Isolation Within Isolation: A Solitary Century of African-American Vernacular English

The nature of language diversity in small, isolated communities is considered by examining a unique sociolingustic situation in which a one African-American family has resided for over 130 years on a small island community located off the Southeastern coast of the United States. The Anglo-American community maintained a distinctive dialect due to their isolation from the mainland United States, while the sole African-American family maintained a variety heavily influenced by African-American Vernacular English. Although some assimilation to the surrounding Anglo-American variety has taken place, a number of salient African-American Vernacular English features are still used by the single African-American resident of the island. At the same time, the most marked items of the Anglo-American Outer Banks variety have not been assimilated, thus demonstrating the symbolic exclusion of the African-American speaker from the Anglo community despite her life-long residency.     

Children's abilities and strategies in managing the facial display of affect

To examine children's ability to control their affective expression facially, 68 second- and fourth-grade boys and girls were unobtrusively videotaped while discussing six self-chosen activities about which they felt positively, neutrally, or negatively. Children then performed three facial management tasks: (a)inhibition (showing no emotion instead of a felt emotion); (b)simulation (showing an emotion when not feeling anything); and (c)masking (showing an emotion that is different than what is felt). Twelve raters judged the edited tapes of the children's performance for affect positivity and deceptiveness. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated, in contrast to previous research, that children were highly competent in managing facial displays. To understand children's techniques for managing affective displays, two raters categorized the primary cognitive strategies children used. Results showed that fourth graders used more complex strategies more often than second graders. These results highlight children's skill and strategies in affect management.Funding for this project was provided by a NICHHD grant (#HD22367) to the first author. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Nancy A. Ballard and Michael G. Rakouskas in data collection and preparation. We also thank the children whose participation and cooperation made this research possible.     

Social Structure, Crime and Criminalization: An Empirical Examination of the Conflict Perspective*

Using available data from a variety of secondary sources, this research examines the empirical validity of arguments maintained by conflict theorists about the interrelations among economic inequality, the incidence of crime, and the official crinrinalization of people through arrest. The reported findings, although not definitive, suggest that official criminalization may be a function of the structure of dominant/subordinate relations within populations, rather than the incidence of crime. These findings are dependent, however, on whether the incidence of crime is measured by official or unofficial statistics on criminal activity. The implications of the findings are discussed, and we conclude that they lend some support to conflict criminology and suggest that further aggregate tests using structural variables are desirable.     

Direct and Indirect Measures of Learning Outcomes in an MSW Program: What Do We Actually Measure?

Abstract

Rankings of professional schools are often flawed and always controversial. This was certainly the case when, for the first time, U.S. News & World Report published a list based on “reputation” of the “best” schools of social work. This article compares the results of that study with the findings of eight other attempts to rank social work schools over the last 20 years. The similarities and differences among those studies are discussed in terms of what we may learn from them.     

Foreword

This article charts the history of MuseumAfrica (formerly the Africana Museum) from its founding vision to the present. Taking the museum’s current abysmal reputation as its starting point, it seeks to fill the void in academic and popular thought that encompasses the institution. Sketching the original mandate under which it was created before focusing on the museum’s work from 1935 to the near present, it explores the ways in which the museum interacted with and impacted the world outside its doors. Paying particular attention to the museum’s engagement with liberal and illiberal forces for change, it presents the museum as something other than the monument impervious to change that it is often assumed to be. Categorising the museum as an archive, this article argues in favour of the museum’s enduring relevance in the post‐colonial order.     

My Life in Huddersfield: Supporting Young Asylum Seekers and Refugees to Record Their Experiences of Living in Huddersfield

A project was undertaken with the aim of developing resources that would improve service delivery to asylum seeker children and young people by improving social worker training within the new social work degree. Funding was acquired to work with a group of children and young people. The workers engaged with them in a range of activities, designed to enable the expression of feelings in relation to immigration and asylum seeking. Participants were told they would be working towards producing resources for the training of health and social care staff. This became a strong motivating factor in the engagement of the young people and resulted in the production of teaching resources and a number of changes to the degree curriculum at the University of Huddersfield.     

The applicability of social control theory in understanding adolescent alcohol use

Utilizing panel data on 345 high school students, this study investigates the efficacy of social control theory in accounting for adolescent orientations toward alcohol use. The findings suggest that the differing informal control mechanisms under consideration place varying constraining influences upon adolescent alcohol use, and upon problems which arise in the lives of adolescents as a consequence of their drinking, throughout the three high, school years. Similarly, alcohol use and its attendant problems are generally found to be associated with a decrease in the strength of adolescents’ bonds to conventionality, though these influences differ in degree from year to year as well.     

Development of an Interspecies Nested Dose‐Response Model for Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis

Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) causes chronic inflammation of the intestines in humans, ruminants, and other species. It is the causative agent of Johne's disease in cattle, and has been implicated as the causative agent of Crohn's disease in humans. To date, no quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) for MAP utilizing a dose‐response function exists. The objective of this study is to develop a nested dose‐response model for infection from oral exposure to MAP utilizing data from the peer‐reviewed literature. Four studies amenable to dose‐response modeling were identified in the literature search and optimized to the one‐parameter exponential or two‐parameter beta‐Poisson dose‐response models. A nesting analysis was performed on all permutations of the candidate data sets to determine the acceptability of pooling data sets across host species. Three of four data sets exhibited goodness of fit to at least one model. All three data sets exhibited good fit to the beta‐Poisson model, and one data set exhibited goodness of fit, and best fit, to the exponential model. Two data sets were successfully nested using the beta‐Poisson model with parameters α = 0.0978 and N₅₀ = 2.70 × 10² CFU. These data sets were derived from sheep and red deer host species, indicating successful interspecies nesting, and demonstrate the highly infective nature of MAP. The nested dose‐response model described should be used for future QMRA research regarding oral exposure to MAP.