Building Community from "Scratch": Forces at Work among Urban Vietnamese Refugees in Milwaukee

Drawing from extensive participant observation and qualitative interviewing, this paper describes and analyzes the Vietnamese "community" in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The author concludes that community, both as an element that is sensed by its members and a process identified by actual interaction, is virtually nonexistent. Ten specific forces that inhibit community formation are identified under the overlapping categories of demographics, organizational issues, cultural factors, and class/power interests. The underlying tendencies toward family isolationism and radical individualism are implicated as driving social forces that undermine community building. Lessons learned from this case study about the process of community formation include the insufficiency of a common "enemy" or ethnic identity for sustainable community, social psychological issues, and environmental influences, as well as survival needs.     

Crisis managers losing control of the message: A pilot study of the Virginia Tech shooting

This pilot study examined the role citizen generated content plays in the coverage of crisis situations and discusses implications for public relations practitioners who must respond to this type of coverage. A content analysis of newspapers and the websites of cable and broadcast news networks revealed reporters were more likely to use citizen generated content during the first stage of the crisis and were more likely to use non-official technology sources, or citizen generated content, than official technology sources such as web-based news releases and official statements.     

Attachment to Community and Civic and Political Engagement: A Case Study of Students

Youth's low level of civic and political engagement may detrimentally affect the health of communities and the democratic system. This paper examines the role of community attachment in explaining youth's levels of civic and engagement. This examination requires an evaluation of existing measures of community attachment and their relevance for understanding youth's experiences. The paper uses a student sample, highlighting a group of youth who have a degree of variation in their experiences of community attachment. We find that subjective measures of community attachment are related to volunteering and voting, but the objective measure of community attachment, that is, years of residence, affects voting and not volunteering. Different mechanisms explain civic engagement versus political engagement. As such, different strategies are required to combat low levels of civic versus political engagement. Le manque d'engagement civique et politique de la jeunesse peut avoir un effet néfaste sur la santé des communautés et sur le système démocratique. Cet article examine le rôle de l'appartenance communautaire pour expliquer le niveau de participation civique et politique des jeunes. Cette recherche nécessite une évaluation des mesures existantes de l'appartenance à une communauté et de leur pertinence pour la compréhension des expériences des jeunes. Cet article se base sur un groupe d'étudiants pour illustrer une population de jeunes avec un niveau d'attachement communautaire variable. Nous avons remarqué que les mesures subjectives de l'attachement à la communauté sont liées au bénévolat et au vote, alors que les mesures objectives de l'attachement, comme la durée de résidence, affecte le vote et non le bénévolat. De différents processus peuvent expliquer l'engagement civique par rapport à l'engagement politique. Ainsi, des stratégies différentes sont nécessaires pour lutter contre la faiblesse des niveaux de participation civique et politique.     

Conditional simulation from highly structured Gaussian systems, with application to blocking-MCMC for the Bayesian analysis of very large linear models

This paper examines strategies for simulating exactly from large Gaussian linear models conditional on some Gaussian observations. Local computation strategies based on the conditional independence structure of the model are developed in order to reduce costs associated with storage and computation. Application of these algorithms to simulation from nested hierarchical linear models is considered, and the construction of efficient MCMC schemes for Bayesian inference in high-dimensional linear models is outlined.     

Practice and Research in Career Counseling and Development—2006

The author presents professional literature published in 2006 related to career counseling and development. The literature is organized into 3 sections: (a) professional issues related to career development throughout the life span, culture, ethnicity, gender, and other specific topics; (b) research related to theoretical and conceptual advances; and (c) career interventions and practice, including issues related to career assessment and technology. Cohesive themes throughout this review are the concepts of social context embedded in career development, multicultural perspectives, and global and international perspectives of career development. Research is encouraged regarding career interventions that are based on career theories specific to certain cultures and in general for global needs.     

Acomparison between Northern and Southern blacks residing in the North

Differences between Southern and non-Southern blacks living in the North and West are considered for a wide variety of attributes such as employment, occupation, income, marital stability, and offspring's performance in school. Migrant blacks have generally more favorable rates than their Northern- and Western-born compatriots after standard domographic controls are applied to an unusually detailed set of cross-tabulations based on the One-Percent Sample Tapes for 1960. Perhaps the sharpest gap exists with respect to marital conditions; Southern blacks of both sexes are more likely to marry and, among those ever married, live more frequently with their spouses. Some of the results reported by earlier investigators require considerable modification; For example, the fact that Northern black men are less often at work than migrants has led to speculations about regional differences in work orientation among blacks, but a detailed analysis of labor force activity indicates this pattern does not hold for women. Likewise, the migrant income advantage is found to vary by education such that it is confined to those with low educational attainment. The use of sample tapes permits a novel analysis of differences between Northern-born blacks classified by whether they are second or at least third generation residents of the North (children of Southern- or Northern-born parents, respectively). For the attribute measured, school performance, the gap is essentially nil. Finally, an alternative is suggested to the existing causal interpretations of North-South gaps among black residents of the North. Reconsidered in particular are the higher labor force rates of migrant men and their more frequent employment in blue collar jobs;     

Efficiency of reduced logistic regression models

One feature of the usual polychotomous logistic regression model for categorical outcomes is that a covariate must be included in all the regression equations. If a covariate is not important in all of them, the procedure will estimate unnecessary parameters. More flexible approaches allow different subsets of covariates in different regressions. One alternative uses individualized regressions which express the polychotomous model as a series of dichotomous models. Another uses a model in which a reduced set of parameters is simultaneously estimated for all the regressions. Large-sample efficiencies of these procedures were compared in a variety of circumstances in which there was a common baseline category for the outcome and the covariates were normally distributed. For a correctly specified model, the reduced estimates were over 100% efficient for nonzero slope parameters and up to 500% efficient when the baseline frequency and the effect of interest were small. The individualized estimates could have efficiencies less than 50% when the effect of interest was large, but were also up to 130% efficient when the baseline frequency was large and the effect of interest was small. Efficiency was usually enhanced by correlation among the covariates. For an underspecified reduced model, asymptotic bias in the reduced estimates was approximately proportional to the magnitude of the omitted parameter and to the reciprocal of the baseline frequency.     

Past Activeness,Solidarity, and Local Development Efforts1

Abstract Actions by local groups and leaders constitute an essential but poorly understood element of many rural development strategies. Previous studies suggest that local development efforts can influence community change, but questions remain about why localities differ in mobilization to achieve development goals. Drawing upon community field theory and human ecology, this study uses data for rural school districts in Pennsylvania to examine the argument that activeness in the past and development of solidarity can contribute to a higher probability of local mobilization than would be predicted by ecological characteristics alone. Hierarchical regressions support this argument for some local actions, while canonical correlations show a generalized pattern strongly associated with past activeness and solidarity.