Police Accounts of Body-Worn Camera Footage In News Media

People offer accounts in response to actions that are subjected to valuative inquiry. Recordings of police actions captured on body-worn camera (BWC) video can become subject to valuative inquiry when footage is publicly released. This footage may possibly undermine police legitimacy. Managing legitimacy is a basic rationale for why police provide accounts in response to their conduct. Proponents of BWCs assert that the devices enhance legitimacy and, while police have long used accounts to justify their conduct, less is known about how body cameras affect police accountability in practice. Drawing from Scott and Lyman's accounts theory framework, this qualitative, exploratory study examines official police accounts as both outcomes of police accountability in practice and as provided in the context of news media coverage of publicly released body-worn camera footage. This allows us to ask the following questions: What types of accounts have police officials provided in news media reports in the context of publicly released BWC footage? And, more generally, what insight might an analysis of police accounts provide about accountability in relation to the implementation of BWCs? A key finding reveals that the timing of police accounts varied quite considerably, and that accounts were usually not static. The findings provide some general insight into what kinds of actions captured on body camera recordings constitute acceptable use of force by officers, even in situations when police actions resulted in death. This study also provides a small empirical window into when and how police officials provide accounts in response to publicly released body camera footage.     

Similarities between friends on service,activism, and awareness of inequities in an adolescent social network

This brief report characterizes the tendency of adolescent friends to be similar on civic behaviors and critical consciousness. Using two waves of network data from a high school that serves primarily low-income Latiné youth (2019, N = 519; 2020, N = 521), the present study examined homophily on service, activism, and awareness of inequities. The results of Exponential Random Graph Models indicated that adolescents tended to be friends with peers who had similar service behavior and awareness of inequities, but not activism. The findings suggest that schools could foster civic engagement by providing infrastructure that encourages civic interactions between peers. The current study highlights the potential that social network analysis holds for generating novel insights into the relational underpinnings of youth civic engagement.     

A sociology of bullying: Placing youth aggression in social context

In this paper we review the sociological literature on peer aggression among adolescents and demonstrate how it can form the basis of a new subfield in sociology on the subject of bullying. Although sociologists have mostly avoided the term bullying in classic works on adolescent aggression, these studies suggest that institutional social control, status hierarchies and social inequalities provide important social context for youth aggression. While historically they have not been in dialog with each other, when taken together sociological research on youth status relations and social networks, systemic bias, school culture and social ecology can lay the foundation of a sociology of bullying. We suggest that if sociologists see this work as shedding light on issues of bullying, they can begin to play a larger role in the shaping of the national conversation on bullying and influence anti-bullying programs in schools to take better account of the social dimensions of bullying.     

Institutional theory-based research on corporate social responsibility: Bringing values back in

Research applying institutional theory to corporate social responsibility (CSR) has experienced remarkable momentum. Institutional theory-based CSR research illustrates the role of values in guiding both agentic choices for CSR and the influence of institutional structures on CSR agency. Although values have been explored in this literature, systematic studies of values that seek to gain insights into the mutual relationship between agentic choices and structures are lacking. Such insights are crucial for exploring whether and how CSR is enabled or constrained. We thus ask two interrelated questions: (1) What is the role of values in institutional theory-based CSR research? (2) How and along which avenues should future institutional theory-based CSR research that focuses on values be mobilised? Based on our analysis of this line of literature from 1989 until 2021, first, we take stock of established institutional theory perspectives on CSR and disentangle what role values have played in this literature. Second, we outline how to mobilise values in future institutional CSR research based on four promising but under-investigated areas. From our literature analysis, two central functions emerge (which we label ‘bridging’ and ‘referencing’) that values can perform in the institutional analysis of CSR. Based on these two functions, our values-focused framework will help scholars examine the moral foundations that inform business–society interactions as well as understand how companies can responsibly manage those interactions with societal stakeholders.     

Social intelligence as moderator in the relation between narcissism and aggression in at-risk adolescents

This study examined the moderating role of social intelligence (SI) in the associations of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism (VN) with peer-reported overt and relational aggression (RA). The sample consisted of 286 adolescents aged 15 to 19 recruited from a residential program for youth who have dropped out of school. Results showed that whereas grandiose narcissism (GN) was related to both forms of aggression, VN was related to neither overt nor RA. However, SI moderated the relation between VN and both forms of aggression such that SI works as either a risk or protective factor for adolescents with higher levels of narcissism depending on the subdimensions of SI and aggression. The findings indicate that SI may play a role in how adolescent peers perceive the behavior of relatively narcissistic individuals.     

A new method for finding hierarchical subgroups from networks

We present a new method for decomposing a social network into an optimal number of hierarchical subgroups. With a perfect hierarchical subgroup defined as one in which every member is automorphically equivalent to each other, the method uses the REGGE algorithm to measure the similarities among nodes and applies the k-means method to group the nodes that have congruent profiles of dissimilarities with other nodes into various numbers of hierarchical subgroups. The best number of subgroups is determined by minimizing the intra-cluster variance of dissimilarity subject to the constraint that the improvement in going to more subgroups is better than a network whose n nodes are maximally dispersed in the n-dimensional space would achieve. We also describe a decomposability metric that assesses the deviation of a real network from the ideal one that contains only perfect hierarchical subgroups. Four well known network data sets are used to demonstrate the method and metric. These demonstrations indicate the utility of our approach and suggest how it can be used in a complementary way to Generalized Blockmodeling for hierarchical decomposition.     

Eighth‐Grade School Form and Resilience in the Transition to High School: A Comparison of Middle Schools and K‐8 Schools

We examine a set of academic and social outcomes in 9th grade, comparing middle school attendees with those who attended K‐8 schools. Previous research with these data has shown that there are few differences in 8th‐grade outcomes by school type. Here we extend these findings to determine whether school form influences student outcomes in the first year of high school. The results reveal several domains in which attendance at a middle school results in worse outcomes (e.g., greater rates of course failure); however, we find that a large portion of the difference by type of a student's 8th‐grade school is accounted for by differential rates of attendance at the district's magnet schools. That is, our results indicate that type of school attended during the middle grades is significantly and positively related to magnet school attendance and thereby on the academic outcomes in the 9th‐grade year.     

Landscape,vegetation characteristics,and group identity in an urban and suburban watershed: why the 60s matter

As highly managed ecosystems, urban areas should reflect the social characteristics of their managers, who are primarily residents. Since landscape features develop over time, we hypothesize that present-day vegetation should also reflect social characteristics of past residents. Using an urban-to-suburban watershed in the Baltimore Metropolitan Region, this paper examines the relationship between demographics, housing characteristics, and lifestyle clusters from 1960 and 2000 with areas of high woody and herbaceous vegetation cover in 1999. We find that 1960 demographics and age of housing are better predictors of high woody or tree coverage in 1999 than demographics and housing characteristics from 2000. Key variables from 1960 are percent in professional occupations (+), percent of pre-WWI housing (−), percent of post-WWII housing (+), and population density (−). Past and present demographic and housing variables are poor predictors of high herbaceous cover in 1999. Lifestyle clusters for 2000 are very good predictors of high herbaceous coverage in 1999, but lifestyle clusters from 1960 and 2000 are poor predictors of high woody vegetation coverage. These findings suggest that herbaceous or grassy areas, typically lawns, are good reflections of contemporary lifestyle characteristics of residents while neighborhoods with heavy tree canopies have largely inherited the preferred landscapes of past residents and communities. Biological growth time scales of trees and woody vegetation means that such vegetation may outlast the original inhabitants who designed, purchased, and planted them. The landscapes we see today are therefore legacies of past consumption patterns.     

Error Bands for Impulse Responses

We show how correctly to extend known methods for generating error bands in reduced form VAR's to overidentified models. We argue that the conventional pointwise bands common in the literature should be supplemented with measures of shape uncertainty, and we show how to generate such measures. We focus on bands that characterize the shape of the likelihood. Such bands are not classical confidence regions. We explain that classical confidence regions mix information about parameter location with information about model fit, and hence can be misleading as summaries of the implications of the data for the location of parameters. Because classical confidence regions also present conceptual and computational problems in multivariate time series models, we suggest that likelihood-based bands, rather than approximate confidence bands based on asymptotic theory, be standard in reporting results for this type of model.