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Scholars of minority political participation have shown significant interest in unraveling the complex but crucial role of group-based resources. Although there is an emerging scholarship on Latinos, much of the work on group consciousness, group identity, and ethnic organizations is based on research on Black Americans. Increasing diversity in the United States brings necessary attention to expanding the model to the politics and participation of other non-White, multiethnic, and immigrant majority communities. Using a new and unique dataset designed to tap the political opinion and behavior of Asian Americans, the authors find that the usefulness of group-based resources for this rapidly expanding and heterogeneous population is contingent on the specific form of the resources and the mode of political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. How do individuals of Asian descent in the United States identify themselves in ethnic terms and why? The purpose of this research is to map the contours of ethnic self-identities among Asian adults and explain their identity preferences in this immigrant community of color. Methods. We analyze a new and large-scale survey that collected public opinion from randomly selected individuals of the six largest Asian American descents who resided in five major metropolitan areas in 2000–2001. Results. We find that two-thirds of the respondents prefer to identify themselves in ethnic-specific modes. Although only one in six respondents preferred to identify themselves as “Asian American,” close to six in ten respondents indicated acceptance to this panethnic term as part of their identification. Using multinomial regression analysis, we show that indicators of primordial ties and prior socialization, in addition to cultural, social, and political integration, are instrumental in structuring ethnic identity preferences among Asian Americans. Conclusions. Our results confirm ethnic identity as a fluid, malleable, and layered phenomenon that depends on context. Our findings also highlight the need for reconsideration and expansion of the extant conceptual frameworks on studying ethnic identity formation for a nonwhite, multiethnic, multilingual, and globally connected population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. How do individuals of Asian descent in the United States identify themselves in ethnic terms and why? The purpose of this research is to map the contours of ethnic self-identities among Asian adults and explain their identity preferences in this immigrant community of color. Methods. We analyze a new and large-scale survey that collected public opinion from randomly selected individuals of the six largest Asian American descents who resided in five major metropolitan areas in 2000–2001. Results. We find that two-thirds of the respondents prefer to identify themselves in ethnic-specific modes. Although only one in six respondents preferred to identify themselves as “Asian American,” close to six in ten respondents indicated acceptance to this panethnic term as part of their identification. Using multinomial regression analysis, we show that indicators of primordial ties and prior socialization, in addition to cultural, social, and political integration, are instrumental in structuring ethnic identity preferences among Asian Americans. Conclusions. Our results confirm ethnic identity as a fluid, malleable, and layered phenomenon that depends on context. Our findings also highlight the need for reconsideration and expansion of the extant conceptual frameworks on studying ethnic identity formation for a nonwhite, multiethnic, multilingual, and globally connected population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That factors best account for the 1974 congressional election results? Were the Democratic party gains in House seats due mainly to the behavior of "strategic politicians" who sought or accepted candidacies and raised effective campaign war chests? Or were the Democratic gains due more to the impact of Watergate and the economy on voters' choices? In this Controversy, Gary C. Jacobson and Samuel Kernell defend the "strategic politicians" thesis, while Eric Uslaner and Margaret Conway stand by their more conventional accounting of the 1974 election outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of the 1974 congressional elections have failed to find significant effects for either Watergate or personal financial conditions, despite the prominence of both of these issues in the campaign. An alternative thesis argues that the effect was indirect, through the selection of better-than-usual Democratic candidates and weaker Republican contestants for House seats. Reanalyzing campaign finance data, we challenge this thesis and then move on to a different type of analysis from that which traditionally has been done in retrospective voting studies. With the use of the 1972-1974 panel of the Center for Political Studies, we examine separately the voting behavior of what V. O. Key, Jr. called "standpatters"and "switchers." The former are motivated primarily by party identification, with small Watergate effects. Our probit analylsis for switchers, on the other hand, finds much weaker party identification effects, but, interestingly, much more pronounced Watergate and economic impacts. Furthermore, an analysis of the sample compared to the population of districts in 1974 suggests that a more representative sample would lead to even more pronounced impacts for Watergate and the economy than even we have found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that used a modification of the Kelley-Mirer Rule to predict voter choice in the 1974 United States Senate elections. Operationalization and methods of analysis; Rule and patterns of political participation and electoral choice; Variables that could influence voter choice among independents.

This article examines the relationship of election administration procedures, sociodemographic characteristics of the citizens, attitudes, and election situation characteristics to voter turnout in three midterm congressional elections. Turnout is consistently related to certain attitudinal and social characteristics in all three elections, while others vary in their association with turnout. Election administration procedures are of limited importance in accounting for turnout, while some of the electoral context variables have a significant impact on voting participation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of voter reactions to Watergate and the 1973-1974 recession, as well as the voters' evaluations of presidential performance and of the presence or absence of an incumbent on individual vote choice in the 1974 House of Representatives elections. The influence of these variables is considered within the context of an attitudinal model of voter choice, using path analysis of responses by voters included in the 1974 University of Michigan National Election Study Party identification and candidate related variables (incumbency and candidate name familiarity) contribute more to the explanation of vote choice than do voter evaluations of Watergate, the recession, and presidential performance. The total set of explanatory variables are able to account for 43% of the variance in vote choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the study of elementary school finds partisan identification related to use of newspaper and television news in the U.S. Focus on reinforcement of attitudes, opinions and controversial issues; Presentation of the mass media in both entertainment and informational material images of the political community; Relationships between governmental and nongovernmental institutions and the workings of governmental processes.

One of the goals of reformers in the U.S. Congressional Democratic Party has been to democratize the law making process, to give more influence to individual members of the U.S. House through changing rules and procedures and reducing the power of committee chairmen. A second goal of reformers has been to increase the ability of the Democrats collectively to influence the law making process. This has been accomplished indirectly by increasing the influence of the party leadership and directly by strengthening the caucus, which now elects both party leaders and committee chairmen.

The article discusses that studies of political participation in the United States have identified a number of variables related to voting participation and to direction of the vote in partisan election contests. However, many offices at the local level are selected in nonpartisan elections, which have not been so extensively studied. Studies of nonpartisan elections have frequently been based on aggregate data and have emphasized variables for which aggregate data were easily available, such as class or social status and party identification in the parallel partisan system. Studies of the relationship of social class and party identification to voting turnout have reached conflicting conclusions about whether and to what degree they are related. Surveys have indicated other variables that may be useful in the analysis of voting behavior in nonpartisan elections. Although studies have examined in detail the influence of candidate and issue orientations on voting behavior in partisan elections, these two variables have been infrequently considered in analyses of nonpartisan elections, undoubtedly in part because of the unavailability of appropriate data.

The reliable identification of skin and soft tissue infections (SSTIs) from electronic health records is important for a number of applications, including quality improvement, clinical guideline construction, and epidemiological analysis. However, in the United States, types of SSTIs (e.g. is the infection purulent or non-purulent?) are not captured reliably in structured clinical data. With this work, we trained and evaluated a rule-based clinical natural language processing system using 6,576 manually annotated clinical notes derived from the United States Veterans Health Administration (VA) with the goal of automatically extracting and classifying SSTI subtypes from clinical notes. The trained system achieved mention- and document-level performance metrics of the range 0.39 to 0.80 for mention level classification and 0.49 to 0.98 for document level classification.

Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) use has increased substantially in the United States since 2010. To date, there is limited evidence regarding the nature and extent of ENDS documentation in the clinical note. In this work we investigate the effectiveness of different approaches to identify a patient's documented ENDS use. We report on the development and validation of a natural language processing system to identify patients with explicit documentation of ENDS using a large national cohort of patients at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

Use of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS, colloquially known as "electronic cigarettes") has increased substantially in the United States in the decade since 2010. However, currently relatively little is known regarding the documentation of ENDS use in clinical notes. With this study, we describe the development of an annotation scheme (and associated annotated corpus) consisting of 4,351 ENDS mentions derived from Department of Veterans Affairs clinical notes during the period 2010-2020. Analysis of our corpus provides important insights into ENDS documentation practices at the VA, in addition to providing a resource for the future development and validation of Natural Language Processing algorithms capable of reliably identifying ENDS-use status., (©2021 AMIA - All rights reserved.)

Background: Perceptions of tobacco, cannabis, and electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) are continually evolving in the United States. Exploring these characteristics through user generated text sources may provide novel insights into product use behavior that are challenging to identify using survey-based methods. The objective of this study was to compare the topics frequently discussed among Reddit members in cannabis, tobacco, and ENDS-specific subreddits. Methods: We collected 643,070 posts on the social media site Reddit between January 2013 and December 2018. We developed and validated an annotation scheme, achieving a high level of agreement among annotators. We then manually coded a subset of 2,630 posts for their content with relation to experiences and use of the three products of interest, and further developed word cloud representations of the words contained in these posts. Finally, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to the 643,070 posts to identify emerging themes related to cannabis, tobacco, and ENDS products being discussed on Reddit. Results: Our manual annotation process yielded 2,148 (81.6%) posts that contained a mention(s) of either cannabis, tobacco, or ENDS with 1,537 (71.5%) of these posts mentioning cannabis, 421 (19.5%) mentioning ENDS, and 264 (12.2%) mentioning tobacco. In cannabis-specific subreddits, personal experiences with cannabis, cannabis legislation, health effects of cannabis use, methods and forms of cannabis, and the cultivation of cannabis were commonly discussed topics. The discussion in tobacco-specific subreddits often focused on the discussion of brands and types of combustible tobacco, as well as smoking cessation experiences and advice. In ENDS-specific subreddits, topics often included ENDS accessories and parts, flavors and nicotine solutions, procurement of ENDS, and the use of ENDS for smoking cessation. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the posting and participation patterns of Reddit members in cannabis, tobacco, and ENDS-specific subreddits and provide novel insights into aspects of personal use regarding these products. These findings complement epidemiologic study designs and highlight the potential of using specific subreddits to explore personal experiences with cannabis, ENDS, and tobacco products., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Benson, Hu, Chen, Zhu and Conway.)

We use Reddit to demonstrate social media's potential for public health applications. First, we employ a lexicon-based approach to track the prevalence of keywords indicating public interest in Ebola, electronic cigarette, influenza, and marijuana. Second, to better understand the public reactions, we use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, to identify either the general themes or motivations for extreme changes in the volume of discussion over time. We observe that discussions related to Ebola and influenza, infectious diseases of public health interests, surged when the first case of Ebola was diagnosed and a new strain of H1N1 influenza virus was confirmed in the United States. We also observed that discussions of a controversial health topic like marijuana increased with the announcement of a major change in United States federal policy. Discussions of electronic cigarette highlighted opportunities for better health education. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our findings for utilizing Reddit data for public health applications.

We translated an existing English negation lexicon (NegEx) to Swedish, French, and German and compared the lexicon on corpora from each language. We observed Zipf's law for all languages, i.e., a few phrases occur a large number of times, and a large number of phrases occur fewer times. Negation triggers "no" and "not" were common for all languages; however, other triggers varied considerably. The lexicon is available in OWL and RDF format and can be extended to other languages. We discuss the challenges in translating negation triggers to other languages and issues in representing multilingual lexical knowledge.

This study investigated the hypothesis that older adults would show age-related reductions in the tendency to worry in both their retrospective accounts and through cross-sectional age comparisons with a sample of younger adults. We also sought to determine whether age differences would be evident in psychological processes associated with a tendency to worry in general adult samples (intolerance of uncertainty and beliefs in the functional value of worry). Support was found for the hypothesized age-related reduction in worry in both retrospective reports among the older adults and cross-sectional age comparisons. Older adults were also found to report less intolerance of uncertainty and less belief in the functional value of worrying compared to younger adults. These findings suggest that worry-proneness is reduced in late adulthood and that a greater ability to tolerate uncertainty in life and to see less value in worrying may partially account for this. Developmental and contextual changes that may account for these findings are considered.

In this issue the Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (CPT) Conflict of Interest (COI) policy is published in full. Conway describes the background of developing the policy, what it is designed to accomplish, and how it will be implemented.

The Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Health Initiative in Nicaragua is distinctive in its focus on developing a cadre of in-country trainers whose aim is to equip frontline public health managers with widely applicable tools and techniques to assist them in identifying and solving implementation problems. Since 1999, 137 trainees--37% more than originally planned--have demonstrated competence by completing and presenting applied management projects. Nineteen professors from the preventive medicine faculty at the Autonomous University of Nicaragua also have been trained. The country office now has a cadre of seasoned trainers who can meet the ongoing management training needs of CARE staff and their counterparts in the Ministry of Health and in other nongovernmental organizations.

Therapeutic Recreation professionals continually strive for effective performance standards for their clients. In addition to standards for clients, Therapeutic Recreation Specialists must also develop performance standards for themselves to meet the continual challenge of accountability in the 80's. This paper identifies the need to develop a performance appraisal system as well as the benefits. The elements of the standards include: specificity, observability, measurability, attainment and mutual determination. The paper also reviews the process of assignment of relative weights, categories of review and detailed standards for the Director of Therapeutic Recreation and Therapeutic Recreation Specialist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Detroit.