Timing of Immigration Effects Asset Change Among Hispanic Caregivers of Older Family Members

Journal of Family and Economic Issues - Given the cultural value of family in Hispanic culture, older Hispanic immigrants are likely to have family caregivers. This study examined the economic...     

Diseased, maimed, mutilated: categorizations of disability and an ugly law in late nineteenth-century Chicago

The article places Chicago's "ugly" law—an 1881 municipal ordinance that fined "any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" for appearing in public—within the context of late nineteenth-century imaginings of disability. Drawing on the framework of disability studies, this paper demonstrates that nineteenth-century understandings of disability had little to do with the impairments of individuals but instead were tied to the status of the person with the disability. Examining the role of disabled people as workers, as bodies and as charity recipients reveals the hierarchies of disability in late nineteenth-century Chicago and demonstrates who the ugly law intended to restrict and, just as importantly, who it did not. While the law appears to be a blanket indictment of all physically disabled people, multiple sources indicate that the public expected disabled veterans, workers, and freak show performers to occupy the public realm; they therefore cannot be the intended objects of the ordinance. Instead, Chicago's ugly law was one of many pieces of legislation enacted in the wake of the panic of 1873 that attempted to eradicate street begging in general by specifically targeting beggars with disabilities.     

Trial and error: attending to language barriers in child welfare service provision from the perspective of frontline workers

This paper reports on a qualitative study that used focus groups to gather data from the perspective of child protection workers on their experiences in providing services to clients with limited English proficiency (LEP). The goals of the study were to understand processes of relationship building and service provision that could contribute to improved practice. Focus groups are ideal in obtaining data on how a group deals with particular situations and for understanding their decision‐making processes. Measures to ensure rigour and trustworthiness were taken throughout the study. Findings provide rich and multilayered insights into the complexity of providing services for families with LEP showing that agencies use bilingual workers as well as interpreters for services. Participants noted, however, that services continued to be inconsistent with unclear guidelines and training about how and when to access interpreters. Lack of training for bilingual workers was also identified. Confidentiality issues, barriers to engaging with clients, problems with the quality of interpretation and role confusion together with benefits including interpreters being cultural and language ‘conduits’ and links to culturally specific services; enhanced communication decreasing the possibility of inaccurate assessments and lessening power differentials; and help with workload were noted.     

The Effect of Unemployment Insurance on Temporary Help Services Employment

A model with fixed effects and controls for state-specific linear time trends is developed to analyze the influence of state unemployment insurance taxes on temporary help services employment using state level panel data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Prior research has shown that imperfect experience rating of unemployment insurance taxes increases temporary layoffs and that, conversely, more extensive experience rating leads to a decrease in temporary layoffs. The current analysis demonstrates that more extensive experience rating increases temporary help services agency-intermediated temporary employment. To the extent that the increase in temporary help services employment represents a substitution of temporary help services jobs for traditional direct hire jobs, it implies a negative effect on job quality. Steps to address low unemployment insurance recipiency rates by temporary help services workers may alleviate the impact of unemployment insurance tax structures on temporary help services employment.     

The Well-Made Play and the Theatre of the Absurd: A Study in Attitude Change

The general tenets of balance theory are applied to a study of two dramatic genres, the well-made play and the theatre of the absurd. The theory is used in an attempt to discuss the means by which these different forms achieve their characteristic effects and to place the evolution of dramatic forms within the general context of social change in the last century.     

Response to Young and Wolf: goal attainment in urban ecology research

Our critique focuses on the poorly defined key concepts, methodological inconsistencies, circular research design, and over-reaching substantive claims made by Young and Wolf. We suggest that Young and Wolf have provided an assessment of the Urban Ecosystems journal, not of urban ecology as a field. We conclude by identifying questions to guide a bibliometric analysis that focuses on a collaborative and interdisciplinary future of urban ecology (how are participating disciplines contributing to urban ecological research and scholarship; what theories and conceptual frameworks are being used, and how are these theories being tested and modified; and what mixed methodologies are being developed to collect data to address complex urban issues that are inherently interdisciplinary). We take seriously Young and Wolf’s call for a “fundamental discussion as to if and how the intentions of the field have been or need to be updated” and argue that such a discussion requires a more inclusive, rigorous, and meaningful identification of the “core” of urban ecology literature than provided.     

Delivery, Management and Access Model for E_prints and Open Access Journals

A study conducted for the (United Kingdom) Joint Information Systems Committee reviewed possible models for implementing Open Access to research reports in institutional archives and Open Access journals. The conclusion was that a “harvesting model,” in which full texts reside on the original servers but metadata are harvested, held, and enhanced by a central service, was preferable to either a centralized national service or a completely decentralized service for the UK. The study included issues of populating institutional archives (IAs) and some form of mandatory archiving for publicly funded research results to obtain a critical mass of Open Access material in such a system.     

Pleasure and Danger: An Appreciation of Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

In this essay I recall a 40-year experience knowing and working with Muriel Dimen. This is a reminiscence of a shared activist life in the late 1970s and 1980s and later our lives emerging in psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis after the mid-1980s. It is an appreciation of the particular turns and potent hot spots in Muriel Dimen’s evolving theorizing of sexuality and power, body and gender and culture from this point in the mid-1980s to her death in 2016.