(Dis)unity and Diversity in Post-9/11 America

Drawing inspiration from the work of Robin M. Williams Jr., I map out the complexities of ethnic and racial relations in the contemporary United States by focusing on the impacts of 9/11—particularly in relation to immigration policy. Because the attackers entered the country through regular immigration channels (i.e., as foreign students) the U.S. government has introduced policies to enhance border security, restrict immigration, increase the surveillance of immigrant populations, and more actively enforce immigration policy. These national-security-related immigration policies, however, are exacerbating existing tensions and producing new sets of ethnic and racialized conflicts in the United States. In this article, I first provide an overview of the key national-security-related immigration policies that were passed in the wake of September 11, 2001. Then, I review some of the recent sociological literature, as well as draw from my own preliminary research in the State of New Jersey, to illustrate the social impacts of these policies on ethnic and racial relations. I conclude with an outline of the ways the sociology of ethnic and racial relations specifically, as well as other subfields of the discipline, might approach analyses of social conflict in the contemporary United States, post–September 11.     

Rethinking the construction of welfare in Mexico: Going beyond the economic measures

This study utilized a multidimensional measure of social welfare composed of 26 social indicators integrated in nine categories: education, employment and social protection, income, health, housing conditions, subjective wellbeing, social capital, use of technology, and culture and leisure to help understand social welfare in Mexico. We also compared the integrated measure with the Human Development Index. Estimation was performed using the method. Our analysis indicated that the health and housing conditions categories contributed the most to social welfare across the 32 Mexican States. In relation to the indicators, income and trust in other people were associated with welfare. Further, results on the welfare ranking of Mexican states revealed variations between the two indices and the HDI). Specifically, only four states occupied the same position on both indices, ten recorded different positions on moving up or down from their levels of social welfare. Implications of observed correlations are presented.     

Development of a rating form to evaluate grant applications to the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health

Reliance on subjective grant proposal review methods leads private philanthropies to underfund mental health programs, even when foundations have mental health focuses. This article describes a private mental health foundation's efforts to increase the objectivity of its proposal review process by developing a reliable, valid proposal rating form. Staff from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, an administrative unit of The University of Texas at Austin, developed the items for the grant proposal rating form (GPRF). Four interns, who had educational backgrounds equivalent to the foundation's grant-making staff, used the GPRF to independently rate 20 grant proposals previously reviewed by the foundation. Internal consistency and interrater reliability were very good. It had good face and construct validity and moderate criterion validity. The GPRF's psychometric properties are sufficient to recommend its use in the foundation's review process and suggest private philanthropies' grant proposal review processes can be made more objective and reliable without compromising validity.     

Goodness‐of‐fit Test for Directional Data

In this paper, we study the problem of testing the hypothesis on whether the density f of a random variable on a sphere belongs to a given parametric class of densities. We propose two test statistics based on the L² and L¹ distances between a non‐parametric density estimator adapted to circular data and a smoothed version of the specified density. The asymptotic distribution of the L² test statistic is provided under the null hypothesis and contiguous alternatives. We also consider a bootstrap method to approximate the distribution of both test statistics. Through a simulation study, we explore the moderate sample performance of the proposed tests under the null hypothesis and under different alternatives. Finally, the procedure is illustrated by analysing a real data set based on wind direction measurements.     

Employment discrimination in upscale restaurants: Evidence from matched pair testing

White and racial minorities with equal qualifications applied simultaneously for 43 waiter/waitress jobs in New York City fine dining restaurants. Applicants of all demographic backgrounds were treated with equal courtesy, but minorities were only 54% as likely as whites to receive a job offer. This discrimination, either conscious or unconscious, was documented in 31% of restaurants tested. Post-hiring differences appear even more widespread, with front of the house minority restaurant servers averaging 12% lower earnings than their equally qualified white peers. Ensuring equal treatment in hiring would expand minority access to good jobs in Manhattan fine dining by 3500 positions but not make it universal.     

"Not prepared to care" and "raising the bar": case examples of building university-community partnerships in gerontological social work research

This paper examines university-community partnerships in gerontological social work research. Utilizing a case study approach, the process of collaboration is explored within the context of a two-phase research project conducted jointly by agency social workers, social work students and a social work faculty member. The benefits and challenges of the university-community research partnership are discussed along with the implications for gerontological social work research, education and practice.     

Cultural Differences: A Cross-cultural Study of Urban Planners from Japan,Mexico, the U.S., Serbia-Montenegro,Russia, and South Korea

This study evaluates the efficacy of Hofstede’s indexes of national culture in the context of public planning agencies across six countries—US, Mexico, Serbia-Montenegro, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. We surveyed 343 planning employees and computed separate one-way, between groups analyses of variance to test for overall differences in Hofstede’s indexes. We found that public planning officials across countries are significantly different on all five dimensions of culture. We comment on how cultural differences might factor into urban planners’ attitudes toward advocacy and social equity planning, market-based planning, citizen participation, rational planning, and other issues relevant to planners’ roles.     

The circulation of knowledge beyond the academia: On scholarly couplers at porous borders

With strong pressure to make academic research socially and economically relevant, academics face the problem of reconciling inherently academic products through which they are assessed (e.g. scientific articles) with other products that are often demanded by non-academic social actors. These products, which we call scholarly couplers, make up an important part of academic work, often ignored or underestimated in evaluation instances. In this article, we show how these types of products articulate with traditional ones and argue that academic production should be observed (and evaluated) through heterogeneous product chains, fostering more diverse academic profiles.     

The COVID-19 pandemic,mask-wearing,and emotion recognition during late-childhood

Face masks are an effective and important tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including among children. However, occluding parts of the face can impact emotion recognition, which is fundamental to effective social interactions. Social distancing, stress, and changes to routines because of the pandemic have also altered the social landscape of children, with implications for social development. To better understand how social input and context impact emotion recognition, the current study investigated emotion recognition in children (7–12 years old, N = 131) using images of both masked and unmasked emotional faces. We also assessed a subsample of participants (“pre-pandemic subsample,” n = 35) who had completed the same emotion recognition task with unmasked faces before and during the pandemic. Masking of faces was related to worse emotion recognition, with more pronounced effects for happy, sad, and fearful faces than angry and neutral faces. Masking was more strongly related to emotion recognition among children whose families reported greater social disruption in response to the pandemic. Finally, in the pre-pandemic subsample, emotion recognition of sad faces was lower during versus before the pandemic relative to other emotions. Together, findings show that occluding face parts and the broader social context (i.e., global pandemic) both impact emotion-relevant judgments in school-aged children.     

Risk heatmaps as visual displays: Opening movie studios after the COVID-19 shutdown

Upon shutting down operations in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie industry assembled teams of experts to help develop guidelines for returning to operation. It resulted in a joint report, The Safe Way Forward, which was created in consultation with union members and provided the basis for negotiations with the studios. A centerpiece of the report was a set of heatmaps displaying SARS-CoV-2 risks for a shoot, as a function of testing rate, community infection prevalence, community transmission rate (R0), and risk measure (either expected number of cases or probability of at least one case). We develop and demonstrate a methodology for evaluating such complex displays, in terms of how well they inform potential users, in this case, workers deciding whether the risks of a shoot are acceptable. We ask whether individuals making hypothetical return-to-work decisions can (a) read display entries, (b) compare display entries, and (c) make inferences based on display entries. Generally speaking, respondents recruited through the Amazon MTurk platform could interpret the display information accurately and make coherent decisions, suggesting that heatmaps can communicate complex risks to lay audiences. Although these heatmaps were created for practical, rather than theoretical, purposes, these results provide partial support for theoretical accounts of visual information processing and identify challenges in applying them to complex settings.