Steven Stack

The association between gender and research productivity has been the subject of substantial research in numerous fields, including economics (Card, DellaVigna, and Iriberri 2022), medicine (Fukuza...

ObjectiveCDC has called for suicide research on the construction industry, an industry with a high suicide rate. The present study addresses this gap and focuses on roofers. It assesses which risk factors distinguish suicides by roofers from those of the general population. Alcohol and drug misuse, related to their high incidence of injury and pain, are seen as key potential drivers of roofer suicide.MethodologyData refer to 30,570 suicides and are taken from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Drawing from previous work on the health professions, 15 core predictors are selected, representing psychiatric morbidity, social strains, and demographics. Since the analysis seeks to differentiate roofers' suicides from others, the dependent variable is a dichotomy where roofers' suicides (=1) and other suicides (=0).ResultsAfter adjusting for the other 14 risk factors, a multivariate logistic regression analysis found that roofers' suicides were 76% more apt (Odds ratio = 1.76, CI: 1.18, 2.63) than other suicides to have a known substance or alcohol problem that contributed to their suicide. Other constructs differentiating roofers' suicides from other suicides included marital status, gender, and race. Roofers were less protected by marriage.ConclusionThe results inform prevention efforts and substance misuse can serve as a key warning sign for roofers' suicide. This is the first investigation of the drivers of suicide among roofers, and one of a few drawing links between occupational injury and suicide. Roofers' suicides are linked to a high occupational injury rate.A high injury rate is associated with a high incidence of pain.Substance abuse is a way of coping with pain and increases suicide risk.Roofers' suicides were 76% more likely than other suicides to involve substance misuse.Substance misuse is a key warning sign for suicide prevention among roofers.Roofers' suicides are marked by relatively weak ties to marital integration.

The relationship between religious orientation and suicidality can be more complex in samples of low religious rate. The present study was conducted in China, one of the least religious countries, with the purpose of exploring different aspects of religious orientation and their relationships to suicidality. Among a university sample of 2074 respondents, 122 respondents reported being religious and responded to our measures of religious orientation and suicidality. Extrinsic religious orientation, while being distinct from intrinsic religious orientation, could be subdivided into personally-oriented and socially-oriented dimensions to predict suicidality in our sample. Results from regression analysis showed that respondents with higher intrinsic religious orientation and lower personally-oriented extrinsic religious orientation are more likely to have lower suicidality. These findings support that intrinsic orientation is embodied with positive outcomes whereas extrinsic orientation is embodied with negative outcomes. It is noteworthy that socially-oriented extrinsic religious orientation did not predict suicidality in our sample, as it was speculated that the role of socially-oriented extrinsic religious orientation cannot function when there are few religious people to socialize with in the community.

Scripts in the cinema provide a cultural definition of suicide, including where suicide takes place. Using opportunity theory, this study examines the concept of “lethal locations” to address questions regarding movies as a risk factor for suicide: (1) Do cinematic scripts overrepresent lethal locations? (2) Given sociological changes, have cinematic scripts for lethal locations intensified over a century of film? and (3) Are scripts for lethal locations for suicide gendered, possibly accounting for large gender differences in suicide rates? Data are taken from the National Violent Death Reporting System and from cinematic suicides. Results show that cinematic scripts overrepresent suicides away from home. Cinematic scripts supported a gendered relationship, whereas females are more apt than males to suicide at home, a pattern consistent with lower female suicide rates. This is the first national study of American suicide location in the media and society.

Over the last decade, enrollment in online courses has tripled. However, the delivery of online sections of courses that typically require laboratory work on campus can present a challenge. The present study has two goals: (1) describe the laboratory assignments for an online version of an undergraduate research methods course, and (2) assess the extent to which learning in the laboratory assignments is related to grades on the final examination. Participants were 108 students completing an online course in research methods/statistics in a Carnegie Research Extensive University. Students chose a sample of 40 offenders from an online public database, the Offender Tracking Information System (OTIS), entered the data into an Excel file, and used the Excel® Data Analysis Toolkit to produce both descriptive statistics and to test a series of hypotheses including the predictors of violent offending. The dependent variable is the scores on the final examination, and the independent variable was the grades received on six laboratory assignments. Control variables included grades on a preliminary 1-hr examination and sex. In a bivariate regression, laboratory and grades explained 13% of the variance in final examination grades. However, in a multiple regression analysis, controlling for other variables, the grade on the laboratory assignments was unrelated to final examination grades. The model explained 47% of the variance in final examination grades. Standard laboratory assignments were successfully delivered in an online environment, but grades on laboratory assignments were not an independent predictor of final examination grades. Further work is needed for other fields and educational contexts.

Objectives: Research on the relationship between teaching productivity and base salary is sparse, but tends to find no association. However, the research is based largely on student evaluations (student evaluation of teaching (SET)). No study uses peer review of teaching, which may capture qualities of excellence in teaching missed by SETs. The present study addresses this gap.Methods: Data refer to all 70 faculty in the social sciences at a Carnegie research‐extensive university. Measures of teaching include peer‐review scores, student evaluations, and teaching awards. Controls are incorporated for other predictors of base salary, including research productivity, years of experience, service, and demographics.Results: Controlling for the other variables, peer review of teaching was unrelated to base salary. However, each year of experience enhanced salary by $905, each book was associated with $2,309 in salary, and membership in the economics department enhanced salary by $23,076. The full model explained 84 percent of the variation in base salaries.Conclusion: Peer review of teaching was no better a predictor of salary than SETs. While excellence in teaching is often believed to affect base salary, the present analysis finds no evidence that this is the case. Future work is needed to assess the association in other organizational contexts.

The number of citations a scholarly work receives is a common measure of its impact on a field. Citation classics are works that are the most highly cited. The purpose of the present article is to describe and analyze citation classics in the journal Deviant Behavior (DB) and to compare them to classics in related academic journals. Data are from the Web of Science and refer to the number of citations each of the top 1% of articles in DB received since 1979. Data are also collected for three additional journals for comparative purposes. Of the 960 works published in DB, the median citations for DB citation classics were 55.5 with a range between 43 and 103. The impact of DB citation classics was in the middle of the three comparison journals. The principle themes of DB classics included delinquency (3) and sexual deviance (3). The other topics included one article each on suicide, dating violence, employee deviance, and involuntary childlessness. The classics represent a balance between qualitative and quantitative methods. Citation classics in DB represent a variety of topical areas in deviance, but with special attention paid to sexual and juvenile deviance. Future work is needed to assess what predicts which DB articles ultimately become citation classics.