No wonder social workers feel uncomfortable in court

The present article assesses the adversary systemper se and asks the question, Is there any place for courtroom antics and histrionics in cases involving children? Social workers are uncomfortable before the august body of thecourt, not because of any lack of education or knowledge on their part but because of the nature of the adversary process itself.     

Comparing Networks Across Space and Time, Size and Species

We describe and illustrate methodology for comparing networks from diverse settings. Our empirical base consists of 42 networks from four kinds of species (humans, nonhuman primates, nonprimate mammals, and birds) and covering distinct types of relations such as influence, grooming, and agonistic encounters. The general problem is to determine whether networks are similarly structured despite their surface differences. The methodology we propose is generally applicable to the characterization and comparison of network–level social structures across multiple settings, such as different organizations, communities, or social groups, and to the examination of sources of variability in network structure. We first fit a p^* model (Wasserman and Pattison 1996) to each network to obtain estimates for effects of six structural properties on the probability of the graph. We then calculate predicted tie probabilities for each network, using both its own parameter estimates and the estimates from every other network in the collection. Comparison is based on the similarity between sets of predicted tie probabilities. We then use correspondence analysis to represent the similarities among all 42 networks and interpret the resulting configuration using information about the species and relations involved. Results show that similarities among the networks are due more to the kind of relation than to the kind of animal.     

English Language Proficiency of Immigrants and Refugees in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area

Studies of the determinants of English language ability have generally focused on the largest immigrant groups in the United States. Much less is known about smaller, but significant regional concentrations of immigrants and refugees. This article presents data on four very distinct and understudied groups: Russians, Somalis, Hmong, and Mexicans in the Midwest. We found large differences in English language proficiency across the different national origin groups, even after controlling for background variables. These differences were not attributable to refugee status or to linguistic distance from English. Being Somali, migrating to the United States at a young age and having a college diploma were the best predictors of both spoken and written proficiency. The returns to higher education were particularly noteworthy — respondents with college diplomas were more than 29 times more likely than non‐high school graduates to speak English well, and more than 20 times as likely to read well. Women appear to have benefited more than men from completing college in terms of spoken English proficiency since the male‐female gap narrows among the highly educated. Length of time in the United States was a good predictor of whether an individual speaks English at home, regardless of age of entry to the country.     

'The Tribunal was the most stressful thing: more stressful than my son's diagnosis or behaviour': the experiences of families who go to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT)

It is more than 10 years since the Special Educational Needs Tribunal was established in 1994 as an independent panel which arbitrates in disputes between parents of children with the label special educational needs and Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in England. In 2002 the Tribunal began hearing claims for disability discrimination and was re-named the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal (SENDisT). Since 1994 over 20,000 appeals have been registered. This article, which forms part of my ongoing Ph.D. thesis 'Parents as advocates: the experience of parents who register an appeal with SENDisT', offers an analysis of parents' Tribunal stories. Here, the key question is what affect the process of going to SENDisT has on the social, emotional and financial well-being of the family. Through a process of narrative inquiry the aim is to foreground parents' unheard stories and to reveal their 'hidden' experiences.     

Public Meetings and Risk Amplification: A Longitudinal Study

This article offers longitudinal data tracking people who did and did not attend a series of public meetings in an upstate New York rural community grappling with the expansion of an existing solid waste landfill and remediation of an adjacent inactive hazardous waste site. Before and after the public meetings, mailed questionnaires measured risk perceptions and perceived credibility of risk managers (here, the state government agencies and the responsible industry) conducting the meetings. Respondents at each measurement point included meeting attendees and nonattendees, with some fluctuation over time when attendees at one measurement point were nonattendees at the next and vice versa. The results from the first survey indicate that following the first two public meetings, attendees perceived greater risks from the waste sites than did nonattendees; attendees also perceived the risk managers as less credible. After the third public meeting, the results showed that attendees' risk perceptions remained steady; however, perceptions of government agency credibility significantly decreased. After the fourth public meeting, the survey found that attendees' risk perceptions were again not significantly different, whereas perceptions of government agency credibility increased significantly. The industry's credibility also increased, though only among attendees who had attended the most recent public meeting, not among attendees who had attended both the third and fourth public meetings. For nonattendees, risk perceptions and credibility ratings did not change. The discussion examines how distinctive characteristics of communication at each public meeting may have resulted in different effects and proposes hypotheses for future research.     

Improving logistic regression on the imbalanced data by a novel penalized log-likelihood function

Logistic regression is estimated by maximizing the log-likelihood objective function formulated under the assumption of maximizing the overall accuracy. That does not apply to the imbalanced data. The resulting models tend to be biased towards the majority class (i.e. non-event), which can bring great loss in practice. One strategy for mitigating such bias is to penalize the misclassification costs of observations differently in the log-likelihood function. Existing solutions require either hard hyperparameter estimating or high computational complexity. We propose a novel penalized log-likelihood function by including penalty weights as decision variables for observations in the minority class (i.e. event) and learning them from data along with model coefficients. In the experiments, the proposed logistic regression model is compared with the existing ones on the statistics of area under receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve from 10 public datasets and 16 simulated datasets, as well as the training time. A detailed analysis is conducted on an imbalanced credit dataset to examine the estimated probability distributions, additional performance measurements (i.e. type I error and type II error) and model coefficients. The results demonstrate that both the discrimination ability and computation efficiency of logistic regression models are improved using the proposed log-likelihood function as the learning objective.     

Abortion Underreporting in Add Health: Findings and Implications

Population Research and Policy Review - Well-documented, large-scale abortion underreporting on U.S. surveys raises questions about the use of abortion self-reports for statistical inference. This...     

Efficacy Foundations for Risk Communication: How People Think About Reducing the Risks of Climate Change

Believing action to reduce the risks of climate change is both possible (self‐efficacy) and effective (response efficacy) is essential to motivate and sustain risk mitigation efforts, according to current risk communication theory. Although the public recognizes the dangers of climate change, and is deluged with lists of possible mitigative actions, little is known about public efficacy beliefs in the context of climate change. Prior efficacy studies rely on conflicting constructs and measures of efficacy, and links between efficacy and risk management actions are muddled. As a result, much remains to learn about how laypersons think about the ease and effectiveness of potential mitigative actions. To bring clarity and inform risk communication and management efforts, we investigate how people think about efficacy in the context of climate change risk management by analyzing unprompted and prompted beliefs from two national surveys (N = 405, N = 1,820). In general, respondents distinguish little between effective and ineffective climate strategies. While many respondents appreciate that reducing fossil fuel use is an effective risk mitigation strategy, overall assessments reflect persistent misconceptions about climate change causes, and uncertainties about the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies. Our findings suggest targeting climate change risk communication and management strategies to (1) address gaps in people's existing mental models of climate action, (2) leverage existing public understanding of both potentially effective mitigation strategies and the collective action dilemma at the heart of climate change action, and (3) take into account ideologically driven reactions to behavior change and government action framed as climate action.