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How moral decision-making occurs, matures over time and relates to behaviour is complex. To develop a full picture of moral decision-making, moral development and moral behaviour it is necessary to understand: (a) how real-time moral decisions are made (including relevant social and contextual factors), (b) what processes are required to develop to enable mature moral decisions, (c) how these processes develop over time, and (d) how moral decisions relate to behaviour. In this paper, psychological and social neuroscience theories of moral decision-making and development are briefly reviewed, as is the development of relevant component processes. Various component processes and factors are seen as required for moral decision-making and development, yet there is no comprehensive framework incorporating these components into one explanation of how real-time moral decisions are made and mature. In this paper, we integrated these components into a new framework based on social information processing (SIP) theory. Situational factors, and how both cognitive and affective processes guide moral decisions was incorporated into the Social Information Processing-Moral Decision-Making (SIP-MDM) framework, drawing upon theories and findings from developmental psychology and social neuroscience. How this framework goes beyond previous SIP models was outlined, followed by a discussion of how it can explain both real-time moral decisions and moral development. We concluded with how the SIP-MDM framework could be used to guide future research and theory development in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Analytical sociology explains macro-level outcomes by referring to micro-level behaviors, and its hypotheses thus take macro-level entities (e.g. groups) as their units of analysis. The statistical analysis of these macro-level units is problematic, since macro units are often few in number, leading to low statistical power. Additionally, micro-level processes take place within macro units, but tests on macro-level units cannot adequately deal with these processes. Consequently, much analytical sociology focuses on testing micro-level predictions. We propose a better alternative; a method to test macro hypotheses on micro data, using randomization tests. The advantages of our method are (i) increased statistical power, (ii) possibilities to control for micro covariates, and (iii) the possibility to test macro hypotheses without macro units. We provide a heuristic description of our method and illustrate it with data from a published study. Data and R-scripts for this paper are available in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/scfx3/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the globally significant topic of gendered participation and socio-technical improvisation in technological systems hard set within deeply symbolic practices. The general belief in the anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa is that metallurgy (male domain) and pottery (female domain) are gendered technologies, regulated by strong taboos that exclude women from participating in male practices, and vice versa. This has promoted the untested generalisation that, in conformity with these gender dichotomies, taboos mandated that transformational stages of metallurgy such as smelting were always carried on outside settlements, without the participation of women. These ideas were empirically tested through a stylistic, petrographic and geochemical study of metallurgical crucibles from Mapungubwe, which at this site resemble pottery. It emerged that pottery and crucibles are one and the same. Since pottery was made by women, and men worked metal, the conclusion in this paper is that metallurgy was neither hermetically sealed nor accessible exclusively to men. Furthermore, depending on context, primary metal production was also practised within settlements. This demonstrates considerable fluidity and improvisation, with women and men participating in each other’s technological domains, although such participation may have been staggered so that they undertook different tasks of the same process, at potentially different times and in different spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The problem of fit between social institutions and ecological systems is an enduring challenge in natural resource management and conservation. Developments in the science of conservation biology encourage the management of landscapes at increasingly larger scales. In contrast, sociological approaches to conservation emphasize the importance of ownership, collaboration and stewardship at scales relevant to the individual or local community. Despite the proliferation of initiatives seeking to work with local communities to undertake conservation across large landscapes, there is an inherent tension between these scales of operation. Consequently, questions about the changing nature of effective conservation across scales abound. Through an analysis of three nested cases working in a semiautonomous fashion in the Northern Rocky Mountains in North America, this paper makes an empirical contribution to the literature on nested governance, collaboration and communication across scales. Despite different scales of operation, constituencies and scale frames, we demonstrate a surprising similarity in organizational structure and an implicit dependency between these initiatives. This paper examines the different capacities and capabilities of collaborative conservation from the local to regional to supra regional. We draw on the underexplored concept of ‘scale-dependent comparative advantage’ (Cash and Moser, 2000), to gain insight into what activities take place at which scale and what those activities contribute to nested governance and collaborative conservation. The comparison of these semiautonomous cases provides fruitful territory to draw lessons for understanding the roles and relationships of organizations operating at different scales in more connected networks of nested governance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

There is a longstanding debate in anthropology and history regarding the extent to which the determinants of past economic change are similar in any specific ways to those that operate today. In this paper, we examine the extent to which increasing returns to settlement scale in material outputs, which are apparent in contemporary urban systems, also operated in the Late Pre-Hispanic Tarma and Mantaro drainages of the Peruvian Central Andes. Proxy measures for material outputs across settlements and households show that this region experienced a marked economic expansion following its incorporation into the Inka Empire ca. 1450 CE. We argue that these changes in living standards are consistent with expectations of an emerging framework known as settlement scaling theory that specifies relationships between human aggregation, social connectivity and material outputs. Our results suggest that intensification of human social connectivity and material flows—as measured through settlement size distributions—can be sufficient to raise living standards even in the absence of markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The colonial census was a bureaucratic device which provided an essential abstraction from social reality, a ‘statistical fix’ designed to map individual social groups in space. This paper considers the contradictions associated with colonial knowledge systems as reflected in the census grafted onto Burmese society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It attempts to chart the general adoption and adaptation, in the Burmese context, of a classificatory scheme which categorised labour as either productive or unproductive. Colonialism introduced new attitudes towards work and labour which reinforced patriarchal values which contrasted with more egalitarian Burmese socio-economic systems. The paper suggests that a simple classification of women workers as either productive or unproductive in the Burmese census between 1872 and 1931 resulted in the devaluation of their status as workers. This devaluation was a function of both real economic transformation taking place in the empire and changes in census classification, reflecting a gendering of occupations that undermined the cultural norms of Burmese society. The material result was that women became statistically less visible as economically productive workers. Such ascriptions of value to women workers were largely informed by moral considerations originating in England. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The notion of the constraint (or degree of organization) of belief systems is a potentially fruitful one in both political science and sociology. Existing attempts to measure constraint, however, have had severe drawbacks, both conceptual and methodological. This paper argues that this constraint is better conceived of as the absence of dispersion in a table of cross-classified beliefs and demonstrates that measures based on this conception are better at discerning the presence of constraint where it is quite likely to exist, namely, in small, ideologically focused groups. The approach to constraint outlined here has a number of other advantages: it is equally appropriate to interval, ordinal, or nominal data; it does not require external criteria of what responses should be associated with others; it is not variance-dependent; it does not assume that constraint is equivalent to either reduced dimensionality or pairwise association; and it is equally appropriate for mass and nonmass belief systems. It is also simple to conduct tests of significance difference across populations. Finally, this paper outlines the proper way to standardize such measures, which applies to other uses of the entropy measure, such as the quantification of income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for assessing interindividual and intergroup differences in the sense of justice. The framework enables estimation of all the justice quantities of interest--the principles of microjustice and macrojustice, the style of expression, and the firmness with which the principles of microjustice are held--as well as statistical testing for cross-individual and cross-group differences. To illustrate the framework, the paper investigates gender differences in the principles of justice with respect to earnings. Using data collected by Rossi's factorial-survey method, we obtain respondent-specific estimates of (i) three principles of microjustice -- the just base wage, the just rate of return to schooling, and the just gender multiplier--and the certitude with which they are held; and (ii) the principles of macrojustice--represented by seven measures of inequality. To assess gender differences in each of these eleven elements, we estimate a variety of models, utilizing ordinary least-squares estimators and, to correct for possible heteroskedasticity and endogeneity, generalized least-squares and two-stage/least-squares estimators; for the three estimated principles of micro justice, we also carry out hierarchical empirical-Bayes analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a structural theory of industrial organization and operation. The analytical approach taken is largely based on the premise that industry is embedded in the social structure of market competition. Moreover, imperfect competition and industrial resource dependence are composed of and reflected in interindustrial transaction patterns. Using network models of imperfect competition, this study explains the determinants of Israeli industrial performance. The first part of this paper inquires into the structure of interindustrial relations using structural equivalence as a diagnostic tool. In the second part structural determinants of industrial profitability are estimated. Profitability is predicted by the degree of control an industry has over its domestic transactions and its linkage to the world economy. Implications of this study for the theoretical models of social competition and for an empirical analysis of markets and firms are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Founder of the Brussels Observatory, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) is especially well known for his theory of the average man. Like the average position of a star obtained through a large quantity of observed data, the average man was, according to Quetelet, subject to fixed causal laws. Published in 1835, his book On Man: Essay of Social Physics is one of the founding works of sociology and mathematical statistics. The sources of the analogy between astronomy and social physics have been debated by historians. To shed light on this question and the conditions of application of mathematics in the 19th century, we publish for the first time a manuscript that is kept in Quetelet's papers at the Royal Academy of Belgium, and give an English translation of it. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted long-standing questions about energy exploration and its social and environmental implications. Sociologists studying environmental disasters have documented the social impacts resulting from these events and dissatisfaction with government and industry responses. In this paper, we use data from a survey conducted during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to examine how Louisiana and Florida residents'' social backgrounds, experiences with the spill, and trust in information sources predict their perceptions of governmental and BP response efforts. We find that direct personal impacts and compensation strongly influence the evaluations of responding organizations. Age and place of residence also predict such assessments. Finally, levels of confidence in television news and BP as sources of information appear to shape Gulf Coast residents'' opinions about the work of organizations responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Rudin–Osher–Fatemi model is a widely used variational denoising algorithm which favors piecewise constant solutions. Although edge sharpness and location are well preserved, some local features such as textures and small details are often diminished with noise simultaneously. This paper aims to better preserve these local features using a similar variational framework. We introduce a texture detecting function according to the derivatives of the noisy textured image. Then this function is used to construct a spatially adaptive fidelity term, which adjusts the denoising extent in terms of the local features. Numerical results show that our method is superior to the Rudin–Osher–Fatemi model in both signal-to-noise ratio and visual quality. Moreover, part of our results are also compared with other state-of-the-art methods including a variational method and a non local means filter. The comparison shows that our method is competitive with these two methods in restoration quality but is much faster. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Based on structural differences between spoken and written language, the purpose of this paper was to investigate whether spoken and written communication imply a different representation in reporting an experienced dream. In fact, the clausal-dynamic quality of the former and nominal-synoptic quality of the latter, with the consequent differences in length, cohesion and density, could enhance/reduce the perceptual character and narrative structure of report features often considered in order to assess sleep mentation. In particular, we wondered whether, after eliminating all the elements responsible for the more conspicuous quantitative differences across the two forms (false starts, repetitions, digressions, redundancies), we would obtain two equivalent ways of reporting dreams. Three hundred and two (101 males and 201 females) subjects, raging in age from 18 to 40 years, participated as volunteers in the study and were asked to complete a dream diary daily for 14 days, by tape-recording their own dreams and putting them down in writing. The reports were analyzed by a psycholinguistic system. Results indicated that the report modality is able to affect the dream experience representation, conditioning the figurative (re)translation carried out by the tester: written forms show a loss of hallucinatory information and a non-complete correspondence also of the bizarreness features with respect to the spoken texts. Partialling out for length eliminated any difference between spoken and written dream reports on bizarreness; on the other hand, controlling the sequence effect of the report did not introduce changes. Methodological and theoretical implications were discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Researchers have established that individual religiosity influences sexual behavior and that religious support can increase consistency between personal religiosity and behavior. Researchers are less certain, however, of the effect that religious friendship networks have on sexual behavior. In addition, the effects of network characteristics such as density and one’s position in a social network have not been established. This paper uses a network subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effect of friends’ religiosity on the probability of first sex. We find that friends’ religiosity has an independent influence on adolescent sexual behavior that is similar in magnitude to personal religiosity. We also find evidence that friends’ religiosity has the strongest influence on the sexual behavior of adolescents who are embedded in dense social networks, in which teens’ friends are also friends with one another. These results support the hypothesis that group influences depend on the degree of embeddedness within the network and highlight the importance of studying religion as a property of groups as well as individuals. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Social autonomy is the tendency to assert one’s opinion in the face of opposition. This paper investigates the social roots of that tendency by focusing on the long-term effects of childhood family background on midlife social autonomy. The effects of two aspects of family background are investigated—socioeconomic background and childhood household composition. Family background variables in these categories have small yet theoretically and statistically significant effects on midlife social autonomy. Parental education and occupation are associated with midlife social autonomy among both men and women. Early-life household composition variables and parental income are associated with social autonomy only among women. Adult status variables generally do not mediate the effects of of the family background variables on midlife social autonomy. This suggests that the long-term effects of family background on social autonomy are primarily due to early life socialization. Gender-specific socialization processes are discussed as explanations for these effects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Current perspectives on reproductive health place strong emphasis on making steady progress with respect to women’s reproductive rights () in developing countries. Reproductive rights are composed of abortion rights and personal rights such as rights of equality of sexes during marriage. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of reproductive health at the cross-national level. It is argued that improvements in gender equality and levels of democracy are necessary and important for increasing reproductive health levels. Data from 129 developing countries are used to test the proposed model. It is found that as the level of democracy increases resulting in improvements in gender equality, the extent of personal rights improves. Furthermore, advances in personal rights increase the level of reproductive health. Theoretical implications and limitations of the study are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the paper we study a semiparametric density estimation method based on the model of an elliptical distribution. The method considered here shows a way to overcome problems arising from the curse of dimensionality. The optimal rate of the uniform strong convergence of the estimator under consideration coincides with the optimal rate for the usual one-dimensional kernel density estimator except in a neighbourhood of the mean. Therefore the optimal rate does not depend on the dimension. Moreover, asymptotic normality of the estimator is proved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we propose a synthetic framework, “strategic adaptation,” for understanding the social mobility process of Asian Americans. We argue that Asian Americans consciously choose occupations where they can effectively cope with potential discrimination and other disadvantages by achieving marketable credentials. Our empirical analyses are primarily based on data from the 1988–1994 National Educational Longitudinal Survey. There are four main findings from our study. First, Asian American youth tend to choose occupations with a high representation of Asian workers and high average earnings/education, relative to whites, even after controlling for socioeconomic background and academic performance. Second, Asians are more likely than whites to expect to enter college and to major in fields that have high financial payoffs. Third, a large fraction of this racial gap is attributable to occupational expectation. Finally, Asians are more likely than are whites to actually enroll in college and to pursue high-earning majors, and these racial differences are attributable to both educational expectation and occupational expectation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many social scientists conducting macro-level analyses use aggregate-level variables (weighted sums of the characteristics of the individuals within the macro-level units: e.g., means, percents, or rates) to describe macro-level units (e.g., schools, cities, or states). Researchers have long known that aggregate-level variables are likely to be more reliable than individual-level variables. More recently, they have recognized the possibility of estimating the reliability of aggregate-level variables using information on the variability of these variables and variability of the individual-level characteristics (on which they are based). These reliability estimates can be used to correct measures of association at the aggregate-level for unreliability. When correcting measures of relationship, however, researchers will often need to consider the correlated errors generated when the same set of individuals responds to the same questions used to create the aggregate-level variables (the problem of joint sampling). This paper shows how to estimate these correlated measurement errors and use them, and aggregate-level reliability coefficients, to correct measures of relationship at the aggregate-level. These techniques are applied to data from the Senate National Election Studies to illustrate the impact of these corrections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two basic issues related to the assessment of the goodness-of-fit of sociological models to behavioral data: How simplifying assumptions contained in models should be evaluated and whether analysis of data should be carried out at the individual group or aggregate level. The discussion is conducted in the context of the fit of a model of participation rates by Fisek, Berger, and Norman (1991) to data collected by Smith-Lovin, Skvoretz, and Hudson (1986) in a Bales-type situation. The conclusions are that simplifying assumptions should be evaluated from the point of view of robustness of model to violations of such assumptions, and that the assessment of the adequacy of minimal actor models should be in terms of aggregated data. The fit of the model and data under consideration is assessed to be adequate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate innovation is often argued to result from, and be encouraged by, market competition. The tradition is to test such arguments with market concentration data; firms with stronger control over their market can afford the long-run investment of R&D. Network theory has broadened our understanding of how competition is a function of structure within and beyond a market. Producers earn high profit margins to the extent they are few and their customers and suppliers are many and disorganized. The first condition is measured by the traditional concentration ratio for a market. The second condition is measured by the network constraint of suppliers and customers. My purpose in this paper is to describe how our understanding of the market competition effect on innovation is enriched when the concentration measure of market competition tradition in economics is replaced with the network model of market competition now prevalent in sociology. Results indicate that markets facing competitive environments, in high constraint market positions, show greater R&D intensity and faster rates of innovation than do industries facing less competitive pressure. These effects persist even with controls for technological opportunity and appropriability, in contrast to traditional models using only concentration data to measure competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends past findings of the absence of distinctive socialist mobility structures on two grounds: the lack of systematic cross-national comparison within the socialist bloc and an exclusive focus on men's mobility. From a comprehensive analysis of the mobility of men and women in three former socialist societies (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland), the study identifies a socialist mobility regime which differs from the capitalist one in at least two major ways: the existence of long-range upward and downward mobility and the significant outflow of farmers to other destinations. It also finds significant cross-national and gender differences in mobility patterns, confirming that gender and class interact to generate specific mobility patterns even within socialist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive land use plans and their corresponding regulations play a role in determining the nature of the built environment and community design, which are factors that influence population health and health disparities. To determine the level in which a plan addresses healthy living and active design, there is a need for a systematic, reliable and valid method of analyzing and scoring health-related content in plans and regulations. This paper describes the development and validation of a scoring tool designed to measure the strength and comprehensiveness of health-related content found in land use plans and the corresponding regulations. The measures are scored based on the presence of a specific item and the specificity and action-orientation of language. To establish reliability and validity, 42 land use plans and regulations from across the United States were scored January-April 2016. Results of the psychometric analysis indicate the scorecard is a reliable scoring tool for land use plans and regulations related to healthy living and active design. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) scores showed strong inter-rater reliability for total strength and comprehensiveness. ICC scores for total implementation scores showed acceptable consistency among scorers. Cronbach's alpha values for all focus areas were acceptable. Strong content validity was measured through a committee vetting process. The development of this tool has far-reaching implications, bringing standardization of measurement to the field of land use plan assessment, and paving the way for systematic inclusion of health-related design principles, policies, and requirements in land use plans and their corresponding regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]