Student budgets and widening participation: Comparative experiences of finance in low and higher income undergraduates at a northern red brick university

Drawing on a thematic analysis of longitudinal qualitative data (n_total = 118), this article takes a “whole student lifecycle” approach to examine how lower and higher income students at an English northern red brick university variously attempted to manage their individual budgets. It explores how students reconcile their income—in the form of loans, grants, and bursaries—with the cost of living. Four arenas of interest are described: planning, budgeting, and managing “the student loan”; disruptions to financial planning; the role of familial support; and strategies of augmenting the budget. In detailing the micro‐level constraints on the individual budgets of lower and higher income undergraduates, the article highlights the importance of non‐repayable grants and bursaries in helping to sustain meaningful participation in higher tariff, more selective, higher education institutions. It also supports an emerging body of literature that suggests that the continuing amendments to the system of funding higher education in England are unlikely to address inequality of access, participation, and outcome.     

Estimation of seroprevalence, rape, and homelessness in the United States using a social network approach

The authors have developed and tested scale-up methods, based on a simple social network theory, to estimate the size of hard-to-count subpopulations. The authors asked a nationally representative sample of respondents how many people they knew in a list of 32 subpopulations, including 29 subpopulations of known size and 3 of unknown size. Using these responses, the authors produced an effectively unbiased maximum likelihood estimate of the number of people each respondent knows. These estimates were then used to back-estimate the size of the three populations of unknown size. Maximum likelihood values and 95% confidence intervals are found for seroprevalence, 800,000 +/- 43,000; for homeless, 526,000 +/- 35,000; and for women raped in the last 12 months, 194,000 +/- 21,000. The estimate for seroprevalence agrees strikingly with medical estimates, the homeless estimate is well within the published estimates, and the authors' estimate lies in the middle of the published range for rape victims.     

“We're gonna get you through it”: The role of bonding social capital in the development of bridging social capital

Many programs that place low-income students of color in high-achieving college preparatory high schools seek to nurture bridging social capital, connections across class lines that provide leverage in the process of “getting ahead.” Bonding social capital, which focuses more on emotional support and “getting by,” is frequently characterized as less useful for social mobility. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with alumni from one such program, we challenge the notion of bridging and bonding social capital as discrete, countervailing forms of social capital, and demonstrate how the two may complement each other. Specifically, we find that bonding social capital served as a critical resource that students drew upon as they navigated their elite high schools in the face of racism and classism. In doing so, this bonding social capital ultimately facilitated the development of bridging social capital by encouraging student persistence at these institutions. Our findings support critiques of traditional accounts of social capital that devalue the capital possessed by marginalized communities and fuel deficit ideologies. Furthermore, they highlight the personal costs that youth may face in the pursuit of bridging capital, complicating the narrative of social mobility as an unmitigated good.     

Family Risk and Resilience in the Context of War and Terrorism

War and terrorism are exerting increasing force on world affairs, with growing implications for families and the scholars who study them. In this review, I consider the implications of mass violence for families, with particular emphasis on families with members serving in the U.S. military and families around the world who live where mass violence occurs. Mass violence poses significant threats to mental health and family functioning, but individuals and families also display striking levels of resilience.     

Rising food security concerns among New Zealand adolescents and association with health and wellbeing

The current paper explores recent changes in food insecurity among adolescents and determine if food security concerns are associated with poorer wellbeing. Data were collected as part of two nationally representative surveys of the health and wellbeing of high-school students in New Zealand in 2007 and 2012. In 2012, 11% of young people reported food security concerns often or always, with 33% reporting food security concerns occasionally/sometimes. The prevalence of food security concerns at both frequencies increased significantly from 2007 (8% and 28%, respectively). Young people with food security concerns were more likely to report poor indicators of health and wellbeing, including truancy, poor general health, mental health concerns and obesity. Our findings highlight the growing concerns of food insecurity reported by adolescents in New Zealand. Interventions that address food security for families may provide a tangible means of promoting the healthy development of children and young people.     

Leadership across hierarchical levels: Multiple levels of management and multiple levels of analysis

We examined differences in leadership influence processes, perceptions, and multiple levels-of-analysis effects between close and distant charismatic and contingent reward leadership across three hierarchical levels in 13 Korean companies. Multi-source data revealed that followers' commitment to the leader mediated relationships between leadership and followers' attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcomes in close situations, but not in distant relationships. Leadership at higher levels of management was positively related to leadership at the next lower level, which in turn related to follower outcomes at the lowest echelon. Multivariate within and between analysis indicated multiple-level effects differing by leader–follower distance and for the variables of interest.