Correction to: Patronage and Public Goods Provisioning in an Unequal Land

Social Indicators Research - The article Patronage and Public Goods Provisioning in an Unequal Land, written by Hadia Majid and Rashid Memon, was originally published electronically on the...     

An exploratory study of acculturation among Muslims in Australia

Muslims constitute 2.2% of the Australian population. Given the current socio-political climate and the limited research, the present exploratory study explores the relationship between acculturation, ethnic identity, self-identity, generational status, religiosity, and demographics among adult Australian Muslims.

A cross-sectional convenience sample of 324 adult Australian Muslims completed either online or paper-based questionnaires in either English or Arabic. Recruitment was via convenience sampling and social media advertisements. Acculturation, ethnic identity (MEIM), religiosity, and demographic variables were measured.

The study sample was young and mostly female, with high religiosity levels. Acculturation was negatively correlated with ethnic identity. From multiple regression analysis, acculturation was predicted independently by religiosity (low), age (young), gender (male) and ethnic identity (low).

First generation Australian Muslims were older, had stronger ethnic identity and religiosity, and more commonly self-identified as non-Australian. By contrast second- and third-generation were more likely to self-identify as bicultural or Australian.

In summary, acculturation of Australian Muslims is influenced by multiple variables, particularly ethnic identity, religiosity, and generation; hence all these variables need to be included in policy regarding successful integration of migrants.     

The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)

Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century’s old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.     

Identity construction of second-generation Iranians in Australia: influences and perspectives

Understanding the complexity of identity in the children of immigrants has become important with the growing rates of global migration. A new theoretical construct refers to an individual’s subjective representation of the interrelationships among his or her multiple group identities and how their subjective identity could be explained.

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of their Iranian background and the social characteristics of their host society, Australia, on the second generation’s understanding of their national and ethnic identity.

This cross-sectional study is based on a quantitative method. Participants in the study were second-generation Iranians aged 18–40, living in Australia. Data were collected on how these second-generation Iranians identified themselves with Iranian society and/or with the wider society, and how their chosen identity was influenced by their background, their national beliefs, their perspectives towards the host country and the host country’s perspective towards specific ethnic groups.

Overall, 137 people participated in this study, and the results show patterns of biculturalism; the majority claimed hyphenated identity wherein the second identity was shown to be the weaker identity. The main contextual factors influencing their identity formation were birth place, acculturation and attitudes towards the host.     

Rank-based analysis of repeated measures block designs

A rank-based inference is developed for repeated measures balanced incomplete block and randomized complete block designs using a suitable dispersion function. Asymptotic distributions of rank estimators are developed after establishing approximate linearity of the gradient vector of the dispersion function. Unlike available nonparametric procedures for those designs, estimation and testing are tied together. Three different test statistics are developed for testing the linear hypotheses. Friedman's (1937) statistic and Durbin's (1951) statistic are particular cases of one of the three proposed statistics. An estimate of a scale parameter which appears in the ARE expression as well as as in the variences and covariances of the rank estimators is discussed.     

Control charts for location based on different sampling schemes

Control charts are the most important statistical process control tool for monitoring variations in a process. A number of articles are available in the literature for the X? control chart based on simple random sampling, ranked set sampling, median-ranked set sampling (MRSS), extreme-ranked set sampling, double-ranked set sampling, double median-ranked set sampling and median double-ranked set sampling. In this study, we highlight some limitations of the existing ranked set charting structures. Besides, we propose different runs rules-based control charting structures under a variety of sampling strategies. We evaluate the performance of the control charting structures using power curves as a performance criterion. We observe that the proposed merger of varying runs rules schemes with different sampling strategies improve significantly the detection ability of location control charting structures. More specifically, the MRSS performs the best under both single- and double-ranked set strategies with varying runs rules schemes. We also include a real-life example to explain the proposal and highlight its significance for practical data sets.     

Using principal components to test normality of high-dimensional data

Many multivariate statistical procedures are based on the assumption of normality and different approaches have been proposed for testing this assumption. The vast majority of these tests, however, are exclusively designed for cases when the sample size n is larger than the dimension of the variable p, and the null distributions of their test statistics are usually derived under the asymptotic case when p is fixed and n increases. In this article, a test that utilizes principal components to test for nonnormality is proposed for cases when p/n → c. The power and size of the test are examined through Monte Carlo simulations, and it is argued that the test remains well behaved and consistent against most nonnormal distributions under this type of asymptotics.