Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Some level of police discretion is an inevitable consequence of the numerous decisions a police officer faces daily. In light of recent cases of police abuse of force and racial profiling, most scholarly inquiry has focused on whether police have exercised their discretion fairly/justly. Unexplored in the literature, however, has been consideration of how affiliation with a police association in the form of a membership card (or P.B.A. card) distributed to police officers and their family and friends may favorably influence the outcome of interactions with police. This paper addresses the extent to which the use of the PBA card has resulted in law enforcement agents ignoring criminal or traffic infractions because of the offender's association with a fellow officer. In particular, this paper will examine the history, distribution, function, and public awareness of the membership card. Specific examples of the use of these cards as well as the larger issues associated with their existence will be examined. This paper will argue that the promotion and use of these cards by police associations is one of the largest and least studied threats to a democratic state.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper compares the extended family integration of Latinos/as and Euro American women and men and assesses the import of social class and culture in explaining ethnic differences. Using NSFH II data, it finds that ethnic differences depend on the measure of integration utilized. Latinos/as exhibit higher rates of kin proximity, contact, and household help but lower rates of financial support than Euro Americans. Two additional differences exist only among women: Latinas are more likely to give child care help and less likely to give emotional support. As to the explanation for these ethnic differences, social class is the key factor; cultural factors have little effect. The analysis supports an intersectional framework attending to links among ethnicity, gender and class.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The dream of extending the human life span, and of potentially achieving immortality, is long lived, spanning across many cultures and centuries. This paper describes six different immortality ideologies used throughout the ages to explore beliefs and practices associated with efforts to obtain rejuvenation and longevity. In an effort to highlight the ways that cultural and historical contexts are intricately woven in the human desire to avoid death, this research considers major cultural influences on immortality ideologies including the intersection of religion and science, attitudes towards nature and changing conceptions of time. This research works to emphasize the idea that immortality ideologies are not neutral, by unveiling hidden outcomes seemingly disconnected from the explicit goal of a longer life. Finally, this research beckons readers, with inspiration from the efforts of Howard Becker (1973), to consider the impact current day immortality ideologies have on our ability to successfully live life.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Rationale: Health care expenditure regressions are used in a wide variety of economic analyses including risk adjustment and program and treatment evaluations. Two recent articles have demonstrated that generalized gamma models with heteroskedasticity (GGM-het) and extended general linear models (EGLM) provide flexible approaches to deal with a variety of data problems commonly encountered in expenditure estimation. To date, however, there have been few empirical applications of these models to expenditures.

Objective: We use nationally representative data from the first six panels of the U.S. Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to compare the bias and predictive accuracy of GGM-het and EGLM models with other regression models in a cross-validation study design.

Methodology: We estimate models of prescription drug, ambulatory and total health care expenditures conditional on having any expenditure. Models are estimated separately for the elderly and other privately insured adults. Since expenditure distributions vary by type of service and population, the appropriate functional form is also likely to vary. In estimating expenditures, we focus on two recently developed modeling approaches that flexibly accommodate skewness, kurtosis, heteroskedasticity and other data problems. The GGM-het model, proposed by Manning, Basu, and Mullahy (2005), uses a log-link like many standard GLM models. However, the GGM-het model is more flexible than standard models because the generalized gamma distribution has a scale parameter and two shape parameters and variance is explicitly modeled as a function of explanatory variables. In the EGLM model, proposed by Basu and Rathouz (2005), the link function is not specified prior to estimation. Instead, both the link and variance functions are simultaneously estimated along with the coefficients.

Our models use socioeconomic characteristics and condition information from the first year of each MEPS panel to predict expenditures in the second year. We use a split-sample cross validation design to compare results from GGM-het, EGLM, log OLS with heteroskedasticity (log-het), linear OLS, Poisson and Gamma models. We use the validation sample to test for over-fitting and to examine predictive ratios and mean prediction errors in the entire sample, in the tails of the distribution and for persons with chronic conditions.

Results: In our preliminary analysis we focused on total expenditures and estimated all types of models except EGLM. We found that the expenditure distribution for the elderly was more kurtotic than the distribution for other adults and the distributions varied in the extent of heteroskedasticity beyond simple functions of the mean. Overall, the GGM-het and log-het models fit the data for privately insured adults very well. However, none of our models was clearly superior for the elderly.

Conclusions: Our preliminary analysis confirms that GGM-het models are robust to a wide variety of common data problems. For some distributions, however, an even more flexible estimator, such as the EGLM model, may be required.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper will focus on the explanation of stakeholder’s causal attributions during crises and their link with organizational reputation. The potential and applicability of attribution theory are by far not exhausted in order to understand how attributions arise and how they influence stakeholder’s perceptions of organizations in ongoing crises. A theoretical framework for explaining covariation-based causal inferences in attribution theory will be discussed and proposed for application in crisis communication research. On the basis of partially constructed crisis scenarios, basic assumptions of Kelley’s covariation principle (1967, 1973) will be explained and suggested for future empirical tests. The resulting framework possibly can be considered as complementary to Situational Crisis Communication Theory (Coombs & Holladay 1996, 2004). Thus, it can be discussed for inclusion into the model, subject to the condition that forthcoming studies provide sufficient empirical evidence. Such an extension could help to deepen our understanding of how crisis responsibility attributions emerge and how crisis managers can refine their strategies of communication with stakeholders during organizational crisis.