Issues in understanding quality volunteering in human services

Organisations providing human services are under increasing pressure to demonstrate quality from a range of sources such as new legislation and new requirements for government funding. Four dimensions for examining quality, derived from program evaluation theory, illustrated some of the contradictions surrounding these expectations. The research used a qualitative and grounded approach to exploring clients', volunteers' and coordinators' notions of quality service. The clients' and volunteers' perceptions of quality were highly experiential, related to the specific context and focussed on strong trusting personal relationships. Clients were also very conscious of their lack of power. Coordinators used a combination of approaches to try to satisfy the demands of clients, volunteers and bureaucracy.     

Exploring Social Media Contexts for Cultivating Connected Learning with Black Youth in Urban Communities: The Case of Dreamer Studio

Qualitative Sociology - Using the Connected Learning framework as a conceptual lens, this study utilizes digital ethnographic methods to explore outcomes of a Hip-Hop Based Education program...     

Groups and individuals: conformity and diversity in the performance of gendered identities

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and ‘groupishness’ of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology.     

Social enterprises as enabling workplaces for people with psychiatric disabilities

In recent years, western governments influenced by neoliberalism have emphasized paid work as a key route to social inclusion and community participation for people with psychiatric disabilities. Although paid work can offer many rewards, access to mainstream employment for people with psychiatric disabilities is difficult as they continue to encounter discrimination and a lack of workplace accommodation. One response to these challenges has been the creation of social enterprises as ‘alternative spaces’ of employment for people with psychiatric disabilities. On the basis of interviews with key informants from 21 different social enterprises across Ontario, Canada, this paper critically analyzes the strategies used by organizations to create jobs that are both accommodating for people, but also conducive to the ongoing success of the business.     

Survival Distributions Satisfying Benford's Law

Hill stated that “An interesting open problem is to determine which common distributions (or mixtures thereof) satisfy Benford's law …”. This article quantifies compliance with Benford's law for several popular survival distributions. The traditional analysis of Benford's law considers its applicability to datasets. This article switches the emphasis to probability distributions that obey Benford's law.     

The fertility effect of catastrophe: U.S. hurricane births

Anecdotal evidence has suggested increased fertility rates resulting from catastrophic events in an area. In this paper, we measure this fertility effect using storm advisory data and fertility data for the Atlantic and Gulf-coast counties of the USA. We find that low-severity storm advisories are associated with a positive and significant fertility effect and that high-severity advisories have a significant negative fertility effect. As the type of advisory goes from least severe to most severe, the fertility effect of the specific advisory type decreases monotonically from positive to negative. We also find some other interesting demographic effects.     

Effects of sex guilt and premarital sexual permissiveness on role‐played sex education and moral attitudes

Anne Fausto‐Sterling's suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late‐onset adrenal hyper‐plasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto‐Sterling's estimate of 1.7%.     

Testing for serial correlation in the presence of dynamic heteroscedasticity

Standard serial correlation tests are derived assuming that the disturbances are homoscedastic, but this study shows that asympotic critical values are not accurate when this assumption is violated. Asymptotic critical values for the ARCH(2)-corrected LM, BP and BL tests are valid only when the underlying ARCH process is strictly stationary, whereas Wooldridge's robust LM test has good properties overall. These tests exhibit similar bahaviour even when the underlying process is GARCH (1,1). When the regressors include lagged dependent variables, the rejection frequencies under both the null and alternative hypotheses depend on the coefficientsof the lagged dependent variables and the other model parameters. They appear to be robust across various disturbance distributions under the null hypothesis.