College and university compliance with a required meningococcal vaccination law

OBJECTIVE: Maryland became the first state to pass a vaccination law requiring college and university students living on campus to obtain a meningococcal vaccination or to sign a waiver refusing vaccination because college students are at increased risk for disease. The authors sought to identify how Maryland colleges addressed the law and determine whether schools were in full compliance. PARTICIPANTS: The authors surveyed 32 college/university administrators via a self-administered questionnaire. METHODS: The authors calculated vaccination and waiver rates and assessed compliance with the law overall and with specific law components. RESULTS: Among 28 participating schools, annual vaccination rates and waiver rates among students during 2000-2004 ranged from 66%-76% and 12%-17%, respectively. Two (7%) schools were compliant with all components of the law. CONCLUSIONS: Mandatory vaccination laws do not ensure compliance at the college and university level. Mandatory reporting, increased education, and collaboration between colleges and universities and public health agencies are needed.     

Community-managed water supplies in Africa: sustainable or dispensable?

Over the past two decades, community management has become theprevalent model for management of rural water supplies throughoutsub-Saharan Africa. Despite its widespread popularity amongdonors and implementing agencies, low water supply sustainabilitylevels throughout the sub-continent indicate that it is notthe panacea it is often presented to be. There is a strong needto distinguish between ‘community participation’which is a prerequisite for sustainability and ‘communitymanagement’ which is not. If community management systemsare to be sustainable, they require ongoing support from anoverseeing institution to provide encouragement and motivation,monitoring, participatory planning, capacity building, and specialisttechnical assistance. If such support is not available, alternativessuch as household water supplies and private sector servicedelivery should be considered.     

Emotional impacts of environmental decline: What can Native cosmologies teach sociology about emotions and environmental justice?

This article extends analyses of environmental influences on social action by examining the emotions experienced by Karuk Tribal members in the face of environmental decline. Using interviews, public testimonies, and survey data we make two claims, one specific, the other general. We find that, for Karuk people, the natural environment is part of the stage of social interactions and a central influence on emotional experiences, including individuals’ internalization of identity, social roles, and power structures, and their resistance to racism and ongoing colonialism. We describe a unique approach to understanding the production of inequality through disruptions to relationships among nature, emotions, and society. Grief, anger, shame, and hopelessness associated with environmental decline serve as signal functions confirming structures of power. The moral battery of fear and hope underpins environmental activism and resistance. More generally, we expand this concern to argue that neglecting the natural world as a causal force for “generic” social processes has limited not only work on Native Americans, but also work sociology of emotions and theories of race and ethnicity, and has masked the theoretical significance of environmental justice. Taking seriously the experiences of Native people and the importance of the natural environment offers an opportunity to extend sociological analyses of power and to move sociology toward a more decolonized discipline.     

Essay: The Role of Participatory Listening in Collaborative Discourse: Insights from Studies of Engineering Design Teams

In this article, we summarize evidence from observations of engineering teams for the importance of active listening in collaborative design problem solving. We focus on the way speakers use freehand sketching to convey complex design ideas, and how listeners support them whilst they do this. We argue that listeners temporarily redistribute the shared cognitive load of discourse production and comprehension within design teams: whilst speakers are engaged in sketch construction they are unable to take account of listener understanding, and listeners respond intuitively by anticipating and avoiding difficulties in this process. We conclude that this cooperativeness emerges naturally from the operation of effort conserving principles underlying collaborative social interaction, and show that by focusing on the contribution of the listener to the production of creative engineering discourse, this principle can be thrown into sharp relief.     

Processes of adjustment in organized out-of-school activities: opportunities and risks

Participation in organized out-of-school activities leads to long-term psychosocial and educational benefits for young people. Now we're learning which features of these activities best support individual children.     

Longitudinal associations among adolescents’ organized activity involvement and sociopolitical values

Organized activities represent a potentially important context for the development of adolescent sociopolitical values, but few studies have examined longitudinal associations between youths’ sociopolitical values and activity involvement. Adolescents (N = 299, Time 1 M_age = 15.49, SD = .93, 62% female) reported on their organized activity involvement (volunteering, church, sports, arts/music, school and community clubs) and sociopolitical values (materialism, social dominance, authoritarianism, patriotism, spirituality) at baseline and one year later. Greater involvement in arts/music predicted lower spirituality and patriotism one year later and greater involvement in church predicted higher levels of spirituality and lower levels of social dominance one year later. Higher levels of materialism predicted less involvement in arts/music one year later and higher social dominance values predicted less involvement in volunteering one year later. Findings support the importance of organized activities in sociopolitical development, and suggest that sociopolitical values may guide decisions concerning future organized activity involvement.     

Effect of perceived cost on judgments regarding the efficacy of investment

Three experiments examined the effect of costs associated with investments on the judgments of the causal effectiveness of those investments, and on the type of information utilised when making those judgements. Using operant conditioning technology, in an experimental analogue of making economic investments, it was found that greater costs associated with an investment reduced the judgement about the effectiveness of the response (Experiment 1). Greater investment costs tended to bias the subject toward using information integrated over a longer period of time; whereas low costs tended to produce judgements made on the basis of the conditions prevailing immediately prior to the return being acquired (Experiments 1–3). The effect of cost was modulated by the subjects' own financial background. The same absolute cost being treated as “greater” by those from less wealthy backgrounds compared to those from more affluent backgrounds (Experiments 2 and 3). These results suggest that as well as the nature of the schedule relating investment to return, the perceived cost of the investment determines the manner in which it is judged with respect to its efficacy.     

Profiles of union organizers from manufacturing and service unions

This study uses data on 229 organizers from eight unions to assess differences in characteristics of organizers employed by manufacturing and service unions. The results suggest that a new breed of organizer is entering the labor movement through service unions-organizers who are younger, more highly educated, more socially mobile, and have less experience in the union movement than organizers from manufacturing unions. This article is based on data collected for a dissertation written at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. I gratefully acknowledge the support of committee members David Lewin, James Kuhn, Casey Ichniowski, and Seymour Spilerman of Columbia and Charles A. O’Reilly III of the University of California at Berkeley. I thank John Delaney for his many helpful insights and suggestions during the course of my research and Shannon Ratcliff and Rick Fuentes for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This research was financially supported by the Industrial Relations Research Center and the Management Institute at Columbia University and the Department of Management at Texas A&M University.