Effects of early maternal employment on maternal health and well-being

This study uses data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study on Early Child Care to examine the effects of maternal employment on maternal mental and overall health, self-reported parenting stress, and parenting quality. These outcomes are measured when children are 6?months old. Among mothers of 6-month-old infants, maternal work hours are positively associated with depressive symptoms and parenting stress and negatively associated with self-rated overall health. However, maternal employment is not associated with quality of parenting at 6?months, based on trained assessors’ observations of maternal sensitivity.     

Playing with Sims as a Space of One's Own

Studies of women's use of popular media have highlighted how these contested genres may be used by women to create a space of their own. Is this also the case when the media text in question is a digital game and the community around it moves online? Investigated via a netnographic approach, this article analyses the articulated experiences of playing The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 in relation to how the players perceive the activity's function in their everyday lives. Seven emic categories are identified and discussed in the inductive analysis, namely “relaxation and dealing with stress,” “playing according to mood,” “managing and taking control,” “experimentation,” “get what one does not have,” “making something one's own,” and “creative outlet.” A central denominator of these seven categories is the notion of a space of one's own in the widest sense of the phrase. In the discussed accounts playing becomes a way not only to escape other obligations for a while but also in various ways to work with the self and its place in everyday life.     

CONTESTED PORTRAYALS: Medical and Legal Social Control of Juvenile Sex Offenders

While juvenile courts were originally designed to respond to troubled youth by providing treatment appropriate to the needs of individual offenders, advocates of a system that gets tough on young criminals by meting out punishments based on offense characteristics (both present offense and past offense history) have become increasingly influential in recent years. In this article, I examine a special case, that of juvenile sex offenders in a Washington State county. for whom a 1990 law reintroduced treatment as a central goal. While Washington has been a forerunner in the shift toward a juvenile justice system in which offending behavior is the central factor in decision making, I argue that, largely as a result of this law, juvenile sex offending has been medicalized and that, in this process, distinctions based on offense characteristics have noticeably diminished. This case study provides both empirical support for established theoretical arguments regarding medicalization and a detailed explication of the differences between medical and legal assumptions about social problems.     

Vegetation type alters water and nitrogen budgets in a controlled,replicated experiment on residential-sized rain gardens planted with prairie,shrub, and turfgrass

Vegetation type alters surface hydrology and nitrogen (N) cycling by partitioning evapotranspiration (ET) and drainage, but has not been fully utilized for this purpose in the design of urban rain gardens. Replicated treatments of three vegetation types (prairie, shrub, and turfgrass) commonly planted in rain gardens, as well as bare soil (control), were evaluated 1 year after establishment in 12, free-drainage bioretention cells designed to specifications for residential rain gardens in the Midwestern United States. Water and N budgets were calculated to assess differences in ET, drainage, soil moisture, and N transport following three stormwater applications in July, August, and October of 2006. Evaporative demand was also estimated as potential or reference ET during the study period using Hamon, Priestley-Taylor, and FAO Penman-Monteith models. Results show that after 1 year of establishment, vegetation type changed the water budgets of rain gardens thus altering their provisioning of ecosystem services via observed tradeoffs between daytime evaporative cooling (ET), stormwater storage, N-load reduction, soil and plant N retention, and groundwater recharge (drainage). Vegetation effects on hydrology and N transport were most significant when evaporative demand was high during the middle of the growing season. Observed changes in ET, drainage, soil moisture, and N transport support the incorporation of different vegetation types into conceptual and numerical models of rain gardens to assess ecological outcomes and tradeoffs at a variety of spatiotemporal scales.     

Is Strategic Communication too important to be left to Communication Professionals?: Managers’ and coworkers’ attitudes towards strategic communication and communication professionals

The article is based upon empirical data from a Swedish three-year research project entitled “Communicative Organizations”, investigating the value of communication for organizations. The project is involves eleven organizations. Based upon empirical data from a quantitative survey (n = 6486) the perceived value of strategic communication and communication professionals, mainly among managers and co-workers, is analyzed. Two conceptual models are used for analysis: the communicative organization and the four-by-four model of strategic public relations. The results shows that the self-identity of communication professionals and the normative model of strategic public relations partly mirror and partly collide with the perceptions of managers and coworkers. The study confirms that managers and coworkers find communication crucial for their organizations at a strategic level, but that the role of communication professionals is rather unclear. A majority of the respondents do not understand the core role or roles of communication professionals.     

Decomposition of urban atmospheric carbon in Sonoran Desert soils

Urban atmospheres can have high concentrations of particulate organic carbon (oC) but the rate and fate oC deposition in near-urban ecosystems are rarely quantified. We collected atmospheric particulate matter in Phoenix, AZ and applied these samples to Sonoran Desert soils in a series of laboratory incubation experiments. The addition of fine particulate matter (<2.5 μm aerodynamic diameter) increased microbial respiration in soils collected from the interspaces between desert shrubs. The increase in soil respiration was equivalent to 25% to 30% of the added oC. In contrast, we did not detect increases in respiration when coarse particulate matter (>2.5 μm aerodynamic diameter) was added to interspace soils, suggesting that coarse particulate oC is recalcitrant to microbial decomposition. Due to comparatively higher background levels of C mineralization, we rarely detected changes in microbial respiration when fine or coarse particulate oC was added to soils collected beneath shrub canopies. We measured total atmospheric C concentrations within and surrounding Phoenix and, using inferential methods, estimated rates of deposition that ranged from 0.02 to 0.58 mg C m⁻² d⁻¹ for fine particles and from 0 to 6.15 mg C m⁻² d⁻¹ for coarse particles. Results show that fine atmospheric particulate matter deposited at low rates downwind of Phoenix is a labile oC substrate for soil heterotrophs. In contrast, oC deposited at higher rates as coarse particulate matter may accumulate in soils due to slow microbial decomposition rates.     

Longitudinal Associations Between Other‐Sex Friendships and Substance Use in Adolescence

The impact of the changes in the gender composition of friendship networks during early adolescence on substance use in late adolescence was examined. The hypothesis was that initial level and increase in the proportion of other‐sex friends in the network would be associated with higher levels of substance use among girls, but not among boys. Girls and boys (n=390) were interviewed annually from ages 12 to 18 (79% retention). For both boys and girls, initial level in the proportion of other‐sex friends predicted alcohol use in late adolescence, whereas it was predictive of drug use in girls only. Moreover, for girls only, a faster increase in the proportion of other‐sex friends in the network predicted later use of alcohol and drugs.     

Measuring Differences in Living Standards Within Households

This article presents a quantitative approach used to investigate differences in living standards between spouses within households. Adopting a specially adapted, standard poverty measurement approach—nonmonetary indicators—it explores differences between spouses in terms of possessions and access to certain goods and services and the control and management of household resources. Using data from a unique module in the Living in Ireland Survey (N = 2,248 individuals) as an exemplar, the article focuses on 3 methodological issues: (a) the development of specially designed nonmonetary indicators to explore differences in living standards within households rather than between households (including the role played by qualitative findings in developing those indicators and how focus groups were used to assess and validate the method), (b) the use of multivariate analysis to assess the impact of a wife's independent income in ameliorating differences in living standards between spouses, and (c) the deployment of a mechanism for use in quantitative surveys to record spousal presence and allow measurement of any subsequent difference in individual responses.     

Providing new opportunities or reinforcing old stereotypes? Perceptions and experiences of single-sex public education

There has been a widespread increase in single-sex public schooling in the U.S. following 2006 changes to the Department of Education regulations motivated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Single-sex public schooling is viewed as a means to improve the educational experiences and performance of low-income youth of color. Yet little is known about its effects and efficacy, particularly for these populations. This article is based on a community-based participatory research project, on which high school students and university researchers collaborated, conducted in a low-income, African American high school implementing single-sex courses. Our findings challenge proponents' key assumptions that single-sex education will improve the academic achievement of low-income youth of color by 1) eliminating distraction from the other sex; 2) addressing the different learning styles of girls and boys; and 3) remedying inequities by offering these youth opportunities traditionally afforded to more privileged youth. While some distractions were decreased, others were increased or ignored; racialized stereotypes of hypersexuality and essentialized notions of gender were reinforced; and students felt punished rather than privileged by being separated by sex. We conclude that single-sex education as a public school option is a neoliberal approach to addressing low achievement that deflects attention from the structural inequities that created the problem and implicitly blames those experiencing oppression.