SAGE Podcast

In this podcast, Professor Sven Bölte discusses his work published in Autism (2011 volume 15 issue 4) on the differences between high functioning boys and girls with autism spectrum disorders, particularly with respect to cognitive taskes.

Tan Jin and Barley Mak from the Chinese University of Hong Kong discuss approaches to scoring performance tests based on fuzzy logic.

In this podcast, Drs. Tappenden and Guenter discuss a Web-based registry for patients receiving home parenteral nutrition launched in early 2011.  This registry, titled Sustain™, allows for collection of data that can be used to measure outcomes, benchmark programs and ultimately improve patient care.  Expansion of the registry to other populations and therapies is planned for future phases of the project.

Dr Julio Pascual talks through the International Headache Society's new recommendations for conduct of acute and preventive migraine clinical trials

A lecture discussing the 2011 Cephalalgia Award Winning Paper "A new trigemino-nociceptive stimulation model for event-related fMRI"

Intercountry adoption (ICA) is a relatively common practice. Since its contemporary conception during the Second World War, approximately one million children have been adopted internationally. Controversy surrounding ICA includes ideas about human rights and notions of child rescue in the context of major reform to prevent child sales and abduction under the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. Social work, as a discipline, is a central player in ICA practices, and at least, one historian asserts that social work academic literature is scant on the topic of problematic practice and reforms. A review of the social work literature was conducted, and four thematic areas emerged in the 87 manuscripts reviewed: (a) social policy; (b) exploitation, social justice, ethics, and human rights; (c) clinical perspectives to include identity, child development, and family transition; and (d) child welfare practices. Results indicate a small but robust body of social work literature, and highlights are presented as well as analysis indicating methodical trends.

Does small-city management experience (50,000 population) help city managers get large-city management jobs (100,000 population), and does it help them to keep the large-city jobs? The answers to these questions are important for city managers planning a move to a larger city and for young professionals planning a career in city management. This study indicates that the large-city assistant city manager (ACM) position is the prevalent route for getting a large-city manager's position, while small-city experience by itself may have a negative influence on managers' job tenure in large cities. A career path combining both large-city ACM and small-city management experiences helps large-city managers keep their jobs.

Achieving data and information dissemination without harming anyone is a central task of any entity in charge of collecting data. In this article, the authors examine the literature on data and statistical confidentiality. Rather than comparing the theoretical properties of specific methods, they emphasize the main themes that emerge from the ongoing discussion among scientists regarding how best to achieve the appropriate balance between data protection, data utility, and data dissemination. They cover the literature on de-identification and reidentification methods with emphasis on health care data. The authors also discuss the benefits and limitations for the most common access methods. Although there is abundant theoretical and empirical research, their review reveals lack of consensus on fundamental questions for empirical practice: How to assess disclosure risk, how to choose among disclosure methods, how to assess reidentification risk, and how to measure utility loss.

Australia, Denmark, France, and Italy. These countries have different employment patterns, social and family policies, and cultural attitudes toward parenting and gender equality. Using data from matched married couples, we conduct a cross-national study of mothers' and fathers' relative time in childcare, divided along dimensions of task (i.e., routine versus non-routine activities) and co-presence (i.e., caring for children together as a couple versus caring solo). Results show that mothers' and fathers' work arrangements and education relate modestly to shares of childcare, and this relationship differs across countries. We find cross-national variation in whether more equal shares result from the behavior of mothers, fathers, or both spouses. Results illustrate the relevance of social context in accentuating or minimizing the impact of individual and household-level characteristics.

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children's social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.

Although gene by environment studies are typically based on the assumption that some individuals possess genetic variants that enhance their vulnerability to environmental adversity, the differential susceptibility perspective posits that these individuals are simply more susceptible to environmental influence than others. An important implication of this perspective is that individuals most vulnerable to adverse social environments are the same ones who reap the most benefit from environmental support. Using longitudinal data from a sample of several hundred African Americans, we found that relatively common variants of the dopamine receptor gene and the serotonin transporter gene interact with social conditions to predict aggression in a manner consonant with the differential susceptibility perspective. When social conditions were adverse, individuals with these genetic variants manifested more aggression than other genotypes, whereas when the environment was favorable they demonstrated less aggression than other genotypes. Furthermore, we found that these genetic variants interact with environmental conditions to foster schemas and emotions consistent with the differential susceptibility perspective and that a latent construct formed by these schemas and emotions mediates the gene by environment interaction on aggression.

This article examines how educational disparities in mortality emerge, grow, decline, and disappear across causes of death in the United States, and how these changes contribute to the enduring association between education and mortality over time. Focusing on adults age 40 to 64 years, we first examine the extent to which educational disparities in mortality persisted from 1989 to 2007. We then test the fundamental cause prediction that educational disparities in mortality persist, in part, by shifting to new health outcomes over time. We focus on the period from 1999 to 2007, when all causes of death were coded to the same classification system. Results indicate (1) substantial widening and narrowing of educational disparities in mortality across causes of death, (2) almost all causes of death with increasing mortality rates also had widening educational disparities, and (3) the total educational disparity in mortality would be about 25 percent smaller today if not for newly emergent and growing educational disparities since 1999. These results point to the theoretical and policy importance of identifying social forces that cause health disparities to widen over time.

Sociologists widely acknowledge that uncertainty matters for decision making, but they rarely measure it directly. In this article, we demonstrate the importance of theorizing about, measuring, and analyzing uncertainty as experienced by individuals. We adapt a novel probabilistic solicitation technique to measure personal uncertainty about HIV status in a high HIV prevalence area of southern Malawi. Using data from 2,000 young adults (ages 15 to 25 years), we demonstrate that uncertainty about HIV status is widespread and that it expands as young adults assess their proximate and distant futures. In conceptualizing HIV status as something more than sero-status itself, we gain insight into how what individuals know they don't know influences their lives. Young people who are uncertain about their HIV status express desires to accelerate their childbearing relative to their counterparts who are certain they are uninfected. Our approach and findings show that personal uncertainty is a measurable and meaningful phenomenon that can illuminate much about individuals' aspirations and behaviors.

The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts

In this podcast, Editor Julia Muennich Cowell discusses the contents of the December 2011 issue of The Journal of School Nursing.