The Enduring Significance of Racism: Discrimination and Delinquency Among Black American Youth

Prominent explanations of the overrepresentation of Black Americans in criminal justice statistics focus on the effects of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage, racial isolation, and social disorganization. We suggest that perceived personal discrimination is an important but frequently neglected complement to these factors. We test this hypothesis with longitudinal data on involvement in general and violent juvenile delinquency in a sample of Black youth from a variety of communities in 2 states. We examine the direct effects of concentrated disadvantage and racial isolation and the direct and mediating effects of social organization, support for violence, and personal discrimination. Consistent with our hypothesis, perceived personal discrimination has notable direct effects on both general and violent delinquency and is an important mediator between neighborhood structural conditions and offending; moreover, its effects exceed those associated with neighborhood conditions.     

Student homicidal violence in schools: an international problem

School homicides have been become a worldwide phenomenon. In the decade following the Columbine shooting there have been at least forty similar events in other countries. This article addresses the international scope of this problem and some of the complex conceptual issues that make student homicidal violence difficult to define and study. Meaningful research on risk and protective factors that can inform evidence-based preventive models is summarized.     

Like mother, (not) like daughter: The social construction of menopause and aging

In recent American history, the definition of menopause has shifted from a natural, developmental transition to an increasingly more medicalized perspective that emphasizes biological deficits of the aging female body. Using qualitative data from two generations of women, this essay explores how and why this redefinition has occurred and what effect it has had on women's attitudes toward health and aging. The physical experiences of menopause were remarkably similar across mother-daughter pairs; however, daughters (who represented a slice of the baby boom cohort) differed from their mothers in how they talked about menopause, how they defined and treated menopause, and how willingly they accepted or fought the changes associated with menopause. Major social institutions, including the media and pharmaceutical industry, have played a significant role in reshaping the cultural lens through which women experience issues of health, body, and aging. This essay emphasizes the baby boomers' desire to maintain control over their bodies and considers how this cohort of women, as a result, may experience late-life issues of body and health.     

Changing Less-Preferred Duties to More-Preferred: A Potential Strategy for Improving Supervisor Work Enjoyment

We evaluated a strategy for making highly nonpreferred work duties more preferred as a potential means of enhancing work enjoyment among supervisors in a human service setting. Repeated preference ratings and rankings were completed by 4 supervisors during baseline to identify their most disliked work tasks. These tasks were then altered by soliciting each supervisor's opinion regarding why the respective task was so disliked and what could be done to make the task more preferable, removing disliked stimuli associated with the tasks, and adding liked stimuli during completion of the tasks. Following the task alterations, ratings of task likeability increased for all 4 supervisors. Preference rankings of target tasks also increased, including from rankings as among the least preferred tasks to among the most preferred tasks. All supervisors rated the task-alteration process as making their quality of work life better, and all chose to continue the intervention. These results occurred without any observed decrease in work quality. Results are discussed regarding the potential contribution of behavioral interventions with subjective concepts, such as enjoyment, that are viewed as important by the general populace. However, qualifications with relying on verbal reports also are noted.     

Feminism and Beyond: Interview with Carolyn Quadrio

In interview with Kasia Kozlowska, Melbourne‐born psychiatrist Carolyn Quadrio describes the impact of growing up in a Greek migrant family, the significant influences on her choice of profession, and the ways in which she gradually developed a feminist position simultaneously with embracing a systemic perspective on ‘depression’ and other diagnostic categories. Quadrio talks frankly about her challenges to the male‐dominated psychiatric establishment, her struggles to get her critique of it published, her excitement about the family therapy field, and her later disillusionment with it. Her current work is in the area of forensic psychiatry.     

Starting Behind: A Comparative Analysis of the Academic Standing of Students Entering Charter Schools*

Objectives. The purpose of this study is to assess if students enter charter schools at an academic disadvantage compared to students who make other types of school‐choice decisions, such as transferring between district schools, from a charter to a district school, or staying in the same school. We assess the demographic and academic characteristics of students prior to choosing to attend a charter school in comparison to students who made other types of school‐choice decisions and broaden the operational definition of a “disadvantaged” student when exploring differences between charter and district students to include academic achievement prior to entering a school. Methods. The analysis is conducted with student‐level panel data and a progressive series of ANCOVA models that were estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. This methodology allows for a comparison of the mean differences in academic achievement among students who made different types of school‐choice decisions while controlling for student‐level covariates. Results. Students who transferred from district to charter schools had the lowest levels of prior academic achievement compared to students who made other types of choice decisions. Conclusions. When Arizona charter authorizers face the deluge of renewal decisions that are approaching, the quality of education available to the next generation of charter school students is at stake. Renewal decisions will impact what choices are available going forward and, given the comparative academic disadvantage of charter school students prior to entering, those decisions should take into consideration the starting point for students entering charter schools.     

Embeddedness of Organizational Capabilities*

Managers must regularly make decisions on how to access and deploy their limited resources in order to build organizational capabilities for a sustainable competitive advantage. However, failure to recognize that organizational capabilities involve complex and intricately woven underlying processes may lead to an incomplete understanding of how capabilities affect competitive advantage. As a means of understanding this underlying complexity, we discuss how managerial decisions on resource acquisition and deployment influence capability embeddedness and argue that capability embeddedness has an incremental effect on firm performance beyond the effects from organizational resources and capabilities. To investigate these issues, we present a hierarchical composed error structure framework that relies on cross‐sectional data (and allows for generalizations to panel data). We demonstrate the framework in the context of retailing, where we show that the embeddedness of organizational capabilities influences retailer performance above and beyond the tangible and intangible resources and capabilities that a retailer possesses. Our results illustrate that understanding how resources and capabilities influence performance at different hierarchical levels within a firm can aid managers to make better decisions on how they can embed certain capabilities within the structural and social relationships within the firm. Moreover, understanding whether the underlying objectives of the capabilities that are being built and cultivated have convergent or divergent goals is critical, as it can influence the extent to which the embedded capabilities enhance firm performance.     

PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL SUPPORT AVAILABILITY AND COPING BEHAVIORS AMONG GAY MEN WITH HIV

Analyzing face-to-face, semistructured interviews, we discuss how perceptions of social support availability are formed among gay men coping with HIV. Experiences of receiving support increased perceived availability for specific types of support from specific individuals, but receiving support also gave these men a general sense that someone would be available for assistance. Other aspects of social relationships, such as closeness and role expectations, contributed to gay men's perceptions of support availability. The results suggest that when people with common problems cope together, collective knowledge of support availability may emerge from observations of others' support exchanges as well as from discussions of support experiences. Individuals or groups of individuals may actively create and modify their perceptions of support availability when they cope with anticipated problems. Thus, the study provided an opportunity to integrate concepts of coping and social support into the collective action and social constructionist frameworks.