Residential mobility on skid row: Disaffiliation,powerlessness, and decision making

Individual-level models of residential mobility emphasize (a) the stabilizing effects of various social, demographic, and housing characteristics and (b) the important mediating role played by decision-making variables. Data from a sample of skid row residents are analyzed to determine if these models retain their accuracy under conditions of disaffiliation and powerlessness. The findings indicate that, while older age, employment, and other characteristics may encourage residential stability on skid row, such factors influence mobility behavior in a direct fashion rather than through the intervening decision variables of residential evaluation and mobility expectation. In general, persons with weakened social attachments and little control over their lives and resources find it difficult to engage in the calculated, long-term type of decision-making process implied by mobility theory.     

Older peoples' experiences of Community Care

This exploration of the position of “poor older people”within the context of Community Care, analyses the evidence and identifies discriminatory features that affect their lives. There follows an examination of poverty and the Government's management of the changes in Social Security legislation around pensions and benefits, with special reference to the position of women and carers. Are “economically fragile”older people members of the newly emerging underclass? The consequent inequalities are further explored via the position of carers and retired women in relation to the Benefits System; both groups seem to miss the much heralded effects of the trickle-down economic ideology. In the era of Citizen's Charters, so called choices for economically fragile service users appear to be little more than Hobson's Choice.     

Socioenvironmental Threats to Pastoral Livelihoods: Risk Perceptions in the Altay and Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang,China

Subjective risk perceptions give rise to unique policy implications as they reflect both the expectation of risk exposure and the ability to mitigate or cope with the adverse impacts. Based on data collected from semistructured interviews and iterative ranking exercises with 159 households in the Altay and Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang, China, this study investigates and explains the risks with respect to a seriously understudied population and location. Using both geostatistical and econometric methods, we show that although fear of environmental crisis is prevalent among our respondents, recently implemented pastoral conservation, sedentarization, and development projects are more likely to be ranked as the top concerns among affected households. In order to reduce these concerns, future pastoral policy must be built on the livestock economy, and intervention priority should be given to the geographic areas identified as risk hot spots. In cases where pastoralists have to give up their pastures, the transition to other comparable livelihood strategies must be enabled by creating new opportunities and training pastoralists to acquire the needed skills.     

Ability emotional intelligence and children’s behaviour in the playground

We explored whether emotion understanding promotes positive social functioning in childhood using the ability emotional intelligence (AEI) framework, which defines emotion understanding more broadly than is common in developmental science. The prospective study included children ages 9–11 years who completed a measure of AEI at the start of the school year, and whose playground interactions were observed for one full year. Findings showed that, among girls, low AEI was associated with higher levels of direct aggressive behaviour in the playground; boys and girls high or low in AEI were more likely than their peers to watch others during playground social interactions. Further, higher AEI was associated with indirect aggression in school, suggesting higher AEI during childhood may be associated with the developmental transition from direct to indirect forms of aggression. The implications of the findings for school practice in relation to the teaching of emotion understanding are discussed.     

Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction: A Metropolitan-Level Analysis*

Students of neighborhood satisfaction have traditionally regarded the individual as the appropriate unit of analysis. In this present paper we break with tradition proposing that satisfaction can also be viewed as a property of populations. Data from the 1974–76 U.S. Annual Housing Surveys are employed to test three alternative explanations of variation in aggregate levels of satisfaction across 60 metropolitan areas Consistent with the urban-scale hypothesis, a negative relationship is found between metropolitan population size and the percentage of residents who rate their neighborhoods “excellent.” Further analysis reveals that variables representing the compositional and quality-of-life perspectives affect satisfaction in the expected directions as well: the more residents who are incentive- or resource-deficient and the more residents who perceive local conditions as problems, the lower the level of neighborhood satisfaction tends to be. In terms of relative explanatory power the quality-of-life variables appear dominant, although the persistent effects of the urban-scale measure may prove of greatest theoretical interest.     

Stress,Coping, and Mental Health Differences among Homeless People

People who are chronically homeless are assumed to have higher rates of mental health problems than episodically or new‐entry homeless individuals. It is unclear to what extent early‐life and current stressors account for this disadvantage. Guided by cumulative disadvantage theory and stress research, we analyze data from a national study of the US homeless population to examine how stressors and coping resources throughout the life course are implicated in differences among homeless people in psychiatric disorders and alcohol or other drug abuse disorders. Logistic regression analysis reveals that new‐entry homeless persons are less likely than their chronically and episodically homeless counterparts to have current psychiatric disorders. This is explained by stressors and coping resources experienced in childhood and during adult homeless spells. Alcohol and other drug abuse is common but comparable across the three homeless types and shares an association with selected stress and coping measures. Findings lend credibility to an accumulation of risks perspective, highlighting how past as well as contemporaneous stressors are related to the mental health of homeless people.     

Homelessness and hunger

We employ data from the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients to examine the character and correlates of hunger among homeless people. Our analysis, couched in an adaptation framework, finds more support for the differentiation hypothesis than for the leveling hypothesis: Complex patterns of food insecurity exist at the individual level, and they vary with the resources available (e.g., higher monthly income, regular shelter use) and obstacles faced (e.g., alcohol, drug, and physical and mental health problems). The chronically homeless, who suffer from multiple deficits, appear particularly food-insecure, a finding that favors the desperation hypothesis over its street-wisdom alternative. We conclude that hunger is not uniformly experienced by members of the homeless population. Rather, some individuals are better situated than others to cope with the stressful nature of homelessness when addressing their sustenance needs.     

Racial Diversity and Change in Metropolitan Neighborhoods

This study investigates the changing racial diversity and structure of metropolitan neighborhoods. We consider three alternative perspectives about localized racial change: that neighborhoods are bifurcating along a white/nonwhite color line, fragmenting into homogeneous enclaves, or integrating white, black, Latino, and Asian residents into diverse residential environments. To assess hypotheses drawn from these perspectives, we develop a hybrid methodology (incorporating the entropy index and majority-rule criteria) that offers advantages over previous typological efforts. Our analysis of 1990-2000 census tract data for the 100 largest US metropolitan areas finds that most neighborhoods are becoming more diverse and that members of all groups have experienced increasing exposure to neighborhood diversity. However, white populations tend to diminish rapidly in the presence of multiple minority groups and there has been concomitant white growth in low-diversity neighborhoods. Latino population dynamics have emerged as a primary force driving neighborhood change in a multi-group context.