artificial neocolonial divisions between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ of the world animated by an ‘invest in girls’ logic. This paper endeavors to move beyond the “oppositional girlhoods” (Bent in Sociol Stud Child Youth 16(1):3–20, 2013a, p. 7) bind of girl effects discourse to propose that differentially positioned and experienced girlhoods might be better understood as transnational, relational cultural formations. Drawing from our empirical research with girls in North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we consider the implications of girls’ increasing global visibility as the ‘saviors of humanity’ from different geopolitical contexts. We then go further to suggest the oppositional girlhoods frame assumes reductive, apolitical, and ahistorical claims of divergence between girlhoods in the Global North and Global South “with highly unequal effects” (Gonick et al. in Girlhood Stud 2(3):1–9, 2009, p. 3). By countering the normative construction of global girlhoods as mutually exclusive forms of personhood and historical experience, our project authorizes a new understanding of girlhoods as mutually constituted and relationally contingent. It is from within this relational framework that we propose new directions for thinking about girlhoods transnationally.