Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 Program

In recent years scholars have identified racial disparities in wealth and home ownership as crucial factors underlying patterns of racial inequality and residential segregation in American metropolitan housing markets. While numerous federal housing policies have been identified as responsible for reinforcing residential segregation and racial inequalities in home ownership, little research has focused on the segregative effects of the Section 235 program. As one component of the 1968 Housing Act, Section 235 was designed to shift the focus of federal housing policy away from dispensing aid to local housing authorities for building public housing to providing direct supply-side subsidies to the private sector to stimulate home ownership for nonwhites and the poor. Archival and census data, government reports and housing analyses, and oral histories and interviews are used to examine the segregative effects of the Section 235 program in Kansas City, Missouri from 1969 through the early 1970s. Findings indicate that while the housing subsidy program allowed a vast majority of participating white families to purchase new housing in suburban areas, most participating African American families purchased existing homes located in racially transitional neighborhoods in the inner city. These findings corroborate recent research showing how the market-centered focus of federal housing policy has impaired the ability of African Americans to accumulate wealth through home ownership and reinforced racially segregative housing patterns.     

Siting Noxious Facilities: A Test of the Facility Siting Credo

Over the past decade it has become increasingly difficult to site noxious facilities, despite the fact that there is a growing need to do so. To address this problem, a set of guidelines for a fairer, wiser, and more workable siting process—the Facility Siting Credo—was developed during a National Facility Siting Workshop in 1990. This paper presents an empirical test of these guidelines. A questionnaire based on the Credo was completed by stakeholders in 29 waste facility siting cases, both successful and unsuccessful, across the United States and Canada. Using an independent determination of outcome (success), a preliminary ranking of the importance of various Credo principles was obtained. The data reveal that establishing trust between the developer and host community is an important factor in facilitating the siting process. The siting process is most likely to be successful when the community perceives the facility design to be appropriate and to satisfy its needs. Public participation also is seen to be an important process variable, particularly if it encourages a view that the facility best meets community needs. Moreover, a siting process where communities volunteer to host facilities is an approach that holds promise for meeting many of these key success criteria.     

Intimate Oppression

Book Reviews are in this Articles.
The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. By R. D. Laing.
The Leaves of Spring: a Study in the Dialectics of Madness. By Aaron Esterson.
The Death of the Family. By David Cooper.     

Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics

This article presents an analysis of the Canadian ethics review process by a member of a Research Ethics Board. The author suggests that the new formal system for regulating the ethical conduct of scholarly research is experiencing a form of ethics creep. This is characterized by a dual process whereby the regulatory system is expanding outward to incorporate a host of new activities and institutions, while at the same time intensifying the regulation of activities deemed to fall within its ambit. These tendencies are demonstrated through an analysis of: 1) the scope of research ethics protocols, 2) the concept of harm employed by these boards, 3) the use of informed consent provisions, and 4) the presumption that research participants will remain anonymous. To accentuate the nature of this ethics creep, comparisons are made between the ways in which identical knowledge generation activities are governed within journalism and the academy. The conclusion suggests that one effect of the increasingly formalized research ethics structure is to rupture the relationship between following the rules and acting ethically. Some of the reasons for this creep are highlighted along with the risks that it poses for scholarship.     

Titin--springing back to youth?

Mutations in the muscle protein titin have been linked to dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart chambers are enlarged and blood is ineffectively pumped, in humans and in animal models. This protein, which is a component of sarcomeres, provides essential scaffolding for other muscle proteins and acts as a spring to confer passive elasticity on the cardiomyocyte. Several titin isoforms exist, and they display varying size and degrees of elasticity. We review two interesting reports that show how variations in titin isoforms might be implicated in cardiac failure.     

Interparental Conflict and Preschoolers' Peer Relations: The Moderating Roles of Temperament and Gender

The relations between destructive interparental conflict (IPC) and three‐ to six‐year‐olds’ (N = 62) peer relations were examined as a function of child temperament and gender. Regression analyses indicated that effortful control moderated the relations of IPC with children's amount of peer interaction as well as with their problematic relations with peers. Specifically, high IPC was associated with low amount of interaction and high problematic relations for preschoolers low in effortful control, but it was related to high amount of interaction and low problems for those high in effortful control. Additionally, gender differences in the relations between IPC and the amount of peer interaction indicated that IPC was negatively related to the amount of interaction for girls but positively related to the amount for boys. The findings highlight the need for examining individual differences in the relations between IPC and the development of early peer relations.     

The Continued Importance of Quality Parent–Adolescent Relationships During Late Adolescence

The quality of adolescents' relationships with residential parents has been found to predict many different health and behavioral youth outcomes; strong associations have also been found between these outcomes and family processes, and between relationship quality and family processes. Data from Rounds 1–5 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 were used to examine hypotheses about the influence of the parent–adolescent relationship on subsequent adolescent mental well‐being and delinquency, as mediated by family processes. Using structural equation modeling, we found that the influence of a positive residential parent–adolescent relationship on better mental well‐being and fewer delinquency was entirely mediated by family routines, parental monitoring, and parental supportiveness, net of sociodemographic controls.