Getting called out: Effects of feedback to social media corporate social responsibility statements

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts via social media are increasingly common and are often key to achieving organizational CSR objectives. Concerns exist about potential damage caused by negative user comments and effects of user feedback to CSR efforts are mostly unknown. Exploring the effects of positive and negative comments to social media CSR statements and subsequent organizational response, this work reports the results of an online experiment (N = 257) that manipulated both user-generated feedback to organizational CSR statements and subsequent organizational responses. Results demonstrate that negative user comments are less of a concern than commonly thought, and call into question the value of organizational response to user feedback.     

Gender,Preloss Marital Dependence,and Older Adults’ Adjustment to Widowhood

I examine how preloss emotional and instrumental dependence on one's spouse affects older adults’ psychological adjustment to widowhood. Analyses are based on 297 persons from the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) study, a prospective study of widowhood among adults aged 65 and older. Women who were most emotionally dependent on their spouses had the poorest self‐esteem while still married, yet evidence the highest levels of self‐esteem following loss. Men who were most dependent on their wives for home maintenance and financial management tasks experience the greatest personal growth following loss. These results suggest that widowed persons who were once highly dependent upon their spouses reap psychological rewards from the recognition that they are capable of managing on their own.     

Video lottery gambling: Effects on pathological gamblers seeking treatment in South Dakota

Fifty-eight pathological gamblers receiving treatment for addictive illness in two South Dakota hospitals were assessed for types of gambling and grouped into three categories; 15 video lottery only (VLO), 36 video lottery mixed (VLM), and 7 not video lottery (NVL). There were 51 male and 7 female respondents, with a mean age of 38.2. We hypothesized that video lottery would be the predominant type of gambling on several dimensions: level of recent activity, most money lost on one occasion, and number of DSM-IV criteria met. Of all gamblers, 87.9% had pathological involvement with video lottery. Video lottery gambling accounted for the highest level of recent activity. In the VLM group, video lottery gambling led to greater single-occasion monetary losses. In addition, significantly more DSM-IV criteria were met in the VLM group for video lottery gambling than for other forms of gambling these subjects had engaged in. Results indicate that video lottery gambling is the predominant type of gambling behavior engaged in by gamblers seeking treatment for addictive illness in South Dakota. We propose that these findings could be associated with the availability and stimulus differences between video lottery and other gambling types.The authors would like to thank Larry Atwood, Chemical Dependency Counselor at Keystone Treatment Center in Canton, S.D., for his assistance with data collection.     

The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update

The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users; hence, they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles open access (OA, i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the “golden” road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the “green” road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). About 10% of journals are gold, but over 90% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10–20% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers’ employers and funders, as they are now increasingly beginning to do.     

Gender,race, and the use of prayer to manage anger

ABSTRACT

Women and blacks are more likely than men and whites to use prayer to manage negative emotions such as anger. However, the pathways explaining these associations are not fully understood. Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey’s emotion module, we evaluate four potential mechanisms that might account for these associations: women’s and blacks’ relatively high levels of religious participation, relatively low socioeconomic status, extended duration of their negative emotional experiences, and relatively lower perceived control. Women’s and blacks’ higher likelihood of using prayer to manage anger is partially accounted for by their higher levels of religious participation, lower socioeconomic status, and duration of anger. Lower levels of perceived control contribute only to blacks’ use of prayer to manage anger. Our findings highlight the importance of identifying pathways that explain why particular social groups use particular emotion management strategies.     

Institutions,Their Repositories and the Web

It will soon be rare for research-based institutions not to have a digital repository. The main reason for a repository is to maximize the visibility of the institution’s research outputs (provide Open Access), yet few contain a representative proportion of the research produced by their institutions. Repositories form one part of the institution’s Web platform. An explicit, mandatory policy on the use of the repository for collecting outputs is needed in every institution so that the full research record is collected. Once full, a repository is a tool that enables senior management in research institutions to collate and assess research, to market their institution, to facilitate new forms of scholarship, and to enable the tools that will produce new knowledge.     

The psychological consequences of midlife men's social comparisons with their young adult sons

I examine how midlife men (N= 542) compare their work and family lives with those of their young adult sons, and how these comparisons affect the fathers’ self‐evaluations. Analyses are based on quantitative and qualitative data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Fathers who rate their work lives as more successful than their sons’ have elevated self‐esteem only when they also report being very close with their children. Open‐ended interviews reveal that men derive pride from financially supporting their families, yet normative and economic constraints of the “good provider” role prevented them from pursuing their own career aspirations and from maintaining close parent‐child ties. Intergenerational social comparisons highlight the distinctive work and family constraints felt by the midlife fathers.     

The Sliding Scale of Snitching: A Qualitative Examination of Snitching in Three Philadelphia Communities

We conducted an in‐depth interview study with 77 young men in three moderate to high‐crime neighborhoods in Philadelphia to hear their stories about community violence and relations with police. In this article, we have analyzed how Latino, African‐American, and white young men experience policing and how they discuss the guidelines around cooperation with the police and what they view as snitching. Contrary to popular perception, talking to the police is not always banned in poor or high‐crime neighborhoods. Instead, the respondents present a variety of personal rules that they use to assess when cooperation is called for. We argue that the policing they experience within disadvantaged neighborhoods shapes their frame of legal cynicism, which in turn makes decisions not to cooperate with the police more likely.