The disability bias: understanding the context of hate in comparison with other minority populations

During recent years ‘disability hate crime’ has become a major political and criminal justice concern due to a number of high-profile murders in the United Kingdom. The aim of this article is to compare disability-motivated hate crimes with other hate crimes motivated by homophobic or racist bias. This study employs a quantitative methodology utilising data collected by the ARCH hate crime recording system over a 10-year period (2005–2015). The data findings illustrate a number of variations concerning incidents reported by disabled people regarding violence and threatening behaviour, when compared with incidents motivated by race/faith or homophobic bias.     

Voice quality as a marker of ethnicity in New Zealand: From acoustics to perception1

This study is the first acoustic analysis of voice quality in the two main ethnic dialects of New Zealand English. In a production experiment, narratives from 36 speakers were analyzed and H1‐H2 spectral tilt measures were calculated for each vowel. The results provide instrumental evidence for impressionistic claims about the differing voice quality features of the two main ethnic groups, showing that Maori English speakers are creakier than European New Zealanders. A perception experiment was also carried out to determine the perceptual salience of voice quality for the identification of speaker ethnicity. The results of regression analyses confirm that listeners are sensitive to the phonation differences, and are able to rely on phonation cues in an ethnic dialect identification task. The study demonstrates the role of voice quality as a critical sociolinguistic variable, and highlights the importance of listeners’ previous dialect exposure in terms of sensitivity to prosodic cues. Ko tēnei pūrongo te tirohanga tuatahi ki ētahi āhuatanga o te reo e puta ana i te korokoro o ngā kaikōrero o ngā reo ā‐iwi e rua o te Reo Pākehā i Aotearoa. I tētahi whakamātau i āta tirohia ngā oropuare o ētahi kōrero nō ngā kaikōrero 36, ā, kua tatauria ngā ine H1‐H2 e kīia ana ko te spectral tilt. Ko ngā putanga he taunakitanga mō ngā whakaaro o te tāngata e pā ana ki te rerekētanga o ngā reo o te hunga Pākehā me te hunga Māori, e whakaatu hoki ana he kekē atu te reo o ngā mea e kōrero ana i te ‘Māori English’ i te reo e kōrerohia ana e te iwi Pākehā. He whakamātau whakarongo i whakahaerehia kia kite mena he āwhina tēnei āhuatanga o te reo kia mōhio te kaiwhakarongo ko wai te iwi o te kaikōrero. Ko ngā whakaputanga o ngā tatauranga e kī ana kei te tino mārama tēnei āhuatanga o te reo e puta ana i te korokoro o te tāngata, ā, ka taea ēnei rerekētanga te whakamahi kia whakawehea te tangata Māori i te tangata Pākehā. Nā tēnei ka kitea he āhuatanga motuhake te reo o te korokoro, ā, he mea nui hoki mena kua tino wāia te kaiwhakarongo ki ngā reo ā‐iwi. [Māori]     

Gender bias in performance evaluations: The impact of gender quotas

The intention behind imposing quotas for women on corporate boards is to close the gender gap in economic participation and help women to be promoted within organizations. However, the broader social psychological literature lends support to ideas that affirmative action policies, such as quotas, may do more harm than good for the beneficiaries. We extend this idea beyond the affected beneficiaries and ask whether this unintended negative effect spills over to women who are not immediate targets of the quota, by signaling incompetence. We develop an experimental design to investigate whether the announcement (study 1) and the implementation (study 2) of a quota for women have a direct negative effect on performance evaluations and hence reinforce the existing gender bias in evaluation. We observed that the performance of women was evaluated significantly lower than that of men. However, this gender bias was limited to sequential (rating) evaluations and was not evident in joint (ranking) evaluations. The quota did not significantly influence the amount of this bias. In addition, we observed more pronounced sexism in males compared to females. Results of study 2 gave a hint to an association between higher sexism and lower evaluations of women’s performance. We also found some evidence for a stronger evaluation bias in females when controlling for sexist attitudes. Hence, our results imply that the bias, which is overall quite robust and strongly pronounced, is still affected by individual gender-related characteristics.     

An increase in noise and a decline in civility

Abstract

Large numbers of people living in tight, crowded urban dwellings and the greater dependency of these people on noise-related technology are two factors that have contributed significantly to the growth of urban noise. Yet, another factor too often ignored, namely the lack of civility, has grown concomitantly with this increase in urban noise. Noise, recognized as a major pollutant in cities around the world, is often the outgrowth of a lack of respect for others that has characterized urban living. Playing television sets loudly at night, riding down streets with blasting stereos, or slamming apartment doors are activities that demonstrate disrespect for neighbors. Unfortunately, noisemakers view these activities as falling within their rights. However, rights are not boundless and cannot be exercised at the expense of other people. Individuals are not alone in disrupting the lives of others through noise. Governments have lagged in passing legislation to reduce noise in urban centers and businesses have promoted their products through advertisements that glamorize noise. When we recognize that rights and regard for others go hand in hand, then we will have both a quieter and a more civilized society.     

Negotiating a moral identity in the context of later life care

Strategies to maintain independence for older people have received considerable attention as a social policy solution to the financial and social impact of the ageing population. Critical scholars in gerontology have also highlighted the negative consequences of promoting independence in this way. Understandings of independence have profound implications for caring relationships as people age. To investigate the ways that older people talk about caring we interviewed 48 people aged 55-70years. A discourse analysis of these data showed that a dominant discourse of 'independence' was drawn upon to value self-sufficiency and construct dependence on others as burdensome. This construction of care provides a comfortable position for those who can afford to purchase professional care; however, those without resources are unable to accept unpaid help without also accepting a position of dependency. An alternative discourse of 'being there' constructs having others to provide personal care as a virtue and obligations to provide such care as based on family duty and affection. This discourse emphasises connections between people and a moral obligation to care which also creates difficulties for those with fewer material resources. The position for a dependent older subject in these two discourses may seem incompatible but can be reconciled by reframing independence as autonomy. Autonomy for those requiring care alongside a wider recognition of caring as the responsibility of all members of the community rather than with individual family members would support a flexible approach to later life care arrangements.     

Structure and bias in the network autocorrelation model

In a recent paper (Mizruchi and Neuman, 2008), we showed that estimates of ρ in the network autocorrelation model exhibited a systematic negative bias and that the magnitude of this bias increased monotonically with increases in network density. We showed that this bias held regardless of the size of the network, the number of exogenous variables in the model, and whether the matrix W was normalized or in raw form. The networks in our simulations were random, however, which raises the question of the extent to which the negative bias holds in various structured networks. In this paper, we reproduce the simulations from our earlier paper on a series of networks drawn to represent well-known structures, including star, caveman, and small-world structures. Results from these simulations indicate that the pattern of negative bias in ρ continues to hold in all of these structures and that the negative bias continues to increase at increasing levels of density. Interestingly, the negative bias in ρ is especially pronounced at extremely low-density levels in the star network. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings.     

Disability,politics and poverty in a majority world context

This paper argues that the spread of free market economics throughout the world has generated unprecedented inequalities within and between nation states. This has led to the systematic exclusion of people with perceived impairments from the mainstream of economic and community life in almost all societies, the generation of an international disabled people’s movement, and their demand for legal frameworks with which to address the multiple deprivations encountered by people viewed as ‘disabled’. It is argued that the poverty and exclusion encountered by disabled people and other oppressed groups in all societies will not be eliminated without fundamental structural change at the international level.     

Exploring the stability of communication network metrics in a dynamic nursing context

Network stability is of increasing interest to researchers as they try to understand the dynamic processes by which social networks form and evolve. Because hospital patient care units (PCUs) need flexibility to adapt to environmental changes (Vardaman et al., 2012), their networks are unlikely to be uniformly stable and will evolve over time. This study aimed to identify a metric (or set of metrics) sufficiently stable to apply to PCU staff information sharing and advice seeking communication networks over time. Using Coefficient of Variation, we assessed both Across Time Stability (ATS) and Global Stability over four data collection times (Baseline and 1, 4, and 7 months later). When metrics were stable using both methods, we considered them “super stable.” Nine metrics met that criterion (Node Set Size, Average Distance, Clustering Coefficient, Density, Weighted Density, Diffusion, Total Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Eigenvector Centrality). Unstable metrics included Hierarchy, Fragmentation, Isolate Count, and Clique Count. We also examined the effect of staff members’ confidence in the information obtained from other staff members. When confidence was high, the “super stable” metrics remained “super stable,” but when low, none of the “super stable” metrics persisted as “super stable.” Our results suggest that nursing units represent what Barker (1968) termed dynamic behavior settings in which, as is typical, multiple nursing staff must constantly adjust to various circumstances, primarily through communication (e.g., discussing patient care or requesting advice on providing patient care), to preserve the functional integrity (i.e., ability to meet patient care goals) of the units, thus producing the observed stability over time of nine network metrics. The observed metric stability provides support for using network analysis to study communication patterns in dynamic behavior settings such as PCUs.     

Rescuing a small village school in the context of rural change in Hungary

The paper discusses local responses to schooling policy in the context of the uneven differentiation and sharp social polarisation of the Hungarian countryside. Counter-urbanisation, on the one hand, has brought affluent urban middle classes to suburban spaces, on the other hand, peripheral areas are becoming impoverished with high unemployment, while there are rural areas where a process of ghettoisation is taking place. Parallel with these processes, rural education has had to face demographic decline and the shrinking ability of municipalities to maintain schools. The case study presented in this article illustrates the cultural and spatial barriers impeding the creation of co-operation in the field of education. Given that the community of the village concerned is remarkably vibrant, with strong intra-community horizontal ties, the concept of social capital is used to explain how bonding and bridging networks as well as “missing links” influence community actions, in this case a school-rescue operation.     

An investigation of the endowment effect in the context of a college housing lottery

The endowment effect was examined in a two-part study in the context of a college housing lottery. Students who were awarded their first choice of residence hall were asked the lowest dollar amount they would be willing to accept (WTA) to give up their first choice hall whereas students who were denied their first choice were asked the highest dollar amount they would be willing to pay (WTP) to obtain their first choice. Results from the initial assessment showed the presence of the endowment effect regarding students’ valuation of their first choice residence hall immediately after the housing lottery (i.e., WTA price was significantly higher than WTP price). The follow-up surveyed participants from the initial assessment who responded when contacted a second time after they had experienced two months of life in the residence hall they were awarded in the lottery. Results from the follow-up showed that the endowment effect was still present after experiencing life in the residence hall. Moreover, further analyses revealed that the endowment effect was, in fact, enhanced after the living experience. These findings demonstrate that within the context of a housing lottery, a highly-valued commodity, long-term experiences substantially increase the magnitude of the endowment effect, even when controlling for other factors that have been shown to impact this effect.     

Conceptualizing community in the context of work and family

In recent years, many work-family scholars and practitioners have called for expanding the analysis of work and family to include community. This paper uses the ecological systems approach as a framework for selecting and reviewing community concepts thought to be relevant to the analysis of work, community, and family. Based on the work-family literature and the review of community concepts, the paper creates a set of common categories of characteristics for the analysis of relationships among community, work, and family. The development of such categories is a first step in understanding work, community, and family as interrelated domains. Hopefully, they will be useful for developing and testing hypotheses regarding interrelationships among work, community, and family and the effects of work, community, and family characteristics on domain quality and individual well-being. On a vu, au cours de ces dernières années, de nombreux professeurs et praticiens demander que soit étendue l'analyse du travail et de la famille pour inclure la communauté. Cet article utilise l'approche des systèmes écologiques comme base de sélection et d'étude des principes de communauté considérés pertinents dans l'analyse du travail, de la communauté et de la famille. Ensuite, en s'appuyant sur la littérature visant le travail et la famille, ainsi que sur l'étude des principes de communauté, l'article établit un jeu de catégories communes des caractéristiques permettant l'analyse de rapports entre communauté, travail et famille. L'établissement de telles catégories constitue un premier pas envers une meilleure compréhension de l'interrelation entre les domaines du travail, de la communauté et de la famille. Il est à espérer que cela sera utile envers le développement et l'évaluation des hypothèses visant à établir une relation entre le travail, la communauté et la famille, ainsi que l'influence qu'auraient les caractéristiques du travail, de la communauté et de la famille sur la qualité du domaine et la qualité de la vie.     

Doing disability research in a Southern context: challenges and possibilities

Research on disability issues in countries of the South is primarily dominated by a focus on generating large scale quantitative data sets. This paper discusses the many challenges, opportunities and dilemmas faced in designing and undertaking a qualitative research study in one district in India. The Disability, Education and Poverty Project (DEPP) aims at exploring the role of education in the lives of young people with disabilities living in poverty. A central focus of the research is to engage with the young people with disabilities themselves and to understand how they construed their lives and experiences. This paper discusses three issues which are of central concern to the project: identification of the sample group, appropriateness of the research methods and, finally, an examination of the assumptions underpinning the research process.     

Keeping up with the Joneses and the welfare effects of monetary policy

This paper examines the implications of “keeping up with the Joneses” preferences (jealousy) for the welfare effects of monetary policy. I develop a New Keynesian model, where households are jealous and the central bank follows the Taylor rule. I show that the welfare effects of monetary policy over time depend significantly on the relative strength of the consumption externality caused by jealousy and the monopolistic distortion. When a first-order approximation of the utility function is used, then the main result is the following: If jealousy (the monopolistic distortion) dominates, then a decrease in the interest rate reduces (increases) welfare in the short run, but increases (reduces) welfare in the medium run. However, the use of a second-order approximation changes the sign of the overall welfare effect of monetary policy if the initial level of employment is at the optimal level or just below it.     

Adolescent development in social and community context: a program of research

Search Institute's integrated program of research on the linkages among community, developmental assets, and health outcomes is discussed. Recommendations are made for building a science that is dedicated to exploring pathways to developmental success.     

Power and the perception of social networks

Previous work has led to divergent conclusions about how power affects the accuracy of network perceptions in groups and organizations. This paper develops and tests an argument linking higher power to less accurate network perception. Results from the first experiment showed that, relative to participants primed with high power, those primed with low power had more accurate perceptions of who was tied to whom in novel networks. The second experiment demonstrated that such differences in perceptual accuracy do not emerge for non-social relations.     

Network brokerage and the perception of leadership

We renovate a classic experiment to define a research platform that provides data on network behavior and the causal effect of access to structural holes. Our hypothesis is that people are perceived to be leaders when they behave as network brokers, which is to say, when they coordinate information across structural holes. We focus on the perception of leadership to connect with the many field studies in which access to structural holes predicts success measures keyed to leadership. Our hypothesis is clearly supported. The broker-leader association we report is very similar in strength and form to broker-success associations reported in previous research. At the same time, it is also clear that people adapt to their randomly assigned network, re-shaping it to suit preferences that in some part emerge in team deliberations or outside the experiment. A modification to our hypothesis — at least for these small laboratory teams — is that monopoly brokerage is key to being cited as team leader. Leadership is ambiguous when multiple people are positioned to be brokers unless one person emerges by his or her network behavior as a monopoly broker. Our summary conclusion is that access to structural holes can be causal to the perception of leadership, a characteristic implicit in many success measures used to document the broker-success association.     

Family involvement in the institutional eldercare context. Towards a new understanding

This article focuses on family involvement and its various patterns and expressions in the context of end-of-life care in a nursing home. Based on analyses from an ethnographic study carried out at a nursing home ward, the aim is to describe and analyze the conditions of aging and dying for the old residents, as well as effects on their visiting families and relatives. As in similar research findings, it became clear from the study that families continue to visit and contribute to the care of the old resident throughout the years, from the time of placement to their demise, but that this involvement might vary both in content and in extent. However, it was found that families' involvement (as well as their changing relationships and roles) is particularly shaped by the very process of dying and lingering aura of death on the ward. The analysis presented in the article evinces the difficult — and in many ways impossible — role of the family in the institutional end-of-life setting, and discloses the various patterns and manifestations of family involvement in this environment. Different meanings and implications of family involvement are discussed and highlighted.