The third place

This article examines the benefits that accrue from the utilization and personalization of places outside the workplace and the home. It is argued that participation in these third places provides people with a large measure of their sense of wholeness and distinctiveness. Third places are characterized in terms of sociability and nondiscursive symbolism. The benefits of third place involvement are discussed with reference to diversity and novelty, emotional expressiveness, color, and perspective.     

A cognitive-sociobehavioral model of clinical social work practice and evaluation

Clinical Social Work Journal - In this article the author draws from the empirical work done in clinical psychology, counseling, social work, social psychology, and behavior modification to...     

Family Therapy and the Black Middle Class: A Neglected Area of Study*

Little has been written and virtually no empirical research has been presented concerning family therapy with members of the Black middle class. In this article, a number of factors are discussed in the light of recent sociological inquiries. These findings are discussed in terms of family systems theory in order to provide the clinician with some insights into the dynamics of family functioning in the Black community. Suggestions for working with these families are then offered. The question of whether White therapists can work effectively with Black families is discussed and the pertinent empirical findings available from the field of individual therapy are considered.     

Dimension reduction for the conditional kth moment in regression

The idea of dimension reduction without loss of information can be quite helpful for guiding the construction of summary plots in regression without requiring a prespecified model. Central subspaces are designed to capture all the information for the regression and to provide a population structure for dimension reduction. Here, we introduce the central k th-moment subspace to capture information from the mean, variance and so on up to the k th conditional moment of the regression. New methods are studied for estimating these subspaces. Connections with sliced inverse regression are established, and examples illustrating the theory are presented.     

Organising principles for international advocacy associations

Recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number of voluntary non-profit associations established to address solutions to major international social problems. Many of these associations concentrate on advocacy work, as opposed to service delivery, and are international in scope rather than based in a single country. This paper is concerned with the challenges to organising this particular type of voluntary association.While rapid progress in communications and transportation technology has undoubtedly facilitated the development of these associations, such organisations still face formidable problems. The paper argues that international advocacy associations are successful when they adopt particular organisational structures and strategies to accommodate these problems. In particular, decentralised and federated structures appear to be more viable for the international advocacy arena.This paper reviews relevant literature and elaborates on the theoretical expectations for successful structuring of international associations devoted to advocacy on global issues. Hypotheses are set forth and investigated in a preliminary way through the examination of case studies of three associations.This paper was originally prepared for the Annual Conference of the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars, London, July 1990. The author wishes to thank David Cooperrider and Bill Pasmore for their encouragement to undertake this work, the team of the Social Innovations Project in the Department of Organizational Behavior of the Weatherhead School of Management for allowing him the benefits of their field studies, and David Mason and Herman Stein for their helpful suggestions and useful insights.     

Contextual Models of Party Identification: A Critical Examination

A growing number of papers have appeared which report that the partisanship of the local context influences the party attachments of individual residents. The present paper criticizes this finding and the contextual approach to the study of partisan choice. First, the general mathematical model of contextual partisanship is derived from existing research. Next, a multiple data file, consisting of survey and aggregate evidence, is used to examine the generality of certain specific models. Finally, the same data file is employed to consider the effects of two assumptions common to contextual models, "random mixing" and nonselection. Only one of four specific models is initially found to fit observations. Further analysis reveals that individuals' party allegiances are spuriously attributed to contextual influences as a result of assuming random mixing and nonselection.