Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

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Social capital: a theory of social structure and action

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307/3343529.pdf

Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work

This article reviews scientific advances in the prevention and treatment of substance-use disorder and related developments in public policy. In the past two decades, research has increasingly supported the view that addiction is a disease of the brain. Although the brain disease model of addiction has yielded effective preventive measures, treatment interventions, and public health policies to address substance-use disorders, the underlying concept of substance abuse as a brain disease continues to be questioned, perhaps because the aberrant, impulsive, and compulsive behaviors that are characteristic of addiction have not been clearly tied to neurobiology. Here we review recent advances in the neurobiology of addiction to clarify the link between addiction and brain function and to broaden the understanding of addiction as a brain disease. We review findings on the desensitization of reward circuits, which dampens the ability to feel pleasure and the motivation to pursue everyday activities; the increasing strength of conditioned responses and stress reactivity, which results in increased cravings for alcohol and other drugs and negative emotions when these cravings are not sated; and the weakening of the brain regions involved in executive functions such as decision making, inhibitory control, and self-regulation that leads to repeated relapse. We also review the ways in which social environments, developmental stages, and genetics are intimately linked to and influence vulnerability and recovery. We conclude that neuroscience continues to support the brain disease model of addiction. Neuroscience research in this area not only offers new opportunities for the prevention and treatment of substance addictions and related behavioral addictions (e.g., to food, sex, and gambling) but may also improve our understanding of the fundamental biologic processes involved in voluntary behavioral control. In the United States, 8 to 10% of people 12 years of age or older, or 20 to 22 million people, are addicted to alcohol or other drugs. 1 The abuse of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs in the United States exacts more than $700 billion annually in costs related to crime, lost work productivity, and health care. 2-4 After centuries of efforts to reduce addiction and its related costs by punishing addictive behaviors failed to produce adequate results, recent basic and clinical research has provided clear evidence that addiction might be better considered and treated as an acquired disease of the brain (see Box 1 for definitions of substance-use disorder and addiction). Research guided by the brain disease model of addiction has led to the development of more effective methods of prevention and treatment and to more informed public health policies. Notable examples include the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which requires medical insurance plans to provide the same coverage for substance-use disorders and other mental illnesses that is provided for other illnesses, 5 and the proposed bipartisan Senate legislation that From the National Institute on Drug Abuse (N.D.V.) and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (G.F.K.) — both in Bethesda, MD; and the Treatment Research Institute, Philadelphia (A.T.M.). Address reprint requests to Dr. Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 6001 Executive Bld., Rm. 5274, Bethesda, MD 20892, or at nvolkow@ nida . nih . gov.

Review Article: Neurobiologic Advances from the Brain Disease Model of Addiction

The study of social networks is increasingly central to health research for medical sociologists and scholars in other fields. Here, we review the innovations in theory, substance, data collection, and methodology that have propelled the study of social networks and health from a niche subfield to the center of larger sociological and scientific debates. In particular, we contextualize the broader history of network analysis and its connections to health research, concentrating on work beginning in the late 1990s, much of it in this journal. Using bibliometric and network visualization approaches, we examine the subfield’s evolution over this period in terms of topics, trends, key debates, and core insights. We conclude by reflecting on persistent challenges and areas of innovation shaping the study of social networks and health and its intersection with medical sociology in the coming years.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00221465221086532

Analytic Advances in Social Networks and Health in the Twenty-First Century

Do different operationalizations of family structure offer different understandings of the links between family structure and older adult mortality? Using the American Health and Retirement Study (...

Family embeddedness and older adult mortality in the United States

Background Although survey data suggest that Brexit has negatively influenced European doctors' decisions to remain in the United Kingdom, this is the first quantitative study to use multivariate analysis to explore this relationship. Objective To assess how Brexit relates to doctors' migration intentions in relation to their feelings that Brexit has impacted their professional life, national identity, and demographic factors. Method We collected data from 59 self-reported EU/EEA/European identifying doctors working in the UK. We weighted results to the English National Health Service population in terms of gender, professional grade level and ethnicity and ran weighted regression analyses of respondents' plans (leaving, considering, not considering) and whether they reported Brexit influencing their decision-making. We then examined how stating that Brexit affected their career, national identity, and sex and age related to doctors' intentions to leave or stay. Findings The more doctors agreed that Brexit had impacted their professional lives, the more likely they were to state they intended to leave the UK. We found doctors with increased levels of British identity less likely to leave than those with reduced British identity. Interestingly, we found that those with higher levels of European identity were less likely to leave but more sharply likely to consider leaving compared to those with lower levels of European identity. Conclusions Respondents reported large professional impacts of Brexit. To retain these individuals in the British medical system, the NHS should provide financial and legal assistance for those applying for settled status and financial and other incentives comparable to what doctors could receive in EU health systems.

https://www.annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.3048/galley/3253/download/

Brexit and the European National Health Service England workforce: A quantitative analysis of doctors’ perceived professional impact and intentions to leave the United Kingdom

This study examines how population aging shapes a crucial aspect of mental health and social well-being: loneliness. Drawing on theories of demographic metabolism, United Nations population estimates and projections, and survey data covering approximately 50 percent of the world's population aged 50 and above living in 27 countries, we estimate the role of population aging in shaping cross-national differences in loneliness from 1990 to 2050. We used survey data to estimate the prevalence of late middle age and older adult loneliness by age and sex and then applied these rates to the evolving age and sex distributions of the populations. Our results highlight massive increases in loneliness at ages 50 and above with a tripling of the number of lonely adults in these age groups in our sample countries from 104.9 million in 1990 to 333.5 million in 2050, increasing variability across countries in the share of their populations composed of lonely adults 50 and above, and the feminization of global later life loneliness with an increasing share of lonely adults in these age ranges being women. These results illustrate the power of demographic modeling to advance our understanding of national profiles of mental health and social well-being. 

Population Aging, Demographic Metabolism, and the Rising Tide of Late Middle Age to Older Adult Loneliness Around the World

Prominent sources claim that 'Big Data', a catchall term for digital and other new forms of data and new approaches to data collection and analysis, will fuel a revolution in the social sciences. However, many social scientists are adopting Big Data sources and approaches more slowly than researchers in other fields. Skeptics challenge Big Data as unreliably measured, decontextualized, and lacking content validity for drawing meaningful conclusions. We argue that Big Data projects can be enhanced through data augmentation with crowdsourcing marketplaces like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Following a content analysis using a sample of published academic applications of MTurk, we present three empirical case studies to explore and demonstrate the strengths and limits of crowdsourcing as a tool to address social science skepticism around Big Data projects. The case studies use MTurk to (1) verify machine coding of the academic discipline of dissertation committee members, (2) link online product pages to an online book database, and (3) gather data on mental health resources at colleges and universities. Using these cases and embedded measurement experiments, we consider the costs and benefits of augmenting Big Data with crowdsourcing marketplaces and provide guidelines on best practices. We also offer a standardized reporting template and other tools that will enhance reproducibility. This study expands the use of micro-task marketplaces to enhance social science acceptance of Big Data.

Ashton M. Verdery

Papers

Analytic Advances in Social Networks and Health in the Twenty-First Century

Family embeddedness and older adult mortality in the United States

Brexit and the European National Health Service England workforce: A quantitative analysis of doctors’ perceived professional impact and intentions to leave the United Kingdom

Population Aging, Demographic Metabolism, and the Rising Tide of Late Middle Age to Older Adult Loneliness Around the World

Big Data's Little Brother: Enhancing Big Data in the Social Sciences with Micro-Task Marketplaces.