Lifestyle Options and Economic Strategies: Subsistence Activities in the Mississippi Delta1

Abstract "Subsistence" and "informal economy" are contrasted in their utility as sociological concepts and their ability to explain a variety of activities in two rural Mississippi Delta communities. Literature on subsistence stresses that the desired outcome of participation is not an increase in income but the social rewards of participation itself. Two underlying dimensions of participation in these activities are documented through the literature and through a confirmatory factor analysis of empirical data: life-style choice and economic strategy. These were constructed into indexes and examined individually and in combination as dependent variables using regressors at the community, household, and individual levels. Community ties were weakly associated with participation in such activities. Whites and those with higher incomes participated more in lifestyle choice oriented activities. Participation in general was statistically related to households needing less weekly income and being of larger size. Potential connections with persistent rural poverty are discussed.     

Health care 2015: flight of the butterfly

Projecting out to the year 2015 sounds presumptuous. Who can predict that far ahead? Perhaps no one can. Social and organizational arrangements come slowly. It takes five years or so to implement simple concepts, sometimes decades for more radical changes. Once you have the ideas in tangible form, it can take another five years to get it working right. Early adopters bring others into the movement and, over 15-25 years, new directions dominate. It takes at least a generation of new practitioners to take on the new values and methods so what is likely to dominate in 2015 is beginning to be taken somewhat seriously as the successor movement to our current fad with externally imposed managed care. Put another way, entire generations of people will resist new ideas, making implementation unlikely until their control fades and a new generation takes the helm. The exciting challenge for the observer is to address the issue of where health is and should be going. Both are difficult challenges. Agreeing on what is important and what is not represents a competitive challenge. How do we perceive the world? Surely our value sets will color what we see. Who is not predisposed to select a future where they fit and their pet theories are likely to become reality. For these and other reasons, it is probably easier to agree on what we would like to see happen in the future than on what is happening. Unfortunately, unless we see the world as it is, we are less likely to be able to shift it in a direction we would like to see.     

An innovative approach to selecting an executive director

As a guide for how to select a new executive director, a family agency adopted the search committee process from higher education. The approach included clarifying agency goals and the director's qualifications, a board-staff screening, and interviews held jointly with public representatives before final board selection.     

Does Sport Celebrity Advocacy Work? Testing the Potential for Endorsements to Backfire

Fandom and psychological reactance theory, a framework for understanding reactions to messages perceived to limit an individual’s freedom to choose freely, are used to examine the influence of sports celebrities. An experiment was conducted (n = 283) to examine the impact of source similarity and controlling language use on reactance levels and message evaluations. Findings suggest that sources perceived to be similar generated less reactance than dissimilar sources. Similar source messages were also linked to greater potential for information-seeking behavior. High- versus low-controlling language use was examined in conjunction with similarity; low-controlling language was found to generate the least reactance regardless of source similarity. Implications for the use of celebrity advocacy in marketing and public relations are discussed.     

Dyadic Analyses of Preschool‐aged Children's Friendships: Convergence and Differences between Friendship Classifications from Peer Sociometric Data and Teacher's Reports

Peer sociometrics and teachers' friendship reports were compared in 2179 preschool dyads. One hundred twenty of 306 reciprocated friend dyads from peer sociometric data were also identified as good friends by their classroom teachers, and 301 of 600 of non‐reciprocated dyads in peer data were named as friends by one or both classroom teachers (overall kappa = .16). Friendship classifications from both peer and teacher data had significant relations with variables relevant to peer interactions, social skills, peer acceptance, and teacher‐rated scales (six of seven tests significant for peer data; five of eight significant for teacher data). Multilevel analyses indicated that friendship status effects were not qualified by classroom‐level differences. Findings suggest that sociometric tasks can identify preschoolers' peer friendships and that the range of correlates may be broader in peer‐choice data than in teachers' friendship evaluations.     

Conceptualizing anxiety among social work students: implications for social work education

Student anxiety is frequently discussed within social work education. Due to its potentially devastating impacts, social work educators need to have a full understanding of anxiety in this context, in order to determine the best way to support students. Research on student anxiety from a broad body of literature provides implications for social work classrooms and field education. Key underlying concepts from previous social work and related research on student anxiety inform a conceptual model to help educators develop a more complex understanding of student anxiety. Implications for further research and important next steps in the development of support strategies for social work students are identified.     

Bittersweet and Paradoxical

The American Red Cross is the most active nonprofit organization involved in disaster planning and response in the United States. The organization deployed nearly 50,000 volunteers to provide essential support to victims of some 125,000 domestic disasters, including home fires, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, in a recent two‐year period. This study asks how American Red Cross disaster response volunteer experiences function to cultivate satisfaction and, at the other end of the spectrum, the kind of dissatisfaction that leads people to quit; it pays particular attention to ways in which volunteer management shapes dissatisfaction and fatigue because of implications for volunteer retention. Paradoxically, the Red Cross facilitates the highly satisfying act of helping victims, but volunteers feel dissatisfied when management practices get in the way of helping. The study suggests voluntary organizations that rely on skilled, long‐term volunteers to deliver services should evaluate and strengthen their communication strategies, recognition practices, and support systems for volunteers in distress.     

SOS—Satisfied or Stuck,Why Older Rural Residents Stay Put: Aging in Place or Stuck in Place in Rural Utah*

As rural communities undergo substantial demographic and economic changes, understanding the migration intentions and their antecedents of rural elderly persons becomes increasingly important. Using data drawn from a survey of adults from 24 rural Utah communities conducted in 2008, we examine whether rural residents 60 years of age or older plan to remain in their present communities (N= 621). We use structural equation models (SEM) to estimate the relationships between a variety of individual and community-level background measures, including perceptions of local service quality, leaving one's community for health care, Internet use, attachment to and satisfaction with community, and plans to age in place. Results suggest that even as the rural context of economic decline, population loss, and distance to medical services may reduce the viability of staying in a community, a desire to remain in the community is primarily a function of perceptions of the quality of local services and community satisfaction. This research highlights the need to better understand the interplay between the availability of medical services and perceptions of distance as well as to understand the complex relationship between individual and community level characteristics for migration intentions.