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Reporting of effect sizes is standard practice in psychology and psychiatry research. However, interpretation of these effect sizes can be meaningless or misleading – in particular, the evaluation of specific effect sizes as ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’ can be inaccurate depending on the research context. A real‐world example of this is research into the mental health of children and young people during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Evidence suggests that clinicians and services are struggling with increased demand, yet population studies looking at the difference in mental health before and during the pandemic report effect sizes that are deemed ‘small’. In this short review, we utilise simulations to demonstrate that a relatively small shift in mean scores on mental health measures can indicate a large shift in the number of cases of anxiety and depression when scaled up to an entire population. This shows that ‘small’ effect sizes can in some contexts be large and impactful.

This chapter gives an overview of the elements of Greek and Latin metre, introduces the main technical terms and symbols used, and offers some suggestions for learning and for further study. It is written to be read continuously; technical terms are indicated in bold when they are first introduced or explained, and later paragraphs assume a grasp of the explanations given in previous paragraphs.

Raúl Luis Suarez’s cedula (identity card), which he first obtained in the 1910s, shows him neatly combed, wearing a tie and jacket. He smirks into the camera, an unexpected gesture in this official document that is meant to be emotionless. Nevertheless, it seems he couldn’t help himself from expressing just a little joy. Why? Maybe he was celebrating that the photograph sealed his pact with the state: Raúl was officially a male citizen, and he would be recognized as such until his death in 1930. National General Archive (Argentina). Photography department. Caras y caretas collection. Code: AR-AGN-CYC01-sff-406425, 265, 406425. Serie: Ladies figures. 1/4/1930. Raúl Luis Suárez, called Raquel at birth, was born in 1882 in La Coruña, Spain. His parents, the baker Modesto Suárez and the dressmaker Isidora Valdez, migrated to Uruguay in 1886 with their daughters Raquel and Ada. Some years later they moved to La Plata, Argentina. After Modesto died, they moved to Buenos Aires for work, where his mother became a house cleaner until she died in 1895. Both sisters ended up in a religious orphanage. Raquel escaped, surviving alone until, at the age of 22, she was able to claim her younger sister. The two worked as dressmakers, a popular job among lower-class women at this time. In 1908, after Ada married, Raquel travelled to Montevideo and forged his birth certificate to be recognized as Raúl Luis Suárez. Raúl then married Amalia Gómez in 1912. He was well known in his neighbourhood for flirting with women and some months later he moved in with his lover Matilde, abandoning Amalia. He got a job in the customs office and participated in a rich social life with other men until, one day in 1930, he fainted and was hospitalized. The doctors were surprised by the genitals they found under his suit. Back home, he collapsed and died. Journalists promulgated that he died from the emotional distress produced by the discovery of his “true sex.” Other joutnalists accused Matilde of murdering him by poison. After his death Raúl’s body became a battlefield. Doctors accused him of being a liar. They removed his clothes to observe him as a specimen reduced and redefined by his “nature”; they penetrated his body to search for what they considered the immutable nature of his “true sex”. Doctors concluded that Raúl’s “true sex” was female and restored the name his parents had given him. After years of cultivating a male identity through his clothes, his pose for the camera, by forging documents and perhaps changing the tone of his voice, doctors quickly destroyed it all. The press worked toward the same goal, reporting his case widely and calling him a mujer-hombre (woman-man), a popular term for those who expressed a different gender from the one assigned at birth. Pictures that Raúl had taken with his friends or at the office were published to contrast with those of Raquel. Journalists put forward various theories to explain why Raquel became Raúl. Some suggested that Raúl sought opportunities banned to women in the labour market; others thought his transformation was a tactic to have sex with women. Finally, Raúl’s body was archived. I found his pictures in the National General Archive of Agentina. I was surprised, along with Raúl’s pictures, to find other so-called mujeres-hombres, almost all of them under the label “female figures.” As historians know, the archive is ruthless in preserving categories over time. Raúl’s male embodiment was forcibly placed in a category to which it would hardly fit and tells us a lot about the sexual sciences at the beginning of the century, as well as how the state extended its sovereignty over sex. Likewise, it tells us about the repertoires of male embodiment: the clothing, activities, gestures, objects, poses and experiences articulated in the everyday making of masculinity. Raúl’s story is one of the dozens I am exploring in my current book project about the making of ‘sex change’ in Argentina. In contrast to the cruelty of the archive, its ruthless need to mark and reinforce its own categories of “natural” belonging, I employ an epistemology that distrusts the labels of the archive and instead engages with people’s own self-perception. I seek to recover self-made stories and build new narratives to understand how one’s sex could be experienced and expressed over time. Raúl’s smile somehow destabilizes the attempts of the archive to reduce him to his genitalia. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie-Sklodowka Curie grant number 886496.

In the US economy, Black men, on average, receive lower wages than White men, and the difference increases over the working life. The employment rate and the number of hours worked are also lower for Blacks, but the gap is nearly constant. Together these facts suggest that on-the-job human capital accumulation might explain the diverging wages. However, the wage gap and its evolution over the lifecycle cannot be explained by differences in accumulated experience or educational attainment for the cohort we analyze. Instead, the combination of experience and test scores measured at ages 17-22 accounts for the wage gap and its growth. We propose an on-the-job human capital accumulation model with heterogeneity in the initial human capital endowment and the lifelong ability to accumulate human capital, and endogenous labor supply at the extensive and intensive margins to explain the evolution of the Black-White wage gap over the lifecycle. We discipline the distribution of the ability to accumulate human capital using the power of test scores to predict earnings growth in the data. We find that if the pre-market distributions were the same for Blacks and Whites, the racial gap in hourly earnings would be closed by 84%, with the remaining gap opening throughout life due to higher labor supply amongst White men. That is, the unequal conditions with which men in the two groups enter the labor market are likely to be the key determinant of the differences over the lifecycle.

Genome-wide scans performed in affected sib pairs have revealed small and often inconsistent clues to the loci responsible for the inherited components of hypertension. Since blood pressure is a quantitative trait regulated by many loci, two siblings at opposite extremes of the blood pressure distribution are more likely to have inherited different alleles at any given locus. Hence, we investigated an extreme discordant sib pair strategy to analyse markers from two previous loci of interest: (1) the Gordons syndrome locus that includes the WNK4 gene and (2) the ROMK locus identified in our first genome-wide scan. For this study, 24 sib pairs with strong family histories of essential hypertension were selected from the top and bottom 10% of the blood pressure distribution and genotyped for highly polymorphic microsatellite markers on chromosomes 11 and 17. The mean age of the population was 39.8 ± 7.8 years. A significant inverse correlation was found between the squared difference in pulse pressure and the number of alleles shared by IBD between the siblings for the DS11925 marker (r = −0.44, p = 0.031), systolic pressure and chromosome 17 markers (D17S250: r = −0.42, p = 0.040; D17S799 (r = −0.51, p = 0.011), and this relationship persisted after correcting for age and gender. Markers on chromosome 17 (D17S250, D17S928 and D17S1301) and 11 (D11S1999) also correlated with diastolic pressure. These results illustrate the successful use of discordant sib pair analysis to detect linkage within relatively small numbers of pedigrees with hypertension. Further analysis of this cohort may be valuable in complementing findings from the large genome wide scans in affected sib pairs.

Talking head in a two part documentary series for the Paramount Plus channel