Sex similarities and differences in stance in informal American conversation1

This study compares men's and women's use of stance: the expression of attitude, emotion, certainty, doubt and commitment. A corpus of nearly 900,000 words of informal conversation in social and work contexts was examined with a computer program that measured stance. The main categories, subcategories and the 180 most frequent stance expressions were analyzed with multiple ANOVAs. The main stance categories of affect, evidentials, and quantifiers showed no significant differences between men and women. In terms of subcategories, general affect, boulomaic verbs, general evidentials, mental verbs, hedges and emphatics had no significant differences between men and women; only expletives had a significant difference between men and women. Of the individual stance expressions, only 35 showed a significant difference between men and women. Examples from actual conversations are given to compare men's and women's speech. Cooperative work between qualitative and quantitative researchers is recommended.     

THE DEBATE ABOUT HOMELESSNESS

Three definitions of homelessness which have been influential in Australia may be categorised as the literal, the subjectivist and the cultural. The literal definition equates homelessness with ‘rooflessness’. The subjectivist definition attempts to establish homelessness ‘ by asking people about the adequacy of their accommodation The cultural definition argues that homelessness is an objective category which is not dependent on people's perceptions. From examining the usefulness of the three definitions in relation to a large body of data collected at an agency providing services for homeless people, we may contend that homelessness is best treated as a concept like poverty, which should be measured objectively and not depend on people's perceptions.     

As the Twig Is Bent: Children Reared in Feminist Households

This is a study of children in families in which both the responsibility for income production and the household division of labor is actually post-gendered. Our data come from a larger study of privileged white parents who intentionally organize their households fairly, sharing housework, child care, and emotion work. These parents deconstruct gender not only by encouraging their daughters and sons to develop free from stereotypes but also by modeling such behavior in their own social roles. The data reported here are based on interviews with the children themselves and home observations. We have drawn two main conclusions. First, children do seem to adopt, uniformly, their parent's non-sexist attitudes but then they must negotiate serious inconsistencies between their beliefs and their lived experiences with peers. They resolve this with a dichotomy: men and women are similar and equal, but boys and girls are different and unequal Second, personal identities seem to be forged more from lived experiences than from ideology.     

Effect of Interviewer Experience on Interview Pace and Interviewer Attitudes

Traditional statistical analyses of interviewer effects on surveydata do not examine whether these effects change over a fieldperiod. However, the nature of the survey interview is dynamic.Interviewers’ behaviors and perceptions may evolve asthey gain experience, thus potentially affecting data quality.This paper looks at how interview length and interviewer evaluationsof respondents change over interviewers’ workloads. Multilevelmodels with random interviewer effects are used to account forthe clustering of cases within interviewers and individual interviewercharacteristics in the 1984, 1988, and 2000 National ElectionStudies. The 1984 and 1988 NES released sample in four replicates,minimizing the confound between order in an interviewers’workload and sample composition. We find that over the courseof the studies, both measures change significantly. Interviewerprior survey experience also was significantly negatively relatedto the length of the interview. These findings have implicationsfor interviewer training prior to and during studies, as wellas suggesting future research to reveal why these behaviorsand perceptions change.     

A preliminary evaluation of the effects of a science education curriculum on changes in knowledge of drugs in youth

Drug and alcohol use among youth remains at pervasively high levels, but students are receiving less school-based prevention. Infusing health information into core curricula may be a valuable prevention approach. Therefore, behavior change theory was used to develop a science education curriculum on drugs for fourth- and fifth-grade students, which was then evaluated using a pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design. Exposure to the curriculum was associated with a change in knowledge; other characteristics like grade level also played a role. More positive attitudes toward science at pretest predicted greater knowledge change, and students who knew less at the start showed a greater change in knowledge. Results of this evaluation may support the efficacy of the curriculum and the utility of combining behavior change theory with educational approaches.     

Effect of consumption choices on fluxes of carbon,nitrogen and phosphorus through households

Households are an important scale of analysis for human ecosystems because they are a major source of pollutants and could thus be a new focus for pollution management, particularly for education-based source reduction strategies. The household is also a meaningful unit for analysis of human ecosystems, being common to all human cultures. This study develops a Household Flux Calculator (HFC) to compute C, N, and P fluxes for scenarios intended to represent three levels of household consumption: low, typical, and high. All three scenarios were developed for suburban households with two adults and two children in the Minneapolis-St. Paul (Twin Cities) metropolitan area, Minnesota. Calculated ratios of fluxes between high and low consumption households were 3.5:1 for C, 2.7:1 for N and 1.4:1 for P. Results suggest a high level of discretionary consumption that could be reduced without a substantial reduction in standard of living. Thus, modest changes in behavior in high consumption households would greatly reduce fluxes of C, N, and P without major changes in lifestyle.

Officer friendly and the tough cop:gays and lesbians navigate homophobia and policing

Despite attempts to expand social diversity, policing is still dominated by a white, masculine, heterosexual ethos. As a consequence, employment of lesbians and gay men as police officers may be especially threatening to members of this occupation. Within the context of potential hostility and homophobia, nontraditional officers must negotiate their contradictory presence on the police force. This paper investigates that negotiation. Using the Bem Sex Role Inventory and open-ended survey data from a sample of "out" and "closeted" gay and lesbian police officers, we ask how gays and lesbians manage their images as "good cops" in the face of gender norm violations associated with their sexual orientation. Our findings indicate that masculinity and femininity do not hold together in a cohesive, dichotomous manner for these officers. Instead, other characteristics that enhance policing are emphasized to support their occupational competence. These officers see themselves as "good cops." The gendered/sexualized character of their self-perceptions appears to matter less than the context of the job, more than for a comparison sample of heterosexual police officers. We conclude that although gay and lesbian officers see their sexuality as an occupational asset, they are also likely to work harder to prove themselves as crime fighters.