THE LONDON BOMBINGS AND RACIAL PREJUDICE: EVIDENCE FROM THE HOUSING AND LABOR MARKET

This paper investigates the impact of the London bombings on attitudes toward ethnic minorities, examining outcomes in housing and labor markets across London boroughs. We use a difference‐in‐differences approach, specifying “treated” boroughs as those with the highest concentration of Asian residents. Our results indicate that house prices in treated boroughs fell by approximately 2% in the 2 years after the bombings relative to other boroughs, with sales declining by almost 6%. Furthermore, we present evidence of a rise in the unemployment rate in treated compared to control boroughs, as well as a rise in racial segregation. (JEL J15, J71, R21)     

Enacting Blind Spaces and Spatialities: A Sociological Study of Blindness Related to Space,Environment and Interaction

Lack of eyesight generates blind spaces. Blind spaces often enacted together with sighted are different from visual spaces in important ways. Sharing physical and social space with sighted may imply special challenges for blind persons with regard to interaction order and social identities. The article is based on ethnographic data with the purpose to describe enactment and management of physical and social spaces for blind born persons in different settings. It focuses on the physical and social plasticity of blind spaces and the mediated, practiced and often toolic relationship between body, self and physical and social environments.     

A Contextual Approach to the Development of Self-regulatory Competencies: The Role of Maternal Unresponsivity and Toddlers' Negative Affect in Stressful Situations

A prospective study examined the effects of maternal unresponsivity and of toddlers’ own negative affect on the child's subsequent ability to use effective attentional control strategies in preschool. Maternal and child behaviors were measured in situations that varied in the level of stress to test the hypothesis that behaviors in high stress situations would be more diagnostic of children's subsequent self‐regulatory behavior. As predicted, both maternal unresponsivity and toddlers’ negative affect, particularly in a high stress as opposed to a low stress situation, predicted children's later use of ineffective attentional control strategies. Similarly, maternal disengagement that occurred contingent to toddlers’ distress predicted ineffective attentional control strategies whereas maternal disengagement in response to toddlers’ non‐distress behaviors did not. The findings supported the utility of a contextual approach to understanding the impact of maternal and child characteristics on the development of self‐regulatory skills.     

Community Treatment Orders for People with Serious Mental Illness: A New Zealand Study

New Zealand legislation allows for the involuntary outpatienttreatment of people with serious mental illness. This studyexamines the views of service users, family members and mentalhealth professionals (MHPs) about the impact of this regime.Semi-structured interviews were completed with forty-two serviceusers, twenty-seven family members and ninety MHPs, with recentexperience of the regime. Participants were asked to commenton the functions of community treatment (or non-resident) orders,their benefits and restrictions, decisions about their terminationand any impact on relationships. Most service users believedthe main purpose of the order was to ensure they took medication.They also believed the order provided better access to othertreatments, supported accommodation and care from MHPs. Familiesconsidered the orders provided relief for them and a supportivestructure for their relative’s care. MHPs found the ordersuseful for engaging service users in a continuing therapeuticrelationship, and for promoting treatment adherence. In eachgroup, a majority of those interviewed viewed involuntary communitytreatment in a generally positive light, while acknowledgingthe restrictions imposed on service users’ freedom.     

Achievement Orientations,School Adjustment,and Well-being: A Longitudinal Study

This study set out to identify the kinds of achievement orientations that adolescents show, and to examine the kinds of antecedents and consequences the use of a particular orientation has. The participants were 734 Swedish adolescents (335 boys and 399 girls) who filled in questionnaires measuring their achievement beliefs and behaviors, depressive symptoms, engagement with school, and norm-breaking behavior. By using clustering-by-cases analysis, five achievement orientation groups were identified: optimism, defensive-pessimism, self-handicapping, and learned helplessness, and a group showing average levels of criteria variables. The results showed further that a decrease in depressive symptoms and an increase in engagement with school predicted a move to the use of optimistic and defensive-pessimistic groups, whereas a reverse pattern predicted a move to the helplessness and self-handicapping groups. Moreover, the optimistic and defensive-pessimistic achievement orientations at Time 1 predicted an increase in engagement with school and a decrease in depressive symptoms later on, whereas self-handicapping and learned helplessness predicted a decrease in engagement with school and increases in depressive symptoms and norm-breaking behavior.     

The making of active boards in Swedish public companies

Boards of directors are a vital part of corporate governance systems. In the on-going discussion about the development of national corporate governance systems, however, little interest has been given to the issue of how and why board behavior changes over time. In this article, we use an institutional approach and study the development of board behavior in Sweden between 1994 and 2004 and if it is affected by board composition and board network characteristics. In order to do so, we introduce the constructs of board activities, i.e. what the boards do, and board involvement, i.e. when in the decision process they get involved. Findings show that range of board activities and board involvement have increased drastically during this period, which indicates a change in the logic of appropriateness of Swedish board behavior. There are robust indications that new types of actors affect activities and involvement positively, as do board interlocks, whereas network centrality affects activities and involvement negatively.     

Cattle for Wives and Extramarital Trysts for Husbands? Lobola, Men, and HIV/STD Risk Behavior in Southern Africa

Lobola is in many Southern African countries a tradition, which is expected to be adhered by anyone who is part or want to be part of the community. It is about paying respect to the elders, the family and the community. It is a significant element of marriage among many tribes and there are strict rules to adhere. In order to determine how much the actual fact of payment of lobola would influence the behavior of husbands and wives, we conducted several focus group discussion with men, women, mixed groups and couples. We analyzed the data collected during these sessions and compared these with the literature. Many participants see lobola as part of their African culture, although they wished that they would not actually have to pay lobola. We could not determine a difference in the husband's behavior, whether they had paid lobola or not and having extramarital affairs.     

Cost effectiveness of an integrated service delivery model as measured by worker retention

This study sought to examine the impact of housing child welfare ongoing teams in the community, near client neighborhoods, and in a setting that also co-locates other service providers that serve the same clients. The focus was the impact of location and service integration on perceptions of worker stress and actual worker turnover. Thirty four workers from this type of setting and from a more traditional setting in two urban cities in a Southern state were interviewed. In addition turnover rates were calculated and compared. It was found that those located near clients and with staff from other agencies had better morale, lower stress levels, more positive attitudes toward clients and client contexts, knew more about the communities the clients lived in and had more chances to collaborate to solve client problems than those in a more traditional setting with co-location only with family support staff. The turnover rate was lower in the integrated service delivery setting than in either the traditional setting or the state overall. Thus, integration of service delivery benefits not only the child welfare workforce participants, but also the clients who have greater access to other service providers and to the bottom line of the agency through the retention of workers. Implications are described.     

Using Alternate Forms of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale: Caveat Emptor

This study examined whether Forms A and B ofthe Multidimensional Health Locus of ControlScale (MHLCS) are parallel by comparing (a)mean performance on the internal, powerfulothers, and chance subscales, (b) the internalconsistency and one-week test-retestreliability estimates for each of thesubscales, (c) the intercorrelations among thesubscales, (d) the relationship betweenself-rated health status and each of thesubscales, and (e) the fit of the three-factorstructure for the MHLCS proposed by Wallston etal. (1978) using confirmatory factor analysis(CFA). A non-clinical sample (N = 245) wasused. Overall, the results of the study do notsupport treating Forms A and B of the MHLCS asparallel or exchangeable forms. Directions forfurther revisions to the MHLCS are proposedbased on both the present study as well asfindings from the literature.