Four Motives for Community Involvement

A conceptual analysis is offered that differentiates four types of motivation for community involvement: egoism, altruism, collectivism, and principlism. Differentiation is based on identification of a unique ultimate goal for each motive. For egoism, the ultimate goal is to increase one's own welfare; for altruism, it is to increase the welfare of another individual or individuals; for collectivism, to increase the welfare of a group; and for principlism, to uphold one or more moral principles. As sources of community involvement, each of these four forms of motivation has its strengths; each also has its weaknesses. More effective efforts to stimulate community involvement may come from strategies that orchestrate motives so that the strengths of one motive can overcome weaknesses of another. Among the various possibilities, strategies that combine appeals to either altruism or collectivism with appeals to principle may be especially promising.     

Determinants of stated willingness to pay for public goods: A study in the headline method

Respondents were shown brief statements (“headlines”) referring to various threats to the environment or to public health, and other public issues. An intervention to deal with each problem was also introduced by a single sentence. Some respondents were asked to indicate their willingness to pay for the interventions by voluntary contributions. Others indicated their opinion of the intervention on a conventional rating scale, rated the personal satisfaction of contributing to it, or rated the importance of the problem. Group averages of these response measures were obtained for a large set of issues. Computed over issues, the rank-order correlations between the different measures were very high, suggesting that group averages of WTP and of other opinion statements are measures of the same public attitudes. Observed preference reversals and violations of monotonicity in contributions are better explained by a concept of attitude than by the notion of economic value that underlies the contingent valuation method. Contributions and purchases do not follow the same logic. Possible implications for the contingent valuation method are discussed.     

Economic Background for Gambling Policy

Legalized gambling as a revenue source is evaluated on the basis of data derived from a nationwide survey. The major findings include: (1) gambling is essentially a consumer commodity which people purchase because they enjoy it, rather than because they expect to make money; (2) maximum revenue potential depends on consumer responsiveness to the price of a given game; (3) high take-out rates encourage gamblers to participate in illegal substitutes; (4) state receipts from gambling, regardless of the details of the way they are collected, are economically identical to any other form of excise tax; (5) although gambling outlays tend to increase with income, the amount of increase is disproportionate to the amount of income, and therefore gambling tends to be a highly regressive form of taxation; and (6) the maximum revenue which states could expect to collect as the result of legalizing gambling is about a 4 percent addition to total receipts from other sources of revenue.     

Nature, Rationale, and Effectiveness of Education for Coexistence

Coexistence is a state of mind shared by society members who recognize the rights of another group to exist peacefully as a legitimate, equal partner with whom disagreements have to be resolved in nonviolent ways. Achieving coexistence is a great challenge because of the negative relations between the two groups. These negative relations, the result of ethnocentric beliefs or intractable conflict, are widely shared and their abolition requires deep societal change. Education for coexistence plays an important function in this change. The article suggests that when negative relations are based on ethnocentrism, education for coexistence plays a major role in changing the nature of the relations. But when negative relations derive from intergroup conflict, education for coexistence has less influence.     

Family Life and School Experience: Factors in the Racial Identity Development of Black Youth in White Communities

Eighteen middle-class Black college students were interviewed in-depth about their experiences growing up in predominantly White communities. Using Cross's model of racial identity development as a theoretical framework for analysis, case studies of three women and two men are presented to highlight the impact of varied parental socialization practices and school experiences on racial identity development. For all, positive same-race peer relationships, information about African-American achievements, the availability of role models, and the encouragement of significant adults were important for academic success and the beginning resolution of identity conflicts. The implications of these findings for understanding aspects of school integration and for developing relevant school-based interventions are considered.     

Books and Publications Received

Mexican fertility has remained at a high level (a crude birth rate of 42–46) in spite of rapid economic development and its concomitants: rising levels of urbanization, education, income, and female labour force participation, and falling levels of infant mortality and agricultural population, combined with rural-urban migration.

Data on child-woman ratios and children-ever-born statistics, for Mexico and each state, suggest that the constant crude birth rate is not masking age or region-specific declines in fertility.

Cross-section regressions are employed in an attempt to explain Mexico’s paradoxical fertility behaviour. Using measures of income, education, urbanization, occupational status, industrial composition, labour force participation, and the sex ratio, in a weighted log-linear form, a large portion of the variation in state adjusted child-woman ratios is explained by the ‘demographic transition’ variables. The only two which might possibly explain the trend in Mexican fertility are the income variable and the sex ratio, which have positive influences on Mexican fertility in 1960 and 1970.     

THE U.S. PRODUCTIVITY SLOWDOWN: A PEAK THROUGH THE STRUCTURAL BREAK WINDOW

This paper provides a formal test of the null hypothesis of a unit root in the log-level of labor productivity against the alternative of linear trend stationarity with a one-time structural break in the level and slope of the trend at an a priori unknown date. Using some newly developed time series tests, we show that the log-level of productivity is more accurately modeled as following a deterministic trend with a regime shift rather than as a unit root process. Some implications of the results for detrending and for testing cointegration relationships between productivity and other variables are discussed. ( JEL C22. O40)     

A Pilot for Improving Depression Care on College Campuses: Results of the College Breakthrough Series–Depression (CBS-D) Project

Abstract

Objective: To implement a pilot quality improvement project for depression identification and treatment in college health. Participants: Eight college health center teams composed primarily of primary care and counseling service directors and clinicians. Methods: Chronic (Collaborative) Care Model (CCM) used with standardized screening to identify, treat, and track depressed students for 12 weeks to monitor predetermined process and clinical outcomes. Results: Of all students receiving primary medical care services between January 2007 and May 2008, 69% (n = 71,908) were screened for depression. A total of 801 depressed students were treated and tracked; most predetermined treatment process and clinical outcome targets were achieved. Conclusion: The CCM for depression shows promise for improving depression identification and care for college students.     

The Sources of Error in Psychology

The backgrounds and roles of school interpreters who provide interpretation services for limited English proficient students were investigated through a survey study. The results are based on a total of 89 interpreters working in schools throughout New York State. A total of 29 languages were represented in the two samples of interpreters with Spanish being the most frequently used language. Most of the interpreters had Bachelors Degrees or higher but very few had any formal training in interpretation. The results suggest that most interpreters work on a part-time basis. The interpreters reported providing services for a number of different school personnel while fulfilling numerous roles that included interpreting during assessment sessions as well as during parent meetings. The implications of the findings are discussed from the perspectives of the training and recruiting ofschool interpreters. The limitations of the findings are also examined.