Did mandatory busing programs in the 1970s increase the school achievement of disadvantaged minority youth? Does obtaining a college degree increase an individual's labor market earnings? Did the use ...of the butterfly ballot in some Florida counties in the 2000 presidential election cost Al Gore votes? If so, was the number of miscast votes sufficiently large to have altered the election outcome? At their core, these types of questions are simple cause-and-effect questions. Simple cause-and-effect questions are the motivation for much empirical work in the social sciences. This book presents a model and set of methods for causal effect estimation that social scientists can use to address causal questions such as these. The essential features of the counterfactual model of causality for observational data analysis are presented with examples from sociology, political science, and economics.
Stephen Morgan provides a comprehensive analysis of China's unprecedented economic transformation and the specifics of its development, including issues such as well-being and human capital, ...inequality, ageing, urbanization and sustainability, consumerism, health, education and the environment.
To evaluate the claim that white working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. First, self-reports of ...presidential votes in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible nonvoters composed a substantial share of Trump’s 2016 voters and were disproportionately likely to be members of the white working class. Second, when county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 are merged with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-to-2016 American Community Surveys, areal variations across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States show that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that was white and working class. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.
The five decades of results produced by analysts of the General Social Survey (GSS) have enriched our understanding of social change, but some core modeling challenges remain. This article proposes ...that we more fully engage in the development of targeted models of period-based attitude and opinion change, using counterfactual reasoning, as we continue to model cohort replacement. This shift is also consistent with the recent literature on age, period, and cohort analysis, which argues for attention to age varying period effects. Two outcomes are modeled to provide material for the argument: support for government spending on drug addiction and rehabilitation and the valuation of obedience as a goal for child behavioral development.
•An optical fibre long period grating VOCs sensor coated with ZIF8 reported.•In-situ crystallization of ZIF8 thin film synthesis is conducted.•A concentration specific response to acetone, ethanol ...and methanol vapour was obtained.•The optimized sensor shows a LOD of 6.67 and 5.56 ppm for acetone and ethanol respectively.
An optical fibre long period grating (LPG) based volatile organic compound (VOC) sensor coated with ZIF-8, a material from the zeolite imidazolate framework (ZIF) family, functional coating is presented. ZIF-8 film was deposited onto the surface of the LPG using an in-situ crystallization technique by mixing freshly prepared 12.5 mM zinc nitrate hexahydrate and 25 mM 2-metyl-imidazole solutions in methanol. A concentration specific response to acetone, ethanol and methanol vapour was obtained over the high concentration range up to tens thousands ppm. The LPG based sensor works at phase-matching turning point (PMTP) and such operates at the highest sensitivity. A novel approach for the data analysis based on the measurement of the bandwidth of the U-shaped attenuation band of the LPG is introduced. The optimized sensor shows a sensitivity of 0.015 ± 0.001 and 0.018 ± 0.0015 nm/ppm and limit of detection (LOD) of 6.67 and 5.56 ppm for acetone and ethanol respectively.
When the City of the Name of God of Macao marked 400 years of Portuguese administration in 1956, the Catholic community’s participation was marked by a wide range of activities that included ...liturgical celebrations, public processions and other devotions that involved large numbers of the lay faithful, members of confraternities, in addition to the clergy and religious of the enclave. Twenty-one years later the Diocese of Macao celebrated its own quatercentenary with celebrations of a decidedly more sober character and at the retrocession of Macao to Chinese control in December 1999, other than a few liturgical events and hierarchical presence at civic ceremonies, the Church was all but invisible. As the Diocese of Macao plans for its 450th anniversary, some of the former richness has begun to return. This paper outlines the long ebb tide and now-nascent flow of the tide of Catholic public piety in Macao over this period by reference to the Catholic religious processions of the City and seeks to offer tentative explanations grounded in the theological, ecclesial, political and cultural winds that have blown across the Pearl River Delta since the end of the Second World War.
In the midst of a global pandemic, prevention methods stand as a crucial first step toward addressing the public health crisis and controlling the spread of the virus. However, slowing the spread of ...the virus hinges on the public’s willingness to follow a combination of mitigation practices to avoid contracting and transmitting the disease. In this study, we investigate the factors related to individuals’ risk perceptions associated with COVID-19 as well as their general self-assessed risk preferences. We also provide insights regarding the role of risk perceptions and preferences on mitigation behavior by examining the correlation between these risk measures and both the likelihood of following various mitigation practices and total number of practices followed. Although we find both risk perceptions and preferences to be significantly correlated with mitigation behaviors, risk perceptions are correlated with a larger number of practices. Additionally, we find significant heterogeneity in mitigation behaviors across numerous individual and household characteristics. These results can serve as a benchmark for the design and development of interventions to increase awareness and promote higher adoption of mitigation practices.
•An optical fibre long period grating CO2 sensor coated with HKUST-1.•In-situ crystallization and layer by layer techniques of HKUST-1 thin film synthesis are compared.•2μm and 55nm thickness for the ...film deposited using in-situ crystallization and layer by layer (40 layers) approach.•The film containing 40 layers showed detection limit of 401ppm.
An optical fibre long period grating (LPG) based carbon dioxide (CO2) sensor coated with HKUST-1, a material from the metal organic framework family, functional coating is presented. In-situ crystallization and layer by layer (LbL) techniques of HKUST-1 thin film synthesis are compared in terms of the feasibility of the deposition procedure (time and cost efficiency) and the sensitivity of the film to CO2. The sensing mechanism is based on the measurement of the change of the refractive index (RI) of the coating that is induced by the penetration of CO2 molecules into the HKUST-1 pores. The HKUST-1 film was characterized by scanning electron microscopy. The thickness and refractive index (RI) of the 10, 20 and 40 layers thick films were determined using ellipsometry. The crystallinity of the films was examined by X-ray diffraction pattern (XRD). While no response to CO2 was observed for the sensor coated using the in-situ crystallization technique, an LPG modified with 10, 20 and 40 layers of HKUST-1 films using LbL method upon exposure to CO2 in the range of 500ppm to 40,000ppm showed good sensitivity. The film containing 40 layers exhibited the highest sensitivity to CO2 with an obtained detection limit of 401ppm.
The linear dependence of age, period, and birth cohort is a challenge for the analysis of social change. With either repeated cross-sectional data or conventional panel data, raw change cannot be ...decomposed into over-time differences that are attributable to the effects of common experiences of alternative birth cohorts, features of the periods under observation, and the cumulation of lifecourse aging. This article proposes a rolling panel model for cohort, period, and aging effects, suggested by and tuned to the treble panel data collected for the General Social Survey from 2006 through 2014. While the model does not offer a general solution for the identification of the classical age-period-cohort accounting model, it yields warranted interpretations under plausible assumptions that are reasonable for many outcomes of interest. In particular, if aging effects can be assumed to be invariant over the course of an observation interval, and if separate panel samples of the full age distribution overlap within the same observation interval, then period and aging effects can be parameterized and interpreted separately, adjusted for cohort differences that pulse through the same observation interval. The estimated cohort effects during the observation interval are then interpretable as effects during the observation interval of entangled period and cumulated aging differences from before the observation interval.
•Gender differences in the first major selected in college are modeled.•Occupational plans in high school are the uniformly strongest predictors.•Associations with plans cannot be explained away by ...typical observed variables.•Gender differences in career orientations in adolescence deserve more attention.•The results are nonetheless still consistent with prior research on later STEM attrition.
In this article, we analyze gender differences in college major selection for respondents to the Education Longitudinal Study (2002–2006), focusing on educational pathways through college that lead to science, engineering, or doctoral-track medicine occupations and to non-doctoral track clinical and health sciences occupations. We show that gender differences in college major selection remain substantial, even for a cohort in which rates of enrollment in postsecondary education are more than ten percent higher for young women than for young men. Consistent with other recent research, we demonstrate that neither gender differences in work–family goals nor in academic preparation explain a substantial portion of these differences. However, the occupational plans of high school seniors are strong predictors of initial college major selection, a finding that is revealed only when occupational plans are measured with sufficient detail, here by using the verbatim responses of students. We also find that the association between occupational plans and college major selection is not attributable to work–family orientation or academic preparation. Finally, we find gender differences in the associations between occupational plans and college major selection that are consistent with prior research on STEM attrition, as well as with the claim that attrition also affects the selection of majors that are gateways into doctoral-track medicine. We discuss the implications of the predictive power of occupational plans formed in adolescence for understanding sex segregation and for policies intended to create a gender-balanced STEM and doctoral-level medical workforce.
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