Social Sciences

The School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo has been selected by the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) to work with mental-health professionals to provide better care to residents -- particularly children -- of the 19 counties that make up the OMH Western Region.

A robust, new geographic information systems (GIS) software tool developed by a University at Buffalo geographer is helping the U.S. Forest Service to more quickly and accurately assess and contain the devastation wrought by forest fires.

Faculty members from the University at Buffalo are available for members of the media covering the political, military, economic and social implications of a U.S. war with Iraq.

With questions of fairness regularly dominating the local news, it is difficult to deny equity issues are among the most pressing and controversial facing the Buffalo-Niagara region today. This inevitably raises the provocative question: "How fair and equitable is our region?"

Men who drink alcohol and have a predisposition for physical violence toward their female partners are more likely to be violent on the days they drink alcohol, according to a study conducted at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) and reported in the February 2003 issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

Robert Louis Stevenson once quipped that "Marriage...is a field of battle and not a bed of roses." He may be right, but researchers at the University at Buffalo and Stanford University say some marriages are rosier than others -- not because they have no battles, but because of the way the spouses deal with them. And how they deal, the researchers note, depends on how much the partners value themselves and feel valued by the other.

Gambling is widespread -- and spreading -- in American society with 82 percent of individuals interviewed having gambled in the past year, according to a national survey conducted at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) and reported in the Winter 2002 issue of the Journal of Gambling Studies. Previous surveys found gambling participation at 61 percent (1975) and 63 percent (1998).

The Raelians -- the cult behind Clonaid, the company claiming to have cloned a human being -- are a remnant of the "flying-saucer cults" that originated in the 1970s and '80s, according to cult expert Phillips Stevens, Jr., an associate professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo.

The School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo has been selected as the new home of The Clinical Supervisor, a journal that looks at aspects of supervision in the fields of psychotherapy and mental health.

A new method with the potential to quickly detect suspicious patterns in reported illnesses in specific geographic regions is being developed by a geographer at the University at Buffalo. Combining cluster analysis with quality-control techniques traditionally used on assembly lines in factories, the method takes a novel approach to the problem of detecting potentially significant increases in the incidence of disease within specific geographic areas.