Accessing Higher Education: The Influence of Cultural and Social Capital on University Choice

Over recent years, sociologists of education have paid increasing attention to the higher education sector. They have highlighted the ways in which, despite the significant expansion in the number of university places available in many countries across the world, access to and choices about higher education continue to be strongly influenced by social class. This article provides an overview of recent literature in this field and explores how scholars have tended to explain this influence by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural and social capital.     

VOTING AND IMITATIVE BEHAVIOR

Political behavior generates private benefits by helping people fit in with desired friends. A voter imitates other voters, but at the same time they imitate him. An equilibrium solution requires exogenous variables: the narrow self-interest of the participants. The reduced form makes one's vote a function of the narrow self-interest of others as well as one's own. In accord with the model, a person's party identification depends on his ethnic group's current income and its income in 1909 as well as his own income.     

Analyzing gender in public places: Rethinking Goffman’s vision of everyday life

In this study, I discuss critically some of Goffman’s work on public places, with regard to how that work represents women’s experience in public and how women’s experience changes the notions of public places that Goffman portrayed. I draw on an eighteen-month participant observation of one small city (Santa Fe, NM) and a set of in-depth interviews done with both female and male residents of the city. Here, I concentrate on three areas: the normalized distaste for public places that is encouraged in women by their fear of crime in public and the measures they are informed they must take as crime-conscious pedestrians and shoppers; street remarks that are often difficult to manage and impossible to resolve successfully; and access information—information the woman discloses that can be used as a clue to her identity and home and, potentially at least, as ammunition for further harassment of her. I use these areas to illustrate how gender-conscious appraisal is necessary in order to appreciate the character of public places. Her book,Urban Ritual, is forthcoming from University of California Press.     

A comprehensive program for pregnant adolescents: parenting and prevention

Beginning in 1981 as an effort to reduce mortality rates of at-risk infants, the Teen Pregnancy Project of this agency has grown steadily into a multiservice program with many approaches, yet all services for its help-resistant population depend upon an outreach, home-visiting initiative to establish useful relationships with its clients.     

Neural Correlates of Human and Monkey Face Processing in 9‐Month‐Old Infants

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests a gradual, experience‐dependent specialization of cortical face processing systems that takes place largely in the 1st year of life. To further investigate these findings, event‐related potentials (ERPs) were collected from typically developing 9‐month‐old infants presented with pictures of familiar and unfamiliar monkey or human faces in 2 different orientations. Analyses revealed differential processing across changes in monkey and human faces. The N290 was greater for familiar compared to unfamiliar faces, regardless of species or orientation. In contrast, the P400 to unfamiliar faces was greater than to familiar faces, but only for the monkey condition. The P400 to human faces differentiated the orientation of both familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results suggest more specific processing of human compared to monkey faces in 9‐month‐olds.     

Smoking Prevalence and Antismoking Regulations in Transition Countries

As a number of new nations emerged in the early nineties, there has been a spurt in regulatory initiatives in transition countries toward nation building and socio-economic reforms. A key prerequisite to policy changes is an understanding of the related patterns and policies. This paper provides an overview of the smoking trends in transition nations, broken by gender and age, and the antismoking policies in place. In particular, four different types of non-price policies are studied. Comparisons with the rest of the world show that transition countries do not fare badly in terms of implementing antismoking policies and are, in fact, better in some cases than other countries. However, greater smoking prevalence for some population subgroups in transition nations suggests that either some other socio-economic factors influencing smoking prevalence might be at play or there might be some enforcement issues with the policies in place.     

RESOURCE MOBILIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF CONFLICTING THEORETICAL VARIATIONS

Although resource mobilization theory has brought a number of advances to the field of social movements, it does not constitute a unified body of theory. The principal divisions exist between McCarthy and Zald's "professional organizer" model and McAdam's "political process" model. Their disagreements are centered mainly around their conceptualizations of the role that elites play in the formation and development of social movements. It is believed that these differences can be reconciled by returning to the original precepts of resource mobilization theory.