Spatially Representing Vulnerability to Extreme Rain Events Using Midwestern Farmers’ Objective and Perceived Attributes of Adaptive Capacity

Potential climate‐change‐related impacts to agriculture in the upper Midwest pose serious economic and ecological risks to the U.S. and the global economy. On a local level, farmers are at the forefront of responding to the impacts of climate change. Hence, it is important to understand how farmers and their farm operations may be more or less vulnerable to changes in the climate. A vulnerability index is a tool commonly used by researchers and practitioners to represent the geographical distribution of vulnerability in response to global change. Most vulnerability assessments measure objective adaptive capacity using secondary data collected by governmental agencies. However, other scholarship on human behavior has noted that sociocultural and cognitive factors, such as risk perceptions and perceived capacity, are consequential for modulating people's actual vulnerability. Thus, traditional assessments can potentially overlook people's subjective perceptions of changes in climate and extreme weather events and the extent to which people feel prepared to take necessary steps to cope with and respond to the negative effects of climate change. This article addresses this knowledge gap by: (1) incorporating perceived adaptive capacity into a vulnerability assessment; (2) using spatial smoothing to aggregate individual‐level vulnerabilities to the county level; and (3) evaluating the relationships among different dimensions of adaptive capacity to examine whether perceived capacity should be integrated into vulnerability assessments. The result suggests that vulnerability assessments that rely only on objective measures might miss important sociocognitive dimensions of capacity. Vulnerability indices and maps presented in this article can inform engagement strategies for improving environmental sustainability in the region.     

Bildungsverhalten in institutionellen Kontexten: Schulbesuch und elterliche Bildungsaspiration am Ende der Sekundarstufe I

In the German school system a scientifically widely ignored process of modernization took place. It can be described as disconnection of visited school type and aspired graduation at the end of the lower secondary school. These so called “options of disconnection” are obviously used more often than the change of school type and possibly contribute better for a compensation of suboptimal school decisions. In this context the varying institutional arrangements (e.g., restriction of access) of the German states are to be considered, particularly for the upgrading at the Hauptschule (less prestigious level of secondary school). Based on the theory of rational choice, the article investigates the impact of social origin, ethnicity and gender on the parent’s aspired graduation under the different opportunity structures of German federal states. For the analysis the national PISA 2000 — data are used. The results show that parent’s desired graduation is strongly associated with social background and ethnicity. Additionally, the effects of social origin vary by institutional arrangements: In federal states characterized by a wider institutional opening lower status parents aspire more often towards an upgraded certificate for their offspring than in states characterized by more restrictive conditions.