Boys. Most dangerous and endangered

As both victims and perpetrators of crime and other pathologies, America's boys need help. An important lesson: Work on solutions with groups, not just individuals.     

Pitfalls and opportunities for environmental marketers

Issues such as global warming, ozone depletion, insufficient landfill capacity, and excess packaging are foremost on the minds of consumers. Companies face a myriad of environmental challenges, but they also recognize the opportunities to be gained by implementing responsible marketing action plans.     

Assessing black progress: voting and citizenship rights,residency and housing,education

Farley discusses progress US blacks have made in the areas of voting and citizenship rights, residency and housing, and education. A major goal of the civil rights movement was to permit blacks to influence the electoral process in the same manner as whites. Most important in this regard was the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the proportion of southern blacks casting ballots increased sharply since the early 1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, but by the turn of the century, Jim Crow laws in southern states called for segregation in most public places. Common customs and government policy in the North resulted in similar segregation of blacks from whites. The Montgomery bus boycott and similar protests in dozens of other cities led to enactment of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which proscribed such racial practices. By the late 1960s, blacks in all regions could use the same public accommodations as whites. In most metropolitan areas, de facto racial segregation persisted long after the laws were changed. Supreme Court decisions and local open-housing ordinances supported the right of blacks to live where they could afford. However the major change was the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed racial discrimination in the sale or rental of most housing units. The separation of blacks from whites did not end in the 1970s. Today, in areas which have large black populations, there are many central city neighborhoods and a few in the suburbs which are either all-black or are becoming exclusively black enclaves. Most other neighborhoods have no more than token black populations. Another major effort of civil rights organizations has been the upgrading of housing quality for blacks. By 1980, only 6% of the homes and apartments occupied by blacks lacked complete plumbing facilities (down from 50% in 1940). Unlike the modest changes in residential segregation, racial differences in housing quality have been greatly reduced. By 1960, black students approached parity with whites in terms of measurable aspects of school facilities. In 1940, young blacks averaged about 3 fewer years of educational attainment than whites; the time is nearing when the years of schooling completed by blacks and whites will be the same. In small and medium-sized cities throughout the country, public schools are generally integrated. However, the situation in the largest metropolitan areas is very different. Today, large public schools are segregated, in large part, because blacks and whites live in separate school districts.     

Timing and duration effects in residence histories and other longitudinal data: II. Studies of duration effects in Norway, 1965-1971

The main results of eleven studies of the nature and determinants of the timing of moves and duration of residence effects are presented. The studies (see table 1) illustrate the use of the methodological framework for studying individual histories of the previous article. There are substantial duration of residence effects in most population subgroups, implying that the migration process in non-Markovian at the mocro level and that the semi-Markov model is required. However, characterization of effects and their determinants are shown to depend so heavily on the type of interval and observation scheme used, that only within a comprehensive framework is proper interpretation of empirical results possible.     

DEVIL'S ADVOCACY IN MANAGERIAL DECISION-MAKING

There is some debate about the potential value of using devil's advocates in top-level organizational decision-making. In this paper, the contrasting views on this question are summarized briefly and the field and laboratory research on the devil's advocate and related techniques is discussed. This research is then used as the basis for detailed suggestions on the effective use of devil's advocates in improving managerial decisions.     

On minimum distance estimators for unimodal densities

It is shown that minimum distance estimators for families of unimodal densities are always consistent; the rate of convergence is indicated. An algorithm is proposed for computing the minimum distance estimator for the family of all unimodal densities. References are given to the maximum likelihood method and the kernel method.     

The Self-concept of Black and White Women: The Influences Upon Its Formation of Welfare Dependency, Work Effort, Family Networks, and Illnesses

Abstract . The concept of “self-efficacy” is used to test the hypothesis that the negative self-concept of welfare recipients coniributes to long term psychological and material dependency on such assistance. Self-efficacy focuses on the extent to which people are able to produce and regulate events in their lives and is associated with self-imposed performance expectations. The extent to which the minority status which Blacks occupy in this society decreases self efficacy relative to Whites is examined, using information generated from structured interviews with 290 low income Black and White women. Operationalizing the concept of self-efficacy with appropriate controls for socioeconomic status, family composition and other factors results in finding no racial differences in sense of self-efficacy between Black and White women. Observed differences in patterns of receipt of public assistance are found to be more directly related to the persistence of structural barriers to upward mobility that have differential impacts on Blacks and Whites. Long term receipt of public assistance is found to adversely affect both self-worth and work orientation/perceived efficacy for all women.     

Are robust estimation methods useful in the structural errors-in-variables model?

Summary In this paper it is investigated whether robust estimation procedures for the parameters of a regression model are also applicable when the observations are generated by the errors-in-variables model. Specifically, attention is paid to bounded-influence estimators, i.e. estimators that are constructed in such a way that the influence of a single observation on the outcome of the estimator is bounded. Both the classical errors-in-variables model and models with contaminated observational errors are considered.The authors are indebted to a referee for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.