Maternal Responsibility and Traceable Loss: medicine and miscarriage in twentieth-century Australia

This article historicises the meaning of miscarriage in twentieth century Australia. It identifies a number of crucial turning points in scientific interpretations of the causes and treatments of miscarriage that produced shifts in the communication of responsibility to women for their own pregnancy losses. It also describes the changes that a number of medical technologies, including pregnancy detection, foetal visualisation and assisted conception, have brought to bear on the pregnant and pre-pregnant body. These technologies proliferated a variety of forms of reproductive loss during a period in which women experienced enhanced prospects of conception, as well as foetal, infant and maternal survival.     

Quadratic voting in the wild: real people,real votes

Since their introduction in 1932, Likert and other continuous, independent rating scales have become the de facto toolset for survey research. Scholars have raised significant reliability and validity problems with these types of scales, and alternative methods for capturing perceptions and preferences have gained traction within specific domains. In this paper, we evaluate a new, broadly applicable approach to opinion measurement based on quadratic voting (QV), a method in which respondents express preferences by ‘buying’ votes for options using a fixed budget from which they pay quadratic prices for votes. Comparable QV-based and Likert-based survey instruments designed by Collective Decision Engines LLC were evaluated experimentally by assigning potential respondents randomly to one or the other method. Using a host of metrics, including respondent engagement and process-based metrics, we provide some initial evidence that the QV-based instrument provides a clearer measure of the preferences of the most intensely motivated respondents than the Likert-based instrument does. We consider the implications for survey satisficing, a key threat to the continued value of survey research, and discuss the mechanisms by which QV differentiates itself from Likert-based scales, thus establishing QV as a promising alternative survey tool for political and commercial research. We also explore key design issues within QV-based surveys to extend these promising results.     

Bullying and Depressive Symptomatology Among Low-Income,African–American Youth

Utilizing a risk and protective factors approach, this research examined the relationship between self-reported depressive symptomatology, group membership (bully, victim, bully–victim) risks, and protection among a sample of African–American youths. Self-report data were collected in spring, 2002. Youth in grades 5–12 were sampled (n = 1,542; 51% female) from an urban school district in the Southeast. African–American youths self-identifying as bullies, victims, or bully–victims, reported higher levels of depressive symptoms compared to their nonbullied–nonvictimized counterparts. Additionally, multivariate results highlight a significant set of risk and protective factors associated with depressive symptomatology, even after controlling for the effects of self-identified group membership. These findings further contribute to our general understanding of the interplay among bullying, victimization, risk and protective factors, and their effects on depressive symptoms among a group of understudied African–American youth.     

Book reviews

Adelman, Jeremy (1999), Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World .
Walker, Charles F. (1999), Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 .
Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher (1999), Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833+1874 .
Lauria-Santiago, Aldo (1999), An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823–1914 .
Austin-Broos Diane J. (1997), Jamaica Genesis: Religion and The Politics of Moral Orders .
V. Montecinos (Ed.) (1998), Economists, Politics and the State: Chile 1958–1994, vol. viii .
A. Hira (ed.) (1998); Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National and Organizational Case Studies .
Cullather, Nick (1999), Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account Of Its Operations in Guatemala 1952+1954 .
Wilson Samuel (ed.) (1999), The Indigenous People of the Caribbean .
Gary H. Gossen (1999), Telling Maya Tales. Tzotzil Identities in Modern Mexico .
Lievesley, Geraldine, Democracy in Latin America: Mobilisation, Power and the search for a New Politics .
Gould Jeffrey (1998), To Die in This Way. Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965 .
Torres, Carlos Alberto and Puiggrós, Adriana (1998), Latin American Education. Comparative Perspectives .
Archetti, Edwardo (1999), Masculinities, Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina .
Outtes Joel (ed.) (1997), O Recife: gênese do urbanismo, 1927+1943 .