Attitude Responsiveness and Partisan Bias: Direct Experience with the Affordable Care Act

This study evaluates the competing influences of motivated reasoning and personal experience on policy preferences toward the Affordable Care Act. Using cross-sectional and panel survey data, the findings reveal that healthcare attitudes are responsive to information that individuals receive through personal experience. Individuals who experienced a positive change in their insurance situation are found to express more positive views toward the health reform law, while individuals who lost their insurance or experienced an otherwise negative personal impact on their insurance situations express more negative views. The results point to personal experience as a source of information that can influence individuals’ preferences. However, although attitudes are responsive to the quality of one’s personal interactions with the healthcare system, the results also suggest that partisan bias is still at work. Republicans are more likely to blame the health reform law for negative changes in their health insurance situations, while Democrats are more likely to credit the law for positive changes in their situations. These motivated attributions for their personal situations temper how responsive partisans’ attitudes are to information acquired through personal experience.     

Longitudinal Bidirectional Relations among Parenting Quality,Parenting Stress,and Child Functioning in HIV-affected Families

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Mothers living with HIV (MLH) face unique stressors impacting parenting, parenting stress, and child psychosocial functioning, but longitudinal, bidirectional...     

Homicidal Ideation and Forensic Psychopathology: Evidence From the 2016 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS)

Homicide is the most serious and costly criminal offense and better forensic and criminological understanding of homicidal ideation as a potential psychobehavioral precursor to homicidal conduct is critical. Using data from the 2016 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) distributed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), we found 64,910 cases of homicidal ideation among a sample of 25.6 + million—a prevalence of 0.25%. Numerous conditions conferred increased substantially the likelihood of homicidal ideation including antisocial personality disorder (2406%), schizoaffective disorder (1821%), borderline personality disorder (1557%), paranoid personality disorder (1,504%), schizophrenia (1,143%), obsessive–compulsive personality disorder (921%), brief psychotic disorder (771%), unspecified psychosis (737%), avoidant personality disorder (596%), and schizoid personality disorder (571%), delusional disorder (546%), and other psychotic disorder (504%). Homicidal ideation is comorbid with serious psychiatric and behavioral problems and has important implications for offender typologies and homicidality.     

Public resource allocation,strategic behavior,and status quo bias in choice experiments

Public Choice - Choice experiments, a survey methodology in which consumers face a series of choice tasks requiring them to indicate their most preferred option from a choice set containing two or...     

Negotiating memory: funerary commemoration as social change in emancipation-era Barbados

Anglican church commemoration in Barbados is traditionally viewed as reflecting a wholly white, British history; however, beginning in the late eighteenth century, these spaces were circumvented as places of memory for the freed black community. As abolition and emancipation triggered greater integration of previously racially segregated groups on the island, funerary monuments provided the opportunity to negotiate memory, social structure, and community relationships, subverting dominant power hierarchies and tensions stimulated by race, religion, and marginalization. This paper will reconstruct narratives and counter-narratives in burial practice and monument use against the backdrop of abolition and emancipation to contribute to historical and archaeological understandings of historical processes of colonization and decolonization, relevant to Barbados and other colonies dependent on slave labour.     

Risk Avoidance Strategies After Sexual Assault: A Dyadic Study of Survivors and Informal Support Providers

Interview data from 45 matched pairs of survivors disclosing sexual assaults and their primary informal support provider (friend, family, significant other) were used to explore survivor-support provider perspectives on self-protective behaviors survivors and those close to them take to protect themselves from future assaults. Strategies for reducing risk taken by survivors included behavioral changes, security measures, self-defense strategies, avoiding alcohol or drugs, and protecting others. Support providers play critical roles by encouraging survivors to pursue risk avoidance strategies, and employing these strategies themselves. Counseling and prevention implications are drawn in the context of risks facing survivors trying to avoid further sexual victimization.