The relationship between child disability and living arrangement in child welfare

The influence of disabilities on placement outcomes was examined for 277 children who were removed from their biological parents due to substantiated maltreatment. Results indicated that children with a disability were less likely to reunify and more likely to reside in nonkin foster care two years later than typical children. Children with cognitive, emotional /behavioral, and physical disabilities were over four times more likely to be permanently living in nonkin foster care than to be reunified.     

Effects of method on participants and disclosure rates in research on sensitive topics

This study replicates and extends the research of Rosenbaum, Rabenhorst, Reddy, Fleming, and Howells, which also appears in this special issue. Responses from 398 randomly assigned participants regarding differentially sensitive topics were collected via four methods of data collection: written questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and an automated telephonic data collection system (ATDC). Several significant differences in data collection methodology and topic area were found, including greater disclosure of sensitive information via the ATDC system than via face-to-face and paper-and-pencil conditions. Participants who were assigned to the ATDC condition felt significantly more comfortable answering questions compared to those in the face-to-face interview condition. Participants in the telephone interview condition reported answering significantly more carefully than participants answering via written questionnaire. Taken together, the results of this study and the previous one it replicates suggest that the ATDC produces disclosure rates that are at least equivalent to, if not greater than, those generated using traditional methods for collecting sensitive data.     

An Exploration of African American Forest Landowners in Mississippi

In Mississippi counties with large African American populations, forest resources constitute one of the most important agricultural outputs. Despite the efforts of natural resources extension personnel to provide educational programming to this group, little is known about their needs, concerns, and meanings of the landscape for them. Research has taken place in the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia; however, forests and African American forest landowners in Mississippi face unique social, historical, and ecological contexts that need to be examined. If forests and forestry programs are to provide an equitable distribution of benefits to diverse populations in Mississippi, a culturally based understanding of landowners is needed with special attention to those populations who have been traditionally underserved because of race and income. We address this need by presenting data from focus groups with African American forest landowners in several rural Mississippi counties. Findings indicate that a complex relationship with the landscape has inculcated much traditional knowledge about forest resources, opportunities and challenges to participation in programs and landowner associations, and concerns over heir property, among other factors. We discuss implications for how forestry can meet the sustainable natural resource goals and rural development needs of African American landowners and communities.     

Sect,Church, and Organizational Change

Abstract

Advances in research on national and local influence structures suggest that comparative study of the relationships among the influential in the context of the centralization of power and decision-making is both possible and fruitful. Techniques based on graph theory may be used to operationalize the concept of centralization. We applied Nieminen's (1973) index of centrality to a sample of the elite of the Valle region of Columbia.

Positional, reputational and decisional methods were combined to select the sample, and relationships among respondents in a regionally active core of the elite were mapped from the organizational affiliations they had in common. The adjacency matrix produced by these data showed that direct links among the leaders were structured by organizational brokers in several of the seven cities in the region. The derivative distance matrix and index of centrality incorporate the indirect relationships that exist. All but one person in the sector are closely interrelated in a network, or one clique. An individual's centrality to the network appears to be associated with indicators of status rather than class, but the possibility that differences within this sector of the elite may arise from the interplay of class and status in an industrializing society disappears when the effects of the one deviant case are removed. Reinforced by this finding, we conclude instead that this subset of the elite forms a group of people likely to be in the kind of contact and communication with one another from which consensus emerges. Centrality to a network therefore becomes an indicator of centralization.     

A New Approach to Religious Commitment

Abstract

The authors propose a new framework for studying religious commitment. Commitment is viewed as a general social process which occurs in various aspects of life (e.g., marriage, work, politics, and religion). It consists of subjective and behavioral components. Religious commitment is defined as the interaction between people's religious consciousness and religious participation. Other religious beliefs, feelings, and intellectual inclinations are considered to be parts of people's religious orientations, not aspects of commitment as other approaches have suggested. Data from members of six Christian denominations are used to explore this conceptualization and the relationships among these variables. Some determinants and consequences of commitment also are considered. The evidence yields several propositions regarding factors that affect commitment and the effects of religion on people's attitudes and behaviors. The paper's implications for future research on religious commitment in particular and commitment in general also are discussed.     

Involvement in Family,Religion, Education,Work, and Politics

Abstract

This paper explores the relationships among five spheres of individual involvement: family, religion, education, work, and politics. A theoretical framework stressing the extent of structural differentiation in modern societies led to the hypothesis that the spheres of involvement would be quite independent. Within the context of differentiation, it was hypothesized that the spheres of education, work, and politics on the one hand and family and religion on the other would be most highly related. Data from a national sample of retired professional baseball players allowed examination of these hypotheses for three age cohorts (30–49; 50–69; 70 and over) and three life cycle stages (early in the respondents' playing careers, late in their careers, and at present). The data generally supported for the hypotheses, but also suggested some important extensions of the theory. The implications for future theory and research on involvement are discussed.     

Early Adolescents' Perceptions of Mothers' and Fathers' Parenting Styles and Problem Behavior

We investigated early adolescents' perceptions of parenting styles in mother–father–adolescent triads along with child self-reported problem behaviors (substance abuse and delinquency). We also examined the various combinations of mothers' and fathers' parenting styles by child gender in relation to problem behavior. Participants included 3,353 children (aged 12 to 14) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—97. Results from our structural equation model indicated that mothers and fathers may use different parenting strategies and that permissive parenting may not be as detrimental as previously assumed. In addition, youth perceptions of each parent were equally important in explaining problem behavior among both daughters and sons, but the perception of an authoritarian mother showed stronger adverse effects on sons, even after controlling for poverty and peer influence.