Hip Hop,empowerment, and clinical practice for homeless adults with severe mental illness

This article focuses on the use of a music and empowerment-based group as a vehicle for engagement, and therapeutic, and social-emotional benefits with homeless adults coping with severe mental illness in a shelter setting. The authors present a conceptual framework that includes case illustrations to capture the group process. The group was guided by the MUZUZE Hip Hop and empowerment framework, which is meant to facilitate well-being as evidenced by indicators of social-emotional learning and empowerment-based positive youth development. The authors found that the use of Hip Hop helped foster well-being via pathways of individual and community empowerment. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Validation of the Individual and Community Empowerment Inventory: A Measure of Rap Music Engagement among First-Year College Students

Amid robust debates about the impact of music on the lives of young people, empirically validated measures of music engagement are absent. The present study builds on the construction of the Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) inventory, a measure to capture different types of empowerment and different types of risk potential from rap music engagement. The scientific intent of the scale development and the present validation study was to test the simultaneous presence of empowerment and risk associated with music engagement and its application to the individual and community. A unique sample existed for the present study in comparison to the original, with the bulk of respondents being first-year college students and White. Results of the present study suggest that the ICE inventory is an effective and comparative measure of risk and empowerment. Major findings about the instrument’s utility were replicated, but results were divergent from original research on certain demographic trends with respect to gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Empowering and risky music engagement scale means were higher among male and younger respondents. White respondents had significantly lower mean scores than all other groups on empowerment scales, and African Americans had lower scores on the individual risk scale than other groups. Each result suggests the need for additional research. The validation of the ICE inventory offers promise for helping to collect, organize, and interpret new data on associations between music engagement and desirable health and well-being outcomes.     

Political battlefield: aggressive metaphors,gender, and power in news coverage of Canadian party leadership contests

Our study analyzed aggressive figures of speech used by the Globe and Mail to describe the personas, performances, and prospects of women and men leadership candidates for the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, 1993, and 2004. We codified four distinct forms of power communicated by the aggressive metaphors—power over, power to, power with, and power as—to investigate what these battleground metaphors communicate about gender and political power. Our content analysis and discourse analysis of the phrases applied to each of the candidates revealed gendered assumptions about political leadership. All three women candidates in our study—Flora MacDonald (1976), Kim Campbell (1993), and Belinda Stronach (2004)—were discussed as formidable foes, capable of using considerable force in their efforts to win. Indeed, Campbell became Canada’s first and only woman prime minister. Yet, much of the aggressive mediation confirms the gendered mediation thesis that aggressive metaphors exclude women and reconstitute politics as masculine. Many of the combative phrases cast doubt on a woman candidate’s ability to successfully compete on the political battlefield.     

Economic growth and social capital: A critical reflection

Theory and Society -     

Internet architecture,freedom of expression and social responsibility: critical realism and proposals for a better future

The article opens by explaining the architecture of the Internet. Given its present raison d'être, a free highway allowing maximum freedom, one may argue that the bounds of free expression are broader in scope on the Net compared with the bounds of legitimate speech allowed on other forms of communication. Contesting this assertion, it is argued that legally speaking, there is no difference between electronic communication and other forms of communication. I probe some problematic forms of expression: terrorism, criminal activity, and cyberbullying, arguing that freedom of expression is important but so is social responsibility. The article concludes by offering a new paradigm Internet for the future called CleaNet©. CleaNet© will be sensitive to prevailing cultural norms of each and every society and will be clean of content that the society deems to be dangerous and antisocial. No cyberbullying, child pornography, hateful bigotry, criminal activity, and terrorist material will be available on the new Net. Netusers, with the cooperation of ISPs and web-hosting companies, will together decide which content will be considered illegitimate and unworthy to be excluded from CleaNet©.     

PARLIAMENT SHAPES AND SIZES

This paper proposes a model of Parliamentary institutions in which a society makes three decisions behind the veil of ignorance: whether a Parliament should comprise one or two chambers, what the relative bargaining power of each chamber should be if the Parliament is bicameral, and how many legislators should sit in each chamber. We document empirical regularities across countries that are consistent with the predictions of our model. (JEL D71, D72)     

Economics: A Teaching Aid to History

Numerous studies have highlighted a clear civic achievement gap between students from different ethnic and economic backgrounds in countries such as Singapore and the United States. Concurrently, researchers from both countries have noted that access to government and civics classes and curricula differs considerably across and within schools and school districts. Drawing on research studies conducted in both countries, this article compares the provision of citizenship education in two very different education systems: the United States and Singapore. The article also analyzes some of the explicit and implicit arguments that have been used in support of these policies and examines the potential implications of these policies for the education of young citizens. In both countries, studies strongly indicate that the formal and de facto differentiated access to citizenship education as a result of sorting students into different education tracks implicates students’ ability to be full and equal citizens.     

Reported Happiness,Fast and Slow

The paper uses paradata on response time, cognitive effort and questionnaire order from a large Dutch internet panel survey to study the association between reporting process and reported happiness. We find that slower responses and higher self-stated cognitive effort are associated with lower reported happiness, potentially, because they proxy for momentary mood. Moreover, in multivariate happiness equations, these factors moderate the estimated effect of income on happiness, while no interaction effects are found for other socio-economic determinants of happiness. Our findings have implications for the interpretation of relative marginal effects in economic happiness equations.