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Introduction Survey respondents are increasingly asked sensitive questions (Tourangeau and Smith, 1996) on topics such as sexual behavior, drug use, and illegal activities, thus requiring new and innovative methods for [...]

This study examined how information obtained from an adolescent screening instrument administered in a medical clinic is affected by the method of data collection and knowledge that a summary report would be given to the provider. The Adolescent Health Review (AHR) was administered to 610 adolescent patients randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions to test the effect of mode of administration (paper vs. computer) and disclosure of results to the provider versus only to researchers (using the computer version). The AHR obtained information on mental health, sexual experiences, and use of psychoactive substances. Response patterns varied by mode of administration, with the paper version generally eliciting higher, and arguably more accurate, rates of disclosure. Knowing that the results would be provided to the doctor further attenuated disclosure. Results suggest that the paper version's higher rates of reporting must be weighed against the computer version's benefits of automated scoring and reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments are increasingly interested in estimating the prevalence of substance abuse with social indicators, largely because of the high cost of estimating prevalence with surveys of random samples of the population. With both the individual and county as the unit, we regress measures of the use of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs on social indicators that fall into three categories: demographics, measures of social disorganization, and measures more directly related to the use of substances. The measures of explained variance are fairly low, but even more troubling is that the effects of several social indicators are in the “wrong” direction. Reliance on social indicator data to supplant survey estimates of the prevalence of substance abuse requires further validation, attention to sources of bias in the indicator data, and replication of the models over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the hypothesized inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and conservatism on a wide range of so-called social issues. This relationship is important in itself as well as in some theories that link political dealignment to features of postindustrial society. We examine this relationship by looking at the net effects of education, occupation, income, and class (owner, supervisor, or worker) on nine issues. Our results suggest that the hypothesized relationship is absent for most dimensions of socioeconomic status and most social issues. The most consistent exception to this is that liberalism on social issues tends to increase with education, but even here the relationship varies considerably from issue to issue. The lack of a consistent relationship reflects both the diversity of the social issues and the fuzziness of the social/economic distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some lime, researchers have wanted to estimate models which include effects of origin, destination, and mobility on various dependent variables, but these models are underidentified. When identifying restrictions have been imposed, either the effects of mobility are insignificant or the restrictions are unreasonable. We argue that the most sensible area in which to expect effects of mobility is emotional well-being and propose two types of identifying restrictions on the mobility effects which allow the estimation of main and mobility effects. The first of these constrains the effect of slight upward mobility to be identical to the effect of no mobility. The second constrains the effects of upward and downward mobility to be exponential. For four of five measures of well-being, significant effects are estimated. For three of these, mobility in either direction is associated with improved mental health, For another, the effects of downward mobility are beneficial, and the effects of upward mobility are detrimental. it is critical to remember that these effects are + net of origin and destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attribution theory suggests that attributions of personal responsibility are less likely to be made when forces external to individuals are believed to be important. Data from national samples collected in 1957 and 1976 indicate a reluctance to attribute marital problems to oneself and a decreased tendency to attribute them to one's spouse; the decrease was especially pronounced among divorced respondents in describing previous marriages, although this differential change led to only a partial convergence of the married and the divorced. In both years, mentions of spouse are less frequent among those groups most exposed to secular forces: men, the young, and the better educated. This finding suggests that the decreased frequency of attributing responsibility to the spouse is due to the secularization of marital values. Further evidence for this perspective is obtained from the relationship of spousal blame with the frequency of church attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from a large national survey indicates a significant positive relationship between spouses employment and psychological distress among married men in this country. Employment outside the home is associated with improved mental health among married women. Investigating the determinants of these effects shows that the mental health advantage of employment for women is due to objective changes in their life situations as they move out of the home and into the labor force. We have a less clear understanding of the relationship between spouse's employment and psychological distress among men, but inferential evidence suggests that traditional sex role orientations explain part of this effect. There is no evidence that objective burdens associated with increased housework or childcare responsibilities play a part in the elevated rates of distress reported by husbands. These conclusions are brought together in a discussion of trends in the relationship between sex and psychological distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a great deal of interest has developed in the "sex role hypothesis" as a way of understanding the high rates of psychological distress among women in our society. Although this work has been almost entirely cross-sectional, the underlying hypothesis predicts that the relationship between sex and distress should decline as sex roles become more comparable. Basing our analysis on three national surveys and two community surveys spanning the years 1957 to 1976-a period of rapid changes in the roles of women--we document a reduction in the relationship between sex and one indicator of distress, a screening scale of psychophysiological symptoms. Specification analyses show that the increased labor-force participation of women has been responsible for part of this trend. However, there appear to be no relationships between the decline in psychophysiological symptoms and changes in educational attainment, rates of marriage, marital dissolution, or childbearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends in the female:male ratio of attempted suicide are studied by assembling a data set consisting of all published normal population studies of suicide attempts conducted in the United Stales between 1940 and 1980. A post-World War II increase in this ratio and a subsequent decrease beginning in the 1960s are documented. The first of these changes is consistent with a post-War shift in the sex ratio of overall psychopathology discovered by Gove and Tudor (1973) in an analysis of "true prevalence" studies. The second is consistent with a shift in the rates of self-reported psychological distress found by Kessler and McRae (1981) in national survey data and by Srole and Fischer (1980) in the Midtown Manhattan Restudy. The implications of the findings for current thinking about the influence of sex roles on mental illness are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses multiway contingency analysis. In the event that the categories are ordered or scaled, a different technique, than that of polytomous variables or that of partitioning, is described here. The case of a scaled response and that of a scaled factor are treated. The advantages of linear specification are discussed. Since the linear specification is actually tested, one may avoid imposing it when it is not appropriate. This consideration tends to bypass a priori arguments as to whether the response categories should be regarded as equally spaced points on an interval scale. In the example provided, the assumption involved in scaling comports with the nature of the effects to be described. Under other circumstances one might find that a different scoring of the response categories would be more appropriate. Or it could happen that a nonlinear effect is present whatever the scoring. The illustrative data presents a scaled factor, birth year, cross-classified by two pairs of responses, that is, two different three-way tables rather than a single four-way table.

The article presents a comparison of self-reported use of behavioral health services with Medicaid agency records in Minnesota between September 2000 and February 2001. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had not received services, although administrative data indicated otherwise. Failure to report treatment was associated with gender, age, education, and diagnosis, but not with race or ethnicity or with residence.

The article presents the reply of authors to the comments by sociologist Novral D. Glenn. Glenn maintains that the approach which authors employ to detect mobility effects in the presence of main effects of origin and destination is flawed for several reasons. Authors concede at the outset that the approach is not the ideal way to study mobility. The ultimate solution must involve attempts to measure the concepts for which the mobility terms serve as proxies and their employment of these models is primarily heuristic. Glenn dismisses our identifying restrictions as either being trivial or arbitrary. The first restriction that mobility in the U.S. is characterized by small upward steps. Thus, those who are slightly upwardly mobile are likely to find themselves in unusual circumstances since many of similar origins will have moved with them. The second constraint is based on the linear dependence of mobility of origin and destination by incorporating the consideration that the effect of mobility is likely to increase ad mobility increases.

In this article the author comments on an article named "Measuring Life Events," written by M. Tausig and published in the March 1982 issue of the "Journal of Health and Social Behavior." In a recent paper in this journal, Tausig explored the relationships between the CES-Depression scale and various measures of life-event scales to determine which of the latter is the best predictor of depression. He showed that doubling the number of items in the scale significantly increases the correlation, but he argued that this increase is so small that the cost of adding the items out-weighs the benefit of increased explained variance. The author of this article accepts this, although for particular purposes, one might want to include the additional items. His argument about desirability of events, however, is difficult to understand or accept part of the confusion stems from combining the desirability issue with the issue of whether desirability should be objectively or subjectively determined.

The article presents a reply to Walter R. Schumm and his colleagues, who have proposed an alternative means of dealing with situations involving an hypothesized effect of the difference between two variables. Their approach stresses the role of theory in specifying a priori an appropriate three-dimensional geometric model. They proposed that what they consider an alternative means of dealing with situations involving an hypothesized effect of the difference between two variables. Their approach stresses the role of theory in specifying a priori an appropriate three-dimensional geometric model and the testing of this model against alternative plausible models using regression. In the earlier article Charles J. Brody and James A. McRae made use of previous theory and research on the effects of social mobility to select an appropriate dependent variable for analysis, to propose two types of identifying restrictions leading to plausible three-dimensional models, and to rule out other identifying restrictions leading to less plausible models or unreasonable constraints on the mobility parameters.