1,720,979 research outputs found
Is structural stigma's effect on the mortality of sexual minorities robust? A failure to replicate the results of a published study
No full textAbstractBackgroundThe study of stigma's influence on health has surged in recent years. Hatzenbuehler et al.’s (2014) study of structural stigma's effect on mortality revealed an average of 12 years' shorter life expectancy for sexual minorities who resided in communities thought to exhibit high levels of anti-gay prejudice, using data from the 1988–2002 administrations of the US General Social Survey linked to mortality outcome data in the 2008 National Death Index.MethodsIn the original study, the key predictor variable (structural stigma) led to results suggesting the profound negative influence of structural stigma on the mortality of sexual minorities. Attempts to replicate the study, in order to explore alternative hypotheses, repeatedly failed to generate the original study's key finding on structural stigma. Efforts to discern the source of the disparity in results revealed complications in the multiple imputation process for missing values of the components of structural stigma. This prompted efforts at replication using 10 different imputation approaches.ResultsEfforts to replicate Hatzenbuehler et al.’s (2014) key finding on structural stigma's notable influence on the premature mortality of sexual minorities, including a more refined imputation strategy than described in the original study, failed. No data imputation approach yielded parameters that supported the original study's conclusions. Alternative hypotheses, which originally motivated the present study, revealed little new information.ConclusionTen different approaches to multiple imputation of missing data yielded none in which the effect of structural stigma on the mortality of sexual minorities was statistically significant. Minimally, the original study's structural stigma variable (and hence its key result) is so sensitive to subjective measurement decisions as to be rendered unreliable
Recommended from our members
The role of religious organizations in the HIV crisis of Sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFThere are important disparities between how HIV transmission, prevention, and mitigation are addressed within sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and how they are understood by the international aid agencies that design and implement interventions to combat AIDS in this region. Contending that local responses to the AIDS epidemic hinge on a religious framework, this dissertation examines the relationship between religion and HIV risk at both the individual and collective levels in the setting of rural Malawi - a religiously diverse country with high levels of both religious participation and HIV prevalence. This dissertation advances the Durkheimian idea that participation in harmful behaviors is reduced in places where particular religions or religious rituals are widely practiced. Specifically, it addresses the associations between religion and (1) HIV prevention, (2) actual HIV status, and (3) perceived obligations to support families affected by AIDS. The relationships are assessed by employing multiple methodologies and data sources including participant observation data from religious services, in-depth interviews with religious leaders and lay people, and large-scale survey data. This dissertation provides the first empirical assessment of what religious leaders in SSA say and do about HIV in their communities and shows that many have assumed an activist role in combating the epidemic. The relevant practices religious leaders engage in include: preaching explicitly about AIDS on a regular basis, privately advising members to use condoms, actively policing the sexual behavior of their members -- visiting those suspected to be at risk of contracting the disease and to confront them about their sexual behavior, and advising divorce as a strategy for HIV prevention in cases where a member is likely to be infected by an unfaithful spouse. By synthesizing insights from demographic studies of contextual effects on sexual behavior with the notion of "moral communities" from the sociology of religion, this dissertation emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing religion as a supra-individual phenomenon with important implications for the health of populations.Sociolog
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Season 11 Episode 5: Premarital Sex in America
No full textAccording to several surveys, more than ninety percent of Americans in their early 20s are having sex before marriage. Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin sociology department, and co-author of the book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying, explains the choices and values of emerging adults today. Shirley Hoogstra hosts. Episode #1105
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Recommended from our members
My body is a temple : eating disturbances, religious involvement and mental health among young adult women
No full textA growing body of literature outlines the undesirable health consequences of eating disturbances. However, little attention has been given to the possible mitigating effects of cultural institutions, such as religion, in the lives of women suffering from such pathologies. In this study, I contribute to this gap by asking, "What is the relationship between eating disturbances, religious involvement and mental health?" I address this question by: (a) outlining a series of arguments linking eating disturbances, specific aspects of religious involvement, and mental health; (b) identifying several distinct hypotheses from this discussion; and (c) empirically testing these relevant hypotheses with a nationally representative sample of young adult women in the US. I find that various aspects of religious involvement mitigates the deleterious effects of eating disturbances on depression and self-esteem, lending support for the moderating (buffering) model. I conclude by identifying the limitations of the present study and by suggesting promising directions for future research.Sociolog
Recommended from our members
Does true love wait? : religion, pledging and the premarital sexual behavior of married adults
No full textMost studies of premarital sex use a simple “did-they-or-didn’t-they” approach to the topic. Recent evidence, however, suggests there may be an important distinction between premarital sex—sex with a future spouse—and what has been termed “pre- premarital sex”—sex with someone other than a future spouse. Not only are those who have pre-premarital sex at higher risk for marital dissolution, they are also more likely to have physical health problems such as STDs and cervical cancer. Factors that lead to premarital and pre-premarital sex, however, are not well understood. Using a sample of married adults from Waves I and III of Add Health, I evaluate the effect of religion and abstinence pledging on the incidence of both premarital and pre-premarital sex. Further, I examine their influence on the number of sex partners among respondents who do have pre-premarital sex. My results indicate that premarital and pre-premarital sex are widespread even among religious Americans and those who sign abstinence pledges. Still, multinomial logit modeling and zero-truncated negative binomial regression reveal that religious individuals and abstinence pledgers (1) are more likely to abstain from sex before marriage, (2) are more likely to have only premarital sex versus pre-premarital sex, and (3) report fewer lifetime sex partners when they do have pre-premarital sex.Sociolog
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
