Agents for Change or Conflict?

In today’s Latin America, governments implementing public policies for development and against poverty and inequality meet with social movements that engage in practices for social change, poverty reduction, and empowering. In this context, we analyze the interplay between both processes, describing its conflicts in three specific dimensions: the material, the democratic, and the environmental. Social movements are permanently contesting and challenging public policy when they autonomously appropriate public policy resources; yet, governments respond with criminalization and cooptation strategies. In a setting where social conflict takes place in response to existing poverty and inequality levels, movements challenge development and poverty reduction projects of an ‘assistentialist’ and extractivist nature, and propose an integral understanding of development and the emergence of new relationships among individuals, society, and the environment.     

Clarifying Criminological and Social Psychological Theory: A Second Look at the Relationship between Injustice and General Strain Theory

Research in social psychology and criminology reveals a great deal of overlap when explaining the relationship between injustice and criminal or deviant behavior. The organizational justice literature examines how the major forms of justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional) combine and interact to influence criminal or deviant behaviors in the workplace. While general strain theory (GST) recognizes that injustice is an aspect of strain that fosters criminal coping in multiple contexts, it does not detail the additive and interactive effects that these types of injustice may have on crime. Nevertheless, GST can provide a useful theoretical lens for understanding how injustice facilitates criminal behavior. This article provides an overview of major findings regarding the relationship between injustice and crime according to a GST framework, concluding with a discussion of new directions for future research.     

Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement

Though many studies have suggested that social and behavioral skills play a central role in gender stratification processes, we know little about the extent to which these skills affect gender gaps in academic achievement. Analyzing data from the Early Child Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, we demonstrate that social and behavioral skills have substantively important effects on academic outcomes from kindergarten through fifth grade. Gender differences in the acquisition of these skills, moreover, explain a considerable fraction of the gender gap in academic outcomes during early elementary school. Boys get roughly the same academic return to social and behavioral skills as their female peers, but girls begin school with more advanced social and behavioral skills and their skill advantage grows over time. While part of the effect may reflect an evaluation process that rewards students who better conform to school norms, our results imply that the acquisition of social and behavioral skills enhances learning as well. Our results call for a reconsideration of the family and school-level processes that produce gender gaps in social and behavioral skills and the advantages they confer for academic and later success.     

AD HOC MODEL BUILDING USING TIME-VARYING PARAMETER MODELS*

Decision support for managers and policy makers, such as required in planning and evaluation efforts, often requires ad hoc behavioral modeling to account for context-specific phenomena and to handle data limitations. This paper introduces a systematic approach useful for meeting these requirements in which time-varying parameter estimation plays an important role. A case study evaluating the impacts of public policy actions on residential natural gas conservation illustrates the approach.     

A COMPARISON OF SEQUENCING RULES FOR A TWO-STATE HYBRID FLOW SHOP

A common manufacturing environment in many industries (such as the glass, steel, paper, costume jewelry, and textile industries) is a hybrid flow shop. This system has continuous-process machinery in the fist state of manufacturing and repetitive-batch equipment in the second. Little research has investigated this type system. Scheduling managers of hybrid flow shops tend either to use existing job-shop rules or to devise their own rules. These approaches often are less than adequate for efficient scheduling. In this paper we extend the rule presented by Narasimhan and Panwalker [4] to include a general class of hybrid flow shops. This extenstion, called the generalized cumulative minimum-deviation (GCMD) rule, is compared under various operation conditions to three other sequencing rules: shortest processing time, longest processing time, and minimum deviation. The operating conditions are determined by the number of machines at both stages. The results of 7200 simulation runs demonstrate that the GCMD rule is better than the other rules in minimizing each of five chosen criteria. Thus, the GCMD rule can help managers to schedule hybrid flow shops efficiently to achieve various corporate objectives.     

The multinational transfer of competency-based foster parent assessment, selection, and training: a nine-country case study.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child mandates (Articles 19 and 20) that alternative care be available to protect children from maltreatment by parents and caregivers. Increasingly, countries around the world have recognized the benefits to child well-being of family-based care as an alternative to institutional care. The special if not extraordinary needs of children separated from parents because of abuse, neglect, and maltreatment and placed with foster families requires a commensurate effort to develop foster families who have special if not extraordinary skills. Methods that are effective and replicable across countries offer significant advantages, reducing investments in policies and practices that otherwise would have to be developed independently, country by country. This case study describes the factors that contributed to the transfer of knowledge in the assessment, selection, and training of foster parents and the impact to date.     

Der Hawthorne-Effekt – ein Effekt für viele Gelegenheiten?

It is shown that the concept of ?Hawthorne effect‘ was created many years after the Hawthorne studies in Western Electric Company. Presently, the ?Hawthorne effect‘ concept is increasingly used in social sciences and many other sciences. The concept is however used in different and occasionally digressive meanings. The question arises whether such a concept is useful at all. In addition, it is discussed why the rather imprecise reports of single Hawthorne field experiments have been spread as academic folklore, and why rather undefined concepts like the ?Hawthorne effect‘ are used so widely in psychology and social sciences.     

Young Adult Gambling Behaviors and their Relationship with the Persistence of ADHD

Young adulthood is a period renowned for engagement in impulsive and risky behaviors, including gambling. There are some indications that young adults exhibit higher gambling rates in comparison to older adults. Problem gambling has also been linked to ADHD. This longitudinal study examines the relationship between gambling and ADHD among an epidemiological sample of young adults (n = 235; males = 179, females = 56) aged 18-24. Results indicate that individuals who report childhood ADHD symptoms which persist into young adulthood experience greater gambling problem severity than participants with no ADHD or those with non-persistent ADHD.     

How Mood and Task Complexity Affect Children's Recognition of Others' Emotions

Previous studies examined how mood affects children's accuracy in matching emotional expressions and labels (label‐based tasks). This study was the first to assess how induced mood (positive, neutral, or negative) influenced five‐ to eight‐year‐olds' accuracy and reaction time using both context‐based tasks, which required inferring a character's emotion from a vignette, and label‐based tasks. Both tasks required choosing one of four facial expressions to respond. Children responded more accurately to label‐based questions relative to context‐based questions at the age of five to seven, but showed no differences at the age of eight, and when the emotional expression being identified was happiness, sadness, or surprise, but not disgust. For the context‐based questions, children were more accurate at inferring sad and disgusted emotions compared with happy and surprised emotions. Induced positive mood facilitated five‐year‐olds' processing (decreased reaction time) in both tasks compared with induced negative and neutral moods. Results demonstrate how task type and children's mood influence children's emotion processing at different ages.