Disentangling Socioeconomic Status and Race in Infant Outcomes: A Neural Network Analysis

Race is commonly used as a proxy for multiple features including socioeconomic status. It is critical to dissociate these factors, identify mechanisms that impact infant outcomes, such as birthweight, and direct appropriate interventions and shape public policy. Demographic, socioeconomic, and clinical variables were used to model infant birthweight. Non-linear neural networks better model infant birthweight than linear models (R^2=0.172 vs. R^2=0.145, p-value=0.005). In contrast to linear models, non-linear models ranked income, neighborhood disadvantage, and experiences of discrimination higher in importance while modeling birthweight than race. Consistent with extant social science literature, findings suggest race is a linear proxy for non-linear factors. The ability to disentangle and identify the source of effects for socioeconomic status and other social factors that often correlate with race is critical for the ability to appropriately target interventions and public policies designed to improve infant outcomes as well as point out the disparities in these outcomes.

“Light cleaveth unto light”: Intermarriage discourse, LDS women of color, and the new racism

Fifty years after Loving v. Virginia, oppositional attitudes toward interracial relationships are still advanced by religious institutions in the United States. Extant social science literature characterizes these attitudes as generated largely by Evangelical and Christian nationalist traditions where members harbor negative attitudes toward interracial relationships. Hidden behind this characterization are the significant, but less obvious ways in which non-Evangelical denominations construct and disseminate similar attitudes. Through discourse analysis and digital interviews with LDS women of color, this study uses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) as an entry point for examining intermarriage discourses in other faith traditions. Findings highlight that LDS messaging about interracial relationships shifted over time, integrating multiple racial frames in ways that expanded the scope of LDS racism with especially harsh implications for LDS women of color. Broader theoretical implications for the study of race, gender, and religion are discussed.

Fooling ourselves and others: confirmation bias and the trustworthiness of qualitative research – Part 2 (cross-examining the dismissals)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe and critique ways in which the threats from confirmation bias have been rejected.Design/methodology/approachDismissals of the existence of, or threats from, confirmation bias are identified from a review of literature across a very wide range of disciplines. The dismissals are robustly examined.FindingsThe dismissals are categorised as: (1) radical scepticism (2) consequentialism: and (3) denial. Each type of dismissal, it is argued, is flawed.Originality/valueThe three-fold structuring of confirmation bias dismissal is novel. In addition to drawing from organisation, management and wider social science literature, the article also uses arguments and examples from the creative arts.

Argumentative XAI: A Survey

Explainable AI (XAI) has been investigated for decades and, together with AI itself, has witnessed unprecedented growth in recent years. Among various approaches to XAI, argumentative models have been advocated in both the AI and social science literature, as their dialectical nature appears to match some basic desirable features of the explanation activity. In this survey we overview XAI approaches built using methods from the field of computational argumentation, leveraging its wide array of reasoning abstractions and explanation delivery methods. We overview the literature focusing on different types of explanation (intrinsic and post-hoc), different models with which argumentation-based explanations are deployed, different forms of delivery, and different argumentation frameworks they use. We also lay out a roadmap for future work.

Was Stalin’s Revolution from Above a Rational Strategy of Modernization?

Strategies of modernization are legion within the social science literature. Stalin’s Revolution from Above—but not the Great Terror—is set within this literature as a revolutionary, as opposed to a reformist, strategy. Features of the revolutionary strategy may have been considered necessary to urgently create the capacity to defend the country in a hostile world. But the extent of revolutionary violence against the peasantry cannot be justified in those terms.

The Nature and Etiology of Uncertainty

Chapter 2 examines the nature and etiology of uncertainty in medicine. It reviews existing conceptions of uncertainty and demonstrates the diversity of ways in which it has been defined, both in and outside of medicine. It describes the meaning and functions of metacognition, and offers a working definition of uncertainty as the metacognitive awareness of ignorance. Referencing various insights from the social science literature, the chapter describes how uncertainty as a more general phenomenon is both psychologically generated by novelty, discrepancy, and deliberation and socially constructed and transmitted through the exchange of information.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories of Jewish power and world domination as well as blood libels have been persistently present for over a millennium. This chapter briefly discusses the history and nature of these conspiracy theories and evaluates them using a developing social science literature on conspiracy theories. Empirically the authors test the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and discrimination against Jews using data from the ADL 100 survey. Their results show an extremely strong and significant correlation between belief in conspiracy theories about Jews and both societal and governmental discrimination against Jews. Conspiracy theories provide the strongest empirical predictor of discrimination against Jews among all indicators used on this study. Interestingly, to the authors’ knowledge, there has been no previous cross-country test as to whether belief in conspiracy theories causes real-world discrimination against the objects of those conspiracy theories (in this case, Jews).

Why Do People Discriminate against Jews?

This book provides a new and innovative approach to answering the age-old question of why people discriminate against Jews. The authors argue that anti-Semitism and discrimination are distinct concepts. While anti-Semitism is a negative attitude toward Jews, discrimination is a negative real-world action taken against Jews. From this perspective, one can hold anti-Semitic beliefs but not discriminate, while another can discriminate against Jews but be less anti-Semitic in general. In this context, anti-Semitism is seen as a potential cause of discrimination against Jews, but not the only one. This book examines anti-Jewish discrimination using a two-pronged approach. First, it combines and integrates ideas and theories from classic studies of anti-Semitism with social science theories on the causes of discrimination. For example, social science theories developed to explain how governments justify discrimination against Muslims can help explain the processes that lead to discrimination against Jews. Similarly, conspiracy theories, a major topic in the anti-Semitism literature, are relatively unexplored in the social science literature as a potential instigator of discrimination. Second, the authors use previously unavailable data on discrimination against Jews in 76 countries with significant Jewish minority populations to analyze the patterns and causes of discrimination. They find that government-based discrimination against Jews is below average, but societal discrimination is higher against Jews than most other religious minorities. They focus on three potential causes: religious causes, anti-Zionism, and belief in conspiracy theories about Jewish power and world domination. While all of these factors cause discrimination against Jews, conspiracy theories are the strongest predictors.

The visual vernacular: embracing photographs in research

The increasing use of digital images for communication and interaction in everyday life can give a new lease of life to photographs in research. In contexts where smartphones are ubiquitous and many people are “digital natives”, asking participants to share and engage with photographs aligns with their everyday activities and norms more than textual or analogue approaches to data collection. Thus, it is time to consider fully the opportunities afforded by digital images and photographs for research purposes. This paper joins a long-standing conversation in the social science literature to move beyond the “linguistic imperialism” of text and embrace visual methodologies. Our aim is to explain the photograph as qualitative data and introduce different ways of using still images/photographs for qualitative research purposes in health professions education (HPE) research: photo-documentation, photo-elicitation and photovoice, as well as use of existing images. We discuss the strengths of photographs in research, particularly in participatory research inquiry. We consider ethical and philosophical challenges associated with photography research, specifically issues of power, informed consent, confidentiality, dignity, ambiguity and censorship. We outline approaches to analysing photographs. We propose some applications and opportunities for photographs in HPE, before concluding that using photographs opens up new vistas of research possibilities.

The Trojan-horse mechanism: How networks reduce gender segregation

The segregation of labor markets along ethnic and gender lines is socially highly consequential, and the social science literature has long viewed homophily and network-based job recruitments as some of its most crucial drivers. Here, we focus on a previously unidentified mechanism, the Trojan-horse mechanism, which, in contradiction to the main tenet of previous research, suggests that network-based recruitment reduce rather than increase segregation levels. We identify the conditions under which networks are desegregating, and using unique data on all individuals and all workplaces located in the Stockholm region during the years 2000–2017, we find strong empirical evidence for the Trojan-horse mechanism and its role in the gender segregation of labor markets.