Differential predictors of academic achievement: individual and familial factor interactions with community poverty

We present an analysis of the contexts within which adolescents graduate from high school and enroll in college. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health show that adolescents’ school engagement, maternal academic monitoring, and community poverty significantly interact to explain differences in high school graduation and college enrollment rates (n?=?7100). To examine this association, we performed weighted logistic regression analyses, controlling for gender, race, block level unemployment, and block level median income. Findings suggest that protective factors can help youth overcome the challenges associated with community poverty and achieve academically in low and medium levels of poverty, but that youth in high-poverty contexts may need more resources to reach higher levels of academic attainment.     

Demography of a ground nesting bird in an urban system: are populations self-sustaining?

Urbanization poses threats to earth’s biota, and retention of remnant native habitat in protected areas within expanding urban boundaries may help alleviate threats to wildlife. However, it is unclear for nearly all nonsynanthropic (i.e., not benefiting from an association with humans) species whether vital rates in urban habitats can sustain populations or if populations persist only through immigration from outside the urban boundary. We conducted a three-year study of spotted towhees (Aves: Pipilo maculatus) breeding in four undeveloped parks in Portland, OR, USA, to measure park-specific seasonal reproductive output (F) and annual adult survival (S_A). We developed a stochastic model that combined F and S_A with an estimate of first-year survival to measure population growth rate (λ) in all parks assumed to be closed to immigration. F differed among parks but S_A did not. Relatively high F was possible because many pairs raised >1 brood/season. When combined with empirical estimates of survival through the 30-day period of post-fledging parental care (S_D = 0.645), only 2 of 4 parks were self-sustaining (i.e., λ > 1.0). However, S_D reflected substantial loss of fledglings to domestic cats (Felis catus). Assuming no loss to cats and either partial compensatory or additive mortality of fledglings substantially improved prospects of population persistence for declining (sink) populations. Moreover, allowing low levels of immigration to sinks reversed population declines in most parks even when vital rates were insufficient to maintain populations. Our results suggest that nonsynanthropic bird species can persist in urban landscapes, but also that offspring mortality in the post-fledging period may be a critical determinant of population viability.     

Sense of School Membership and Associated Academic and Psychological Outcomes in Post-Institutionalized Adopted High School Students

Research highlights lasting cognitive and academic challenges in youth internationally adopted from institutional care. However, there is a lack of research examining internationally adopted students' sense of membership at school and associated academic and psychological outcomes. The current study measured sense of school membership and academic and psychological outcomes in post-institutionalized internationally adopted high school students (n = 29) compared to adolescents internationally adopted from foster care (n = 28) and non-adopted adolescents (n = 32). Post-institutionalized males had a lower sense of school membership than males adopted from foster care or non-adopted males. Group differences in school membership were mediated by academic achievement and psychological well-being.     

Standing up to complexity: researching moral panics in social work

Moral panics are central to social work policy and practice. Voluntary agencies and statutory bodies (including governments) create and sustain moral panics in order to raise awareness of, and win support for, their own understandings of social issues and problems. This is not a neutral enterprise; on the contrary, moral panics often have consequences that are negative, whether intended or unintended. Far from leading to greater social justice and a more equal society, they may reinforce stereotypes and lead to fearful, risk-averse practice. This paper discusses one such moral panic in 2013 that centred on the story of ‘Maria’, a Bulgarian Roma child living in Greece. The paper explores the meaning and use of the concept of moral panic before unpacking this case-study example in more detail. We argue that the moral panic over ‘Maria’ has much to tell us about ideas of welfare and protection, institutional racism and children and childhood, as well as the connections between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’. We conclude that social work as a profession must stand up to complexity, and in doing so, be aware of its own role in relation to moral panics.     

Within inequality characteristics and adaptation of immigrants in the United States

Until recently, in works of literature, the assimilation of immigrants had been viewed as an individualistic rather than a community-based process. However, Hatton and Leigh (2011) showed that immigrants integrate to their host country as communities, not as individuals; hence, group characteristics play as much of a role as individual characteristics in terms of adaptation. This paper introduces another dimension to the immigrant adaptation proxies that reflect community-based characteristics. The fundamental assertion of this paper is that inequality can be used as a proxy of adaptation within immigrant groups. Immigrant groups that exhibit income and education distributions similar to those of the natives can be regarded as well-adapted groups, while those who exhibit vastly different distributions should be considered to be groups with limited adaptation. Using the American Community Survey (ACS) 2010 cohort, this paper presents the initial findings of the within-group inequality of immigrants. Then, a cross-sectional regression analysis is employed to analyze the determinants of inequality across these immigrant groups. The results suggest that immigrant community-based characteristics, such as average income, education, and number of years that the immigrants have spent in the US, can indeed explain most of the variation in inequality.     

Fundamental accrued capital gains and the measurement of top incomes: an application to Chile

Most previous studies of income inequality have either ignored capital gains or have used taxable realized capital gains to estimate top incomes. Neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory. We apply for the first time a new methodology that allows us to account for fundamental accrued capital gains as part of the top incomes in a theoretically consistent manner. We estimate the shares of the super-rich in Chile showing that accrued capital gains have a large impact on these estimates. Also, the top income shares estimated using fundamental capital gains appear to exhibit a more stable and presumably more plausible time profile than estimates based on capital gains derived from asset market variations.     

Grow Old With Me! Future Directions of Race,Age, and Place Scholarship

This article reviews current theories of age and place to demonstrate a more inclusive perspective in sociology that considers race, age, and place. Scholars who study age have advanced our knowledge about what place means to old people or how environment operates in an oppressive way to aged bodies. Likewise, race scholars have advanced our knowledge about the ways oppression and White supremacy are rooted in place. Yet the two bodies of literature do not inform one another, and there are potentially dangerous gaps in our knowledge that contribute to oppression. The result is age scholarship about environment that lacks a critical race perspective and race scholarship on place that ignores the oppressive conditions of age. By reviewing these pieces, I argue that scholars must inform themselves of the ways in which we overlook important analyses and may potentially contribute to our own ageism.     

Labor Utilization Effects of Labor Scheduling Flexibility Alternatives in a Tour Scheduling Environment

This study used a factorial experimental design and a new modeling methodology to investigate the impact of a number of labor scheduling flexibility alternatives and labor requirements characteristics on labor utilization within a tour scheduling environment. Break-placement flexibility and shift-length flexibility were found to be extremely effective in improving labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions used. Flexibility with respect to the number of days included in a tour schedule resulted in substantial improvement in labor utilization for all labor requirements distributions exhibiting daily and/or weekly variation. Surprisingly, virtually no improvement in labor utilization was achieved for any labor requirement distribution by the removal of requirements for consecutive days off. In addition, almost no improvement was found by allowing the shift start time to vary across the working days included in tours. High labor requirement amplitude was found to have a strong adverse effect on labor utilization while longer operational days were associated with improved labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions. We discuss the implications of these results for service operations management and provide suggestions for future research.     

Determining Differences in Expert Judgment: Implications for Knowledge Acquisition and Validation*

In knowledge acquisition, it is often desirable to aggregate the judgments of multiple experts into a single system. In some cases this takes the form of averaging the judgments of those experts. In these situations it is desirable to determine if the experts have different views of the world before their individual judgments are aggregated. In validation, multiple experts often are employed to compare the performance of expert systems and other human actors. Often those judgments are then averaged to establish performance quality of the expert system. An important part of the comparison process should be determining if the experts have a similar view of the world. If the experts do not have similar views, their evaluations of performance may differ, resulting in a meaningless average performance measure. Alternatively, if all the validating experts do have similar views of the world then the validation process may result in paradigm myopia.