Negotiating Risk and Promoting Empowerment through Rap Music: Development of a Measure to Capture Risk and Empowerment Pathways to Change

The purpose of this study was to report on the development and construction of the Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) inventory, a measure seeking to capture the specific pathways by which either risk-enhancing impacts or empowering impacts of rap music manifest. Data were analyzed via structural equation modeling from a convenience sample of 128 high school and college students. Results found that respondents elicited (1) empowering themes that related to them individually and to the broader community and (2) high-risk themes that may promote risky health behaviors. Implications about research and practice relevance of the ICE inventory are discussed.     

Exposure to Community Violence,Suicidality, and Psychological Distress Among African American and Latino Youths: Findings From the CDC Youth Violence Survey

The present investigation explored risk and protective factors for suicidal ideation and behavior in a sub-sample of African American and Latino adolescents (n = 2,626) who participated in the 2004 Centers for Disease Control Youth Violence Survey. Structural equation modeling was used to explore exposure to violence at the community level as a contextual factor that could potentially influence depressive symptomatology, substance abuse, parental support, social support, and suicidality among study participants. Findings indicated that exposure to violence at the community level was not directly related to suicidality among this population of urban adolescents. However, it was directly related with several other variables under study in the model, which in turn were directly related with suicidality. Tests of invariance revealed several across-group differences, particularly by race and gender, in how the identified risk and protective factors in the model related to suicidality. Implications for research and practice with urban, ethnic minority, adolescent populations are discussed.     

Slavery: A Supplementary Teaching Bibliography

This study will argue that from 1916 to 1935 Emperor Haile Selassie I adopted a two-pronged strategy of supporting the gradual abolition of slavery while taking steps towards its immediate abolition. Emperor Haile Selassie I was compelled to adopt a policy of gradual abolition due to the deposition of Iyasu V, the institutional nature of Ethiopian slavery and the agricultural primacy of the Ethiopian economy. This article will also contend that Emperor Haile Selassie I sought the immediate abolition of slavery because he wanted to improve the international image of Ethiopia, stave off a European invasion and/or partition, and prevent Ethiopia from becoming a mandate of the League of Nations.     

Causal effects of foster care: An instrumental-variables approach

This paper describes the use of instrumental-variables (IV) to estimate causal effects of foster care on long- and short-term outcomes. This estimation strategy provides a tool to evaluate what are known as “natural experiments”: settings that mimic randomization usually associated with a controlled trial. The proposed natural experiment involves the effective randomization of investigators to child-protection cases. The results suggest that foster care placement increases like likelihood of delinquency and emergency healthcare episodes. Care must be taken when interpreting IV estimates. The results apply to cases that are part of the natural experiment—“marginal cases” where the investigators may disagree about the placement recommendation.     

FEMALE TACTICS AND STRATEGIES OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE: A STUDY OF INCIDENT REPORTS

Researchers have debated the extent to which females pursue violence against their male partners for purposes of enforcing or resisting control. In an effort to shed light on this important topic, we examined 43 incident reports of women who were court-referred to a batterer intervention program to explore how and why they engaged in intimate partner violence. Our analysis of the reports revealed that the most common tactic of physical violence was pushing and the most common tactic of psychological violence was intimidation. The motive to enforce was observed in the majority of the incident reports, while attempts to resist, retaliate, and punish occurred in about one third of the reports. We also found that female violence typically occurred in the contexts of anger and fear. The implications of our research for violence intervention programs are discussed.     

Understanding public support for punitive criminal sanctions: Psychological and sociological views of the “outlier” phenomenon

The present study compares the ability of selected psychological and sociological factors to predict the level of punitive criminal sanction supported by a community's residents. Personality characteristics, particularly those developed in the pioneering work of Adorno on authoritarianism, represented psychological influences; sociological views on punitive sanctions were drawn from the Durkheimian tradition of social condemnation, in which group norms are established by the general level of consensus about the perceived threat of a particular criminal act, or crime seriousness. Little support was found for the link between authoritarianism and specific sanctioning endorsements. The sociological concept of normative outliers, on the other hand, proved to be the much more useful construct.     

Quality and the 2010 Census

The U.S. Census Bureau has a long tradition of evaluating the results of its censuses. This paper presents evaluation results from the 2010 Census, comparing them to earlier results. The paper discusses net coverage at the national and state level, as well as by age, sex, race, and ethnic group. It discusses components of error, including estimated number missed and counted in error. It also presents data on whole-person and item imputation.     

Subjective Well-Being Approach to the Valuation of International Development: Evidence for the Millennium Development Goals

The subjective well-being approach to the valuation of international development is applied to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Results indicate that the rich countries have particular preference for education, healthcare, and housing; they are willing to accept compensation for a failure to meet the three targets by 2015. The poor countries view all the MDGs as important; they are willing accept compensation for a failure to achieve all the targets by 2015. Results also indicate that what the poor countries are willing to accept in terms of compensation matches the amount that would have been the pledge of 0.7% proportion of incomes of the rich countries for international aid. These findings imply that the MDGs can be accomplished at an affordable cost.     

Protecting the Public's Health in An Era of Bioterrorism: The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act

During the fall of 2001, public health law scholars at the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities were asked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a series of national partners to develop the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA). The MSEHPA provides a series of modern powers for states to consider in responding to catastrophic public health emergencies, including bioterrorism events. Since December 2001, provisions based on the MSEHPA have been introduced in nearly 40 states and passed in 20. Underlying the development of the act is a long-standing debate between legal and ethical scholars and law- and policymakers as to the appropriate ways to balance individual and communal rights. The drafting challenge was to create a comprehensive model law that provides adequate powers to protect the public's health while also respecting individual and group rights. The MSEHPA empowers public health agents with broad authority and simultaneously limits the exercise of power in time, duration, and scope to accomplish communal goals of abating serious public health threats. Coercive public health powers, particularly isolation and quarantine, are exercised on a temporary basis, only so long as are reasonably necessary and only among persons who justifiably may pose a risk to others because of their contagious conditions. Individual rights to contest the coercive use of public health powers, even during an emergency, are secured.     

Efficiency and equity as goals for contemporary U.S. immigration policy

As the United States has entered its postindustrial stage of economic development, mass immigration has again become a distinguishing feature of the U.S. economy. In all of its diverse forms, immigration presently accounts for anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the annual growth of the U.S. labor force. By the turn of the 21st century, it could conceivably comprise all of such growth.Immigration is the one aspect of population and labor force growth that public policy should be able to shape and control. Unfortunately, however, the extant public policies that govern the size and composition of the immigrant and refugee flows are largely unrelated to emerging economic considerations.The revival of mass immigration is not taking place in a vacuum. Indeed, it appears that the labor market is being radically transformed. The demand for labor is increasingly favoring those workers with skill and education. There are diminishing needs for job seekers without these human capital endowments. On the labor supply side, it is unfortunately the case that the United States already has a significant number of adults who are ill-prepared for many jobs that are being created.To assist in this effort to enhance efficiency, immigration policy should be flexible. It should be capable of responding to changing domestic economic conditions. Currently, the nation's immigration policy is dominated by political motivations that give priority to family reunification and humanitarian goals. Immigration can be a short run means to provide skilled and educated workers to fill critical worker shortages. But in the long run, equity considerations derived from the nation's multiracial and multicultural character of the labor force also come into play. It is imperative that citizen workers be prepared for the high quality jobs in the growth industries of its postindustrial economy. Immigration must not inhibit market pressures from encouraging employers to provide better opportunities for training and employment of citizens.The obverse is also true. It is essential that immigration does not provide only workers who can be employed in the declining occupations and industries. With a sizeable adult illiteracy problem already, the nation can ill-afford to increase the pool of unskilled and poorly educated workers, which increases the competition among such workers for the shrinking number of jobs available to them.