THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY: JONES INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY™, LTD

Jones International University provides a leading example of a virtual university. This brief overview focuses on innovative features of this university, ranging from its geographically distributed staff and students to its cyber-graduation ceremony.     

Welfare and Work: Complementary Strategies forLow‐Income Women?

We examine the effects of mothers' strategies of combining employment and welfare receipt during the first 3 years of their child's life on the child's cognitive development, behavior problems, and home learning environment at ages 5 to 6. We compare the child outcomes of those mothers who were continuously employed and received no welfare with (a) those who worked some or all of the 3 years and also received public assistance and (b) those who were totally dependent on public assistance. We studied children in single‐parent families (N= 1271 ) living below 200% of the poverty threshold using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—Child Supplement. No negative association was found on most child outcomes with a mother's employment whether or not it was combined with public assistance. However, mothers' not working at all and receiving financial support solely from AFDC was associated with negative child outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the possible effects of the new welfare laws on families and young children.     

Family leave legislation in the American states: Toward a model of state policy adoption

The issue of mandated family leave has drawn substantial attention in recent years. This article develops and tests empirically a model of adoption of family leave policies in the American states during the late 1980s. State family leave policies are seen as a function of three sets of variables: (a) institutional-elite variables such as partisan control of state government and the proportion of women in the state legislatures; (b) constituency disposition variables such as mass partisanship, mass ideology, and the likelihood of general support for “women's” issues; and (c) contextual-demand variables such as birth rates and women's participation in the workforce. The model provides impressive fit to the data, accurately predicting the family leave policies of 92% of the state cases. The results suggest the importance of partisan control of state government, proportion of women in the state legislature, urbanization, and feminism as a state policy as factors that affect the probability that states will adopt mandated family leave policies. His research interests include American politics, public policy, and domestic political economy. He is editor of theAmerican Politics Quarterly, and is former President of the State Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include family policy and women's labor force participation. She received her Ph.D. in Family Science from the University of Georgia.     

Male victims of child sexual abuse

Despite the increased attention the subject of child sexual abuse has received in recent years, rarely has much consideration been given to the boys and adolescent males who are the victims of such abuse. That young girls are consistently the clear majority of sexual abuse victims is not disputed, however the extent to which they are the majority is in question. A review of existing literature has indicated that one of the leading factors for this inadvertent negligence in presenting a truer picture of the magnitude of the problem for male victims concerns the area of under-reporting of the incidence of abuse of young males. Under-reporting has served to give a false sense of the scope of child sexual abuse, particularly for male children. Many societal and methodological factors contribute to under-reporting. Reasons for the discrepancy in reporting abuse will be presented and implications for practice will be discussed.     

Perceived Risks of Conventional and Organic Produce: Pesticides, Pathogens, and Natural Toxins

Public risk perceptions and demand for safer food are important factors shaping agricultural production practices in the United States. Despite documented food safety concerns, little attempt has been made to elicit consumers' subjective risk judgments for a range of food safety hazards or to identify factors most predictive of perceived food safety risks. In this study, over 700 conventional and organic fresh produce buyers in the Boston area were surveyed for their perceived food safety risks. Survey results showed that consumers perceived relatively high risks associated with the consumption and production of conventionally grown produce compared with other public health hazards. For example, conventional and organic food buyers estimated the median annual fatality rate due to pesticide residues on conventionally grown food to be about 50 per million and 200 per million, respectively, which is similar in magnitude to the annual mortality risk from motor vehicle accidents in the United States. Over 90% of survey respondents also perceived a reduction in pesticide residue risk associated with substituting organically grown produce for conventionally grown produce, and nearly 50% perceived a risk reduction due to natural toxins and microbial pathogens. Multiple regression analyses indicate that only a few factors are consistently predictive of higher risk perceptions, including feelings of distrust toward regulatory agencies and the safety of the food supply. A variety of factors were found to be significant predictors of specific categories of food hazards, suggesting that consumers may view food safety risks as dissimilar from one another. Based on study findings, it is recommended that future agricultural policies and risk communication efforts utilize a comparative risk approach that targets a range of food safety hazards.     

A Comparison of Organic and Conventional Fresh Produce Buyers in the Boston Area

Food safety concerns and the demand for organically grown produce have increased significantly in the United States over the last decade. Key differences in lifestyle characteristics, food safety attitudes and beliefs, perceived food safety risks, and valuation of health risk reductions between organic and conventional food buyers remain largely unknown, however. To better characterize how buyers of organic fresh produce differ from their conventional counterparts, over 700 food shoppers were sampled from ten major retail stores in the Boston area. Survey results show that self-reported organic buyers are more likely than conventional buyers to engage in a variety of health-promoting and environmentally friendly behaviors. Organic buyers are less trusting of federal food safety agencies than are conventional buyers, and perceive greater benefits associated with organically grown produce than do their conventional counterparts. Further, organic buyers have significantly higher risk perceptions than do conventional buyers for food safety hazards associated with conventionally grown produce. Compared to conventional buyers, organic produce buyers also perceive significant risk reductions associated with switching to organically grown produce and are willing to pay a higher price to reduce perceived food safety risks. Few sociodemographic differences between buyer types were observed, possibly due to how organic and conventional food stores were matched. Survey findings highlight the need for greater public education about a range of food safety issues and farming practices to ensure that consumers are making informed decisions in the marketplace.     

Strength in Process: Using Concept Mapping to Inform Community Coalition Development

This study reports on the use of Concept Mapping to delineate a conceptual framework germane to the planning and initial formation of tri-county rural diabetes coalition in a southeast US community. The focus of the tricounty coalition is to reduce diabetes-related inequalities in vulnerable populations. After a review of pertinent literature on community coalitions, this article explicates Concept Mapping processes utilized to plan and organize the formation of a coalition, offers analyses of the results, and discusses implications for current and future practices pertaining to community coalition work.