The case of the “unfair” review: Ethical issues from an editor’s file

This narrative traces the life and fate of a paper submitted to the journalSocial Problems and ultimately rejected, with the author claiming that the review was “unfair.” It is an editor’s story and seeks to specify various “ethical” dilemmas that help to define such work. He currently is completing a three-year team as editor ofSocial Problems.     

Behavioral Outcomes for Administration Majors

Social service agencies and schools of social work have cooperated very little in defining the anticipated outcomes for students who study administration. This study identifies seven basic activities that administrators perform: planning, controlling, coordinating, directing, representing, staffing, and negotiating. Specific behavorial outcomes and objectives that serve as a model for graduate student education and training are systematically developed. Finally, recommendations are provided for curriculum design that will strengthen the coordination of social service agency and school policies, as well as provide a, basis for an evaluation system of student performance by field instructors and faculty.     

Illustrating the Implications of How Inequality is Measured: Decomposing Earnings Inequality by Race and Gender

This paper makes three distinct contributions: it presents a novel modification to an established methodology for assessing inequality using the CPS ASEC data, it illustrates how valuable a multi-metric inequality analysis is by reconciling some open questions regarding the trend in inequality and the role of the composition of income along the distribution, and it provides a baseline assessment of the trend in earnings inequality for four distinct groups of income earners. The evolution of earnings inequality from 1995 to 2010 is compared to increasing inequality in total income as documented by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez to show that earnings inequality has followed a qualitatively similar, though less extreme trend. In the process, the disconnect between the trend in the Gini coefficient and inequality assessed via the share of income going to the top 1 % of income earners is reconciled through the use of several alternative inequality indices. Finally, the evolution of the earnings distribution for black women, black men, white women, and white men are considered separately, which shows that there are important differences in the experience of inequality. The main findings are that only white men have experienced changes in within-group earnings inequality that parallel the changes in inequality seen in the overall distribution. By contrast, black income earners have seen no notable increase in within-group inequality by any measure, suggesting that they may rightly perceive growing inequality as primarily a between-group phenomena.     

SOCIAL COMPARISON AND EFFORT PROVISION: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Social comparison has potentially far reaching consequences in many economic domains. We conducted a field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers' effort provision if their own wage or that of a co‐worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performance‐independent hourly wage. Cutting both group members' wages caused a decrease in performance. But when only one group member's wage was cut, the affected workers decreased their performance more than twice as much as when both workers' wages were cut. This finding indicates that social comparison among workers affects effort provision because the only difference between the two wage‐cut treatments is the other group member's wage level. In contrast, workers whose wage was not cut but who witnessed their group member's pay being cut displayed no change in performance relative to the baseline treatment in which both workers' wages remained unchanged. This indicates that social comparison exerts asymmetric effects on effort.     

Infant locomotion shapes proximity to adults during everyday play in the U.S.

Learning to walk expands infants’ access to the physical environment and prompts changes in their communicative behaviors. However, little is known about whether walking also shapes infants’ proximity to their adult social partners during everyday activities at home. Here we followed 89 infants (42 boys, 47 girls; 92% White, not Hispanic or Latino) longitudinally and documented connections between infant locomotion and infant-adult proximity on two timescales: (1) across developmental time, by comparing data from a session when infants could only crawl to a later session when they could walk (M walk onset = 12.15 months, range = 8-15); and (2) in real time, by testing whether the amount of time that infants spent in motion (regardless of their locomotor status) related to their interpersonal distance to adults. The developmental transition to walking corresponded to a significant, but modest, decrease in infant-adult proximity. Infants’ moment-to-moment locomotion, however, was strongly related to patterns of interpersonal distance: infants who spent more time in motion spent less time near adults and instigated more proximity transitions, resulting in shorter and more dispersed bouts of proximity throughout sessions. Findings shed new light on how infants’ motor achievements can reverberate across other domains of development, and how changes in infant development that researchers often observe over months arise from infants’ moment-to-moment experiences.