Is Money Enough?: The Effect of Migrant Remittances on Parental Aspirations and Youth Educational Attainment in Rural Mexico

This research compares remittance‐receiving families in rural Mexico to non‐remittance receiving households in terms of how the presence of this financial source relates to variation in parent educational aspirations for their children and youth enrollment and completion at the non‐compulsory upper secondary schooling level. Using multivariate analysis of a comprehensive survey collected in a significant migrant‐sending state, no evidence is found of a remittance effect on the selected outcomes. Rather, other socio‐demographic background factors — namely, maternal education levels and to a lesser extent household wealth — are the factors most associated with variation in these educational outcomes. Implications for migration and education public policy and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Agency Is Everywhere,but Agency Is Not Enough: A Conceptual Analysis of Young Women’s Sexual Agency

Through a conceptual analysis of sexual agency, I consider the limitations and distortions of what we typically recognize as agency and whom we recognize as agents. I argue that the dominant perspective of sexual agency as an outward performance of an internal attribute both: underestimates its presence, blinding us to the many manifestations of agency, including among girls imagined to have none; and overestimates its potency, insinuating that individual will is enough to fend off sexual vulnerability forged by social injustice. Instead, I recommend a theoretical lens that permits us to see girls’ sexual agency as a matter of fact, evident even among those who are compelled by social and material conditions to exercise it through sexual compliance, compromise, and concession. Accepting sexual agency as ubiquitous among young women can help reorient attention and action away from changing girls and instead toward changing the pervasive, systemic threats to their well-being, sexual and otherwise.     

Service Providers’ Perspectives on Sex Trafficking of Male Minors: Comparing Background and Trafficking Situations of Male and Female Victims

Even though it is documented that sex trafficking of male minors occurs, limited research has focused on this type of commercial sexual exploitation. Data was collected via telephone interviews from 323 professionals who worked with at-risk youth and/or crime victims/offenders in all counties in a mostly rural state in the U.S. Half of the respondents had worked with at least one victim of child sex trafficking, and of these 161 respondents, 57.8% had worked with at least one male victim. To contextualize the data on male minor victims, quantitative analysis was conducted comparing the close-ended and themes identified in open-ended responses of professionals who reported they worked exclusively with male victims (n?=?26) versus professionals who worked exclusively with female victims (n?=?81) to examine how sex trafficking of male minors may differ or be similar to sex trafficking of female minors. Many similarities in victims’ vulnerability factors, the systems victims encountered, and their greatest needs were found by gender. Familial sex trafficking was one of the typical pathways into commercial sexual exploitation for minors. There were some differences in the pathways in sex trafficking by gender. There is a need for greater awareness, training, and resource-building for identifying and appropriately responding to male minors who are trafficked in commercial sex.     

Sampling Television Programs for Content Analysis of Sex on TV: How Many Episodes are Enough?

Content analysis is widely used to analyze sexual themes and messages on television. Although researchers generally use a sampling procedure to identify programs for analysis, there is currently no gold standard for the number of episodes needed to establish a valid, representative sample. This study sought to explore how many episodes of weekly television programs should be examined for an accurate assessment of sexual content present throughout the season. Various sampling strategies were used to select episodes from programs that ran in the 1998–1999 season, and results were compared with data collected from all episodes of these programs to test representativeness. Findings suggest that to provide a representative assessment of sexual content on television programs for behavior-level variables, a random sample of five episodes of weekly television programs is sufficient, while three episodes may be acceptable if variation is minimal. A random sample of seven episodes is needed for character-based analyses.     

Is It Good to be Gifted? The Social Construction of the Gifted Child

There is growing evidence that children labelled as academically gifted are subjected to negative attitudes from others and that this impacts on their self‐esteem and motivation to succeed. Through an analysis of British newspaper stories about gifted children, this article explores the socially constructed nature of the concept of the ‘gifted child’ and finds that children identified as gifted academically are framed more negatively than those who are exceptionally able in music or sport. The article questions the growing practice of labelling children as academically gifted in English schools given the negative stereotypes that surround this classification.     

Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Intention Among College Men: What's Oral Sex Got to Do With It?

Abstract

Objective: To identify associations between engaging in oral sex and perceived risk of oral cancer among college men. Also, to identify associations, and their moderating factors, between oral sex and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine acceptance. Methods: Young men were recruited from 2 university campuses in the South (N = 150). Men completed an audio computer-assisted self-administered interview. Results: With the exception of receiving fellatio, each measure of oral sex behavior was significantly associated with greater perceived risk of oral cancer. Four oral sex behaviors evidenced significant associations with vaccine acceptance. Men engaging in recent oral sex or reporting oral sex behaviors with more than 2 partners were more likely to indicate vaccine intent. African American/black race, communication with parents about sex-related topics, and HPV-related stigma/shame were identified as moderating factors. Conclusion: Young college men giving or receiving oral sex with multiple partners may be predisposed to HPV vaccination.     

The Concept of Ecological Validity: What Are Its Limitations and Is It Bad to Be Invalid?

The concept of ecological validity has played an important role in research on perceptual development. The limitations of this concept are discussed and illustrated with examples from research on the development of intersensory perception. By itself the concept of ecological validity fails to provide objective criteria for experimental design, but together with more traditional bottom‐up methodological approaches it can be used in a convergent operations manner to enrich our understanding of perceptual development.     

‘Is My Volunteer Job Not Real Work?’ The Experiences of Migrant Women with Finding Employment Through Volunteer Work

We examine whether, and under which conditions, volunteering contributes to migrant integration. We identify two main goals of workfare volunteering—empowerment and employability—which build on two distinct images of the ideal citizen: the empowered citizen and the worker-citizen. Life story interviews were held with 46 first- and second-generation migrant women from Turkey, Morocco and Suriname living in the Netherlands. We found that volunteering contributes to employability and empowerment. However, for two mutually reinforcing reasons it eventually disempowers. Firstly, volunteering hardly ever results in paid employment because employers do not recognize volunteering as real work experience. Secondly, the focus on paid employment as ultimate form of integration misrecognizes migrant women as active citizens, which often results in disempowerment. Our findings show that the double policy goals of workfare volunteering require different conditions, and as such striving for both simultaneously often results in failing to achieve the set goals.     

Whose Body Is It Anyway? Pressures and Control for Women with Learning Disabilities

What women with learning disabilities think and feel about their bodies should be of interest to those concerned with women's rights and disability rights. Yet scant attention appears to have paid to these issues. It has been suggested in the past that one of the 'blessings' of having a learning disability is that one is free from many of the pressures society places on individuals to conform. However, the research presented here suggests that far from being immune to these pressures to conform, women with learning disabilities are, indeed, subject to strong influences, and overt and covert control mechanisms shape their bodies and minds towards achieving certain norms of femininity.     

Infants' Perception of Intonation: Is It a Statement or a Question?

The ability to distinguish phonetic variations in speech that are relevant to meaning is essential for infants' language development. Previous studies into the acquisition of prosodic categories have focused on lexical stress, lexical pitch accent, or lexical tone. However, very little is known about the developmental course of infants' perception of linguistic intonation. In this study, we investigate infants' perception of the correlates of the statement/yes–no question contrast in a language that marks this sentence type distinction only by prosodic means, European Portuguese (EP). Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, EP‐learning infants at 5–6 and 8–9 months were able to successfully discriminate segmentally varied, single‐prosodic word intonational phrases presented with statement or yes–no question intonation, demonstrating that they are sensitive to the prosodic cues marking this distinction as early as 5 months and maintain this sensitivity throughout the first year. These results suggest the presence of precocious discrimination abilities for intonation across segmental variation, similarly to previous reports for lexical pitch accent, but unlike previous findings for word stress.     

Is Collective Bargaining Pareto Efficient? A Survey of the Literature

It would be difficult, even today, to argue that labour unions are not important economic institutions, and it is this importance that makes their consequences for efficiency so substantial. Interest in the economic analysis of unions was revived in the early 1980s, in large part by a paper by Ian McDonald and Robert Solow, which formalized ideas first expressed in the context of labour markets 35 years earlier by Wassily Leontief. The standard textbook model of the labour union treats the union as a conventional monopoly seller of labour, selecting the wage while the firm chooses the level of employment; McDonald & Solow, however, drew from Leontief’s work to suggest an alternative in which the firm and union negotiate to a Pareto efficient contract. Further theoretical work followed, and a still-growing empirical literature began to develop; a wide variety of empirical procedures and tests have been attempted, with a diverse and contradictory range of findings. Given the importance of the question of union contract efficiency, an up-to-date survey of the literature may be useful in synthesizing past results and pointing the way to future research, and it is this role which the current paper will attempt to fill.     

Johnson's Differentiation Theory: Is It Really Empirically Supported?

Michael Johnson's differentiation of “types” of domestic violence has had a significant impact on courts and providers, in part because of its claim to an empirical basis. Unfortunately, the label “situational couple violence” has already been used by judges and evaluators to minimize abuse claims in custody cases. Johnson's repeated assertion that SCV is the most common form of domestic violence reinforces the marginalizing of domestic violence. But what do his data actually show? Here Professor Meier takes a close look at the research Johnson relies on and finds that it fails to prove his thesis. Rather, the data suggest that Johnson has it exactly backward: Control-based abuse is probably far more common than “situational” domestic violence.     

Is It Better for Older People to Live With Their Children?

EVER since there have been families in China, it has been traditional for the elderly to spend their later years living at home with their children; if the children have married and presented their parents with grandchildren, the household may consist of a large extended family in which three to four generations live under one roof. Nowadays, many elderly Chinese still fit into this mold. According to a sampling survey taken in 1995, among households with older members, 67.64 million seniors—or 74.73 percent of the total—lived with their adult children. Though some older people live apart     

Is Participation Without Power Good Enough? Introduction to “Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation”

This introduction to the section Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation sketches a contemporary enthusiasm for participation that reaches across business, education, popular culture, and politics. The article tries to account for what makes this enthusiasm new and begins to sketch its implications for what people want and expect from their political and economic institutions.