Navigating the First Year of College: Siblings,Parents, and First-Generation Students’ Experiences

Although college education is a key to upward mobility, students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to enter and complete college than their more advantaged peers. Prior literature has illuminated how cultural capital contributes to these disparities. An alternative conceptualization of cultural capital, however, suggests that it can also play a role in social mobility. In this study, we build on and extend the literature on cultural mobility by proposing that exposure to education can benefit not only individuals but also families. We examine the influence of older siblings who attended college on the experiences of younger college-going siblings in families where neither parent has completed college (i.e., first-generation families). We find that students rarely rely on their older siblings as sources of information and advice, except in a few instances where older siblings attended the same institution. However, both the topics and nature of conversations between parents and students differ between families with and without older college-educated siblings. The primary benefit of having college-educated siblings is thus related to students’ engagement with and support received from parents. These findings have important implications for cultural capital research and understanding experiences of first-generation college students.     

Lessons in Democracy: America's Tenuous History with Immigrants

Taking an uncompromising stance on immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has been sharply criticized for its policies and racially coded rhetoric of immigrants as criminals or undesirables. Despite this criticism, the administration's policies fall in line with historically widespread, exclusionary, nativist and xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants. Much of the American immigrant story has been a tortuous struggle for equality, integration and civil rights. This essay takes a critical look at the complicated history of immigration policy during the last century, focusing on the social, economic and political forces that helped shape legislation.     

The impact of green initiatives on environmental legitimacy and admiration of the organization

Communication about environmental policies and practices has become a critical area of focus for corporations. Through an online experiment this study explored the impact of awareness of environmental initiatives on perceived environmental legitimacy and the subsequent impact of legitimacy on organizational admiration. Findings suggest that raising awareness of an organization's environmental initiatives improves environmental legitimacy; however, investigation of the relationship between legitimacy and admiration found that only one dimension of environmental legitimacy influences the level of admiration of an organization.     

Participatory research meets validated outcome measures: Tensions in the co‐production of social care evaluation

Funding for care service research is increasingly subject to the satisfaction of two requirements: public involvement and adoption of validated outcome tools. This study identifies competing paradigms within these requirements and reveals significant challenges faced by researchers who seek to satisfy them. The focus here is on a study co‐produced between academic researchers and people with experience of adult social care services. It examines to what extent research studies can conduct high‐quality public involvement and genuine co‐production of knowledge, whilst attempting to produce quantifiable outcome scores. Findings add to debate around how to incorporate diverse perspectives in research, which may draw on incommensurate accounts of validity and reliability. Findings also highlight constructive attempts by academic and co‐researchers to make the combination of approaches work in the field. These small scale acts of researcher agency indicate some scope to combine the two approaches in future research studies. However, conclusions foreground the importance of broader awareness of how tensions and power imbalances related to this combination of approaches play out in social policy research practice.     

Nonverbal Social Sensing in Action: Unobtrusive Recording and Extracting of Nonverbal Behavior in Social Interactions Illustrated with a Research Example

Nonverbal behavior coding is typically conducted by “hand”. To remedy this time and resource intensive undertaking, we illustrate how nonverbal social sensing, defined as the automated recording and extracting of nonverbal behavior via ubiquitous social sensing platforms, can be achieved. More precisely, we show how and what kind of nonverbal cues can be extracted and to what extent automated extracted nonverbal cues can be validly obtained with an illustrative research example. In a job interview, the applicant’s vocal and visual nonverbal immediacy behavior was automatically sensed and extracted. Results show that the applicant’s nonverbal behavior can be validly extracted. Moreover, both visual and vocal applicant nonverbal behavior predict recruiter hiring decision, which is in line with previous findings on manually coded applicant nonverbal behavior. Finally, applicant average turn duration, tempo variation, and gazing best predict recruiter hiring decision. Results and implications of such a nonverbal social sensing for future research are discussed.     

Use of Quality-Adjusted Life Year Weights with Dose-Response Models for Public Health Decisions: A Case Study of the Risks and Benefits of Fish Consumption

Risks associated with toxicants in food are often controlled by exposure reduction. When exposure recommendations are developed for foods with both harmful and beneficial qualities, however, they must balance the associated risks and benefits to maximize public health. Although quantitative methods are commonly used to evaluate health risks, such methods have not been generally applied to evaluating the health benefits associated with environmental exposures. A quantitative method for risk-benefit analysis is presented that allows for consideration of diverse health endpoints that differ in their impact (i.e., duration and severity) using dose-response modeling weighted by quality-adjusted life years saved. To demonstrate the usefulness of this method, the risks and benefits of fish consumption are evaluated using a single health risk and health benefit endpoint. Benefits are defined as the decrease in myocardial infarction mortality resulting from fish consumption, and risks are defined as the increase in neurodevelopmental delay (i.e., talking) resulting from prenatal methylmercury exposure. Fish consumption rates are based on information from Washington State. Using the proposed framework, the net health impact of eating fish is estimated in either a whole population or a population consisting of women of childbearing age and their children. It is demonstrated that across a range of fish methylmercury concentrations (0-1 ppm) and intake levels (0-25 g/day), individuals would have to weight the neurodevelopmental effects 6 times more (in the whole population) or 250 times less (among women of child-bearing age and their children) than the myocardial infarction benefits in order to be ambivalent about whether or not to consume fish. These methods can be generalized to evaluate the merits of other public health and risk management programs that involve trade-offs between risks and benefits.     

Identity,selfhood and dementia: messages for social work

Dementia has been identified as a policy priority area for the European Union (EU). Given projected figures on the global increase in dementia over the next few decades, working with people with dementia is likely to become an even more prominent area of activity for social workers in older people's services. Recent research has begun to engage with the subjective experiences of people with dementia and there is considerable focus within nursing literature on their active efforts to maintain identity and selfhood. However, these issues have received little attention within the domain of social work. This paper reviews recent research on the subjective experiences of people with dementia and discusses the implications for social work in relation to: early intervention; communication and assessment, and support arrangements. Based on experience in England, it is argued that the current policy and practice context constrains social work's ability to respond to these issues and that a supportive organisational context, as well as high levels of skill, time and commitment, are required if concepts of personhood and citizenship are to have meaning in practice.     

Nonprofit Board Balance and Perceived Performance

Based on prior literature, this article offers a reconciliation of the core roles of nonprofit boards and aligns these role‐sets with organizational theories. A survey instrument was developed and validated to measure each of four role‐sets (monitoring, supporting, partnering, and representing) to assess whether emphasis on specific roles affects board members’ perception of performance. Our study of nonprofit boards in a midsized midwestern city found that balance across the role‐sets was associated with effective organizational performance. Furthermore, when board members describe any of the four role‐sets as deficient, they perceive the organization as less effective. The results of the study provide practitioners with a validated survey tool that provides nonprofit boards with a method to identify which roles their board emphasizes.     

The Effect of Integrated Scheduling and Capacity Policies on Clinical Efficiency

In outpatient healthcare clinics, capacity, patient flow, and scheduling are rarely managed in an integrated fashion, so a question of interest is whether clinic performance can be improved if the policies that guide these decisions are set jointly. Despite the potential importance of this issue, we find surprisingly few studies that look at how the allocation of capacity, paired with various appointment scheduling policies and different patient flow configurations, affects patient flow and clinical efficiency. In this paper, we develop an empirically based discrete‐event simulation to examine the interactions between patient appointment policies and capacity allocation policies (i.e., the number of available examination rooms) and how they jointly affect various performance measures, such as resource utilization and patient waiting time. Findings suggest that scheduling lower‐variance, shorter appointments earlier in the clinic (and, conversely, higher‐variance, longer appointments later) results in less overall patient waiting without reducing physician utilization or increasing clinic duration. Additionally, exam rooms exhibited classic bottleneck behavior: there was no effect on physician utilization by adding exam rooms beyond a certain threshold, but too few exam rooms were devastating to clinic throughput. Some significant interactions between these variables were observed, but were not influential to the level of managerial concern. Clinicians' intuition about managing capacity in healthcare settings may differ substantially from best policies.     

Nonprofit and Social Marketing

Marketing Social Change: Changing Behavior to Promote Health, Social Development, and the Environment, by Alan R. Andreasen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. 367 pp., $30.95 cloth. Marketing Strategies for Nonprofit Organizations, by Siri Espy. Chicago, Ill.: Lyceum Books, 1993. 165 pp., $19.95 paper. Marketing Nonprofit Programs and Services: Proven and Practical Strategies to Get More Customers, Members, and Donors, by Douglas B. Herron. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997. 282 pp., $32.95 cloth.