Research Note: Religious Affiliation and Poverty Explanations: Individual,Structural, and Divine Causes

Abstract

Prior studies of people's explanations for poverty have relied upon individual, structural, and fatalistic explanations. This paper explores an additional explanation for poverty, divine intervention. Using a sample of 360 college students, I show that divine intervention is a distinct explanation for poverty. I then examine if or how six religious groups—conservative, African American, and mainline Protestants, Catholics, the nonaffiliated, and those with “other” beliefs—differ in their views of individual, structural, and divine explanations for poverty. Results show that members of conservative Protestant denominations are more individualistic than Catholics and the nonaffiliated. African American Protestants were significantly more structuralist than conservative Protestants. African American Protestants are more likely than conservative Protestants, and both are more likely than Catholics, the nonaffiliated, and those with “other” beliefs, to believe that divine intervention is an important explanation for poverty.     

Identifying Attributes of Relationship Management in Nonprofit Policy Advocacy

Relationship management has been identified as an important activity for policy advocacy, but little is known about the strategies that human service administrators use to develop and maintain relationships with policymakers. This exploratory study aimed at identifying attributes of relationship management strategies that are associated with policy advocacy outcomes. Data were gathered from a sample of 333 nonprofit human service providers in Florida. Controlling for organizational size, the findings indicated that several established dimensions of relationship management were associated with policy advocacy success: networking, sharing of tasks, and assurances. Post hoc analyses found that the relationship between policy advocacy success and the domains of access and openness were respectively mediated by networking and sharing of tasks. Implications for nonprofit administrators and researchers are discussed.     

A Philosopher's War on Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments: A Review of Fiona Cowie's What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered

In What''s Within? Nativism Reconsidered 1999 Fiona Cowie addresses three questions: (1) What is nativism? (2) What is meant by calling some trait “innate”? and (3) What types of evidence should be offered when claiming innateness? This review concentrates on these questions as they pertain to Chomsky''s faculties-based account of language acquisition. In particular, this review focuses on Cowie''s critique of three versions of the poverty of the stimulus argument (POSA): (1) the a posteriori POSA, (2) the logical problem POSA, and (3) the iterated POSA. In addition, counter arguments to her critique, and Cowie''s response, in turn, to some of those counter arguments, are also reviewed.     

The Event: An Underexamined Risk Concept

Some of the terms used in risk assessment and management are poorly and even contradictorily defined. One such term is “event,” which arguably describes the most basic of all risk‐related concepts. The author cites two contemporary textbook interpretations of “event” that he contends are incorrect and misleading. He then examines the concept of an event in A. N. Kolmogorov's probability axioms and in several more‐current textbooks. Those concepts are found to be too narrow for risk assessments and inconsistent with the actual usage of “event” by risk analysts. The author goes on to define and advocate linguistic definitions of events (as opposed to mathematical definitions)—definitions constructed from natural language. He argues that they should be recognized for what they are: the de facto primary method of defining events.     

Southern assumptions: normalizing racialized structures at a university in the Deep South

Informed by critical race theory (CRT), we examine how African-American and white college students, at a predominantly white, structurally diverse, Southern US university, understand their cross-racial experiences. Black–white interactions are understood within the context of the so-called ‘post-racial’ environment, against the backdrop of high-profile cases of racial injustice, and within the added context of the historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the rural Southern United States. Our study suggests that many students, regardless of race, recognized the persistence of racial segregation, especially in nightlife and campus Greek letter organizations (GLOs). African-American students were the most vocal and troubled by this division. Unexpectedly, however, students appeared to take for granted that in the American South, racism is persistent and indestructible. Building on Bell’s (1991) notion of racial realism and Bonilla-Silva’s (2013) notion of naturalization, we expand the view that racism is inherent or related to individual preference, to place and time, with a construct we term southern assumptions. Southern assumptions are the mechanisms in which participants connect collective historical racism in the south to the race problems of today.     

Immigrant retention in NB: an analysis using administrative Medicare Registry data

Journal of Population Research - This paper examines immigrant retention using a novel approach based on data contained in New Brunswick’s Medicare Registry database. To date, researchers...     

Do Open Educational Resources Help Contingent Sociology Faculty Acquire Teaching Resources and Form Collegial Relationships?

Access to resources and social relationships are important for teacher development. Unfortunately, within higher education contingent faculty often are under resourced and poorly integrated into their department’s social network. This shortfall could be addressed by Open Educational Resources (OERs), which are websites that freely distribute pedagogical resources and provide a platform for educators to form collegial relationships. The current research focuses on the OERs that have formed around American sociology to assess the characteristics of the faculty who use them, the pedagogical resources they acquire from them, and how often their users form collegial relationships online. Analysis of an online survey of 275 sociology OER users finds that contingent faculty are acquiring resources from the sites. While only a small percentage of faculty are forming collegial relationships via these sites, they are doing so without occupational status, gender, or racial differences.