The Poverty Deconcentration Imperative and Public Housing Transformation

Public housing has been on the chopping block for almost two decades now in an effort to deconcentrate poverty. In 1992 the federal government created the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI program. HOPE VI is driven by the assumption that deconcentrating neighborhood‐level poverty will yield better access to upward mobility opportunities for former public housing residents. To accomplish this, existing public housing is demolished and replaced with mixed‐income developments. Public housing residents are relocated, many with Housing Choice Voucher subsidies to private‐market rental housing. However, by its very definition mixed income means that only a small percentage of former residents get the opportunity to return. Do voucher relocated residents end up in lower poverty neighborhoods with greater upward mobility opportunities? We examine the spatial organization of relocation within the critical discourse on the deconcentration imperative. We highlight Atlanta because it recently became the first city in the nation to eliminate all of its public housing. Findings reveal that voucher relocatees end up in neighborhoods with modestly less poverty than the public housing neighborhoods they left. Questions remain about what poverty deconcentration means vis‐à‐vis policy goals. We provide recommendations for future research.     

Getting Active in the Gulf: Environmental Attitudes and Action Following Two Mississippi Coastal Disasters

The current study examined the impact of the Gulf Oil Spill and Hurricane Katrina, environmental attitudes, and environmental action among residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The authors sought to determine if disaster impact, worry about the environment, or connection to nature was associated with environmental action following the oil spill and in general. We hypothesized that disaster impact and environmental attitudes would be significantly associated with environmental action. Surveys were administered to 1,108 individuals receiving mental health services in connection with the Gulf Oil Spill. Results indicated that disaster impact was correlated with environmental worry, connection to nature, and action. Additionally, environmental worry and connection to nature were significantly associated with action, as were the effects of Hurricane Katrina to a lesser degree. This study supplements the existing literature by examining environmental attitudes, disaster impact, and their association with environmental action following two disasters.     

Student-Athletes and Gambling: An Analysis of Attitudes Towards Risk-Taking

Gambling scandals at Arizona State University, Boston College, and Northwestern University have made gambling prevention a point of emphasis in the NCAA and throughout colleges and universities across the nation. Despite this emphasis, there is minimal research at any level regarding gambling and student-athletes. This research examines attitudinal differences towards risk-taking among student-athletes who gamble on college sports and those who indicate no such gambling activity. Our findings indicate that student-athletes who gambled were more likely to have attitudes supportive of risk taking behavior than their student-athlete peers who did not gamble.     

Lay and Expert Interpretations of Cancer Cluster Evidence

Conflict frequently occurs between community members and environmental/public health officials when an unusual number of cancer cases is reported. This conflict may result from different ways in which laypeople and experts interpret facts to judge whether there is an environmental cause of the cancer cases, but little is known about this issue. Volunteer laypeople (N= 551) and epidemiologists (N= 105) read a hypothetical scenario about cases of cancer on one neighborhood block. Participants judged whether each of the 23 facts about the situation made it “much more likely” to “much less likely” that something in town was causing the cancer cases (7‐point scale). The facts were designed to be “alarming,”“reassuring,” or “neutral” (i.e., according to epidemiological principles, should increase, decrease, or have no impact on the likelihood of an environmental cause). The laypeople were alarmed by most of the facts (mean response significantly greater than the scale midpoint), including all of the neutral facts and over half of the reassuring facts. The experts were more balanced: they were alarmed by none of the neutral or reassuring facts. Their responses showed significantly less alarm than the laypeople's responses (p < 0.0001 for all comparisons). This study reveals that laypeople are not reassured by information that substantially lowers the chance of an environmental cause for cancer cases. Lay responses differ significantly and systematically from experts who are far less alarmed by relevant facts. These findings may help explain the conflicts between the two groups in situations where concern about cases of cancer arises in a community.     

Children as Witnesses: Understanding Their Capacities, Needs, and Experiences

Historically the law regarded children as inherently unreliable and made it difficult for them to testify. Since 1975 awareness of child abuse has increased and research has established that children can be reliable witnesses. Governments began to recognize the needs and capacities of children and enacted legal reforms to facilitate prosecutions for child abuse. This paper reports on a survey of victim witness workers and other justice system professionals which reveals some of the continued failings of that system in dealing with children. Although relatively rare, there are cases of false allegations of abuse, usually a result of investigations by poorly trained professionals. Further legal reforms and better human supports are required to ensure that the needs of children are met and their capacities as witnesses are fully appreciated.     

Glassblowing Tools: Extending the Body Towards Practical Knowledge and Informing a Social World

Understanding tools in the development of practical knowledge and in the formation of social worlds is critical for the sociology of culture insofar as they reveal how matter, or material, informs practice and discourse. This article is an ethnographic exploration of the variations of the maker-tool-material relation in glassblowing, informed by Bourdieu's logic of practice as well as phenomenological considerations of the body's dispositions towards and interactions with the material world. These relations form the backbone of the glassblowing studio, and more importantly provide the subject matter of ‘tool talk,’ studio talk about tools, which forges feelings of empathy and consequently contributes to the formation of the glassblowing social world. Through this exploration, we come to understand how material, the subject of much studio discourse, is a structuring force of a lifeworld, the glassblowing studio.

Rural and urban women's perceptions of barriers to health, mental health, and criminal justice services: implications for victim services

The purpose of this study was to examine rural and urban women's perceptions of barriers to health and mental health services as well as barriers to criminal justice system services. Eight focus groups were conducted, two in a selected urban county (n = 30 women) and two in each of three selected rural counties (n = 98 women). Results were classified into a barrier framework developed in the health service utilization literature which suggests there are four main dimensions of barriers: affordability, availability, accessibility, and acceptability. Results indicate that: (1) women face many barriers to service use including affordability, availability, accessibility, and acceptability barriers; (2) it takes an inordinate level of effort to obtain all kinds of services; however, women with victimization histories may face additional barriers over and above women without victimization histories; (3) barriers to health and mental health service utilization overlap with barriers to utilizing the criminal justice system; and (4) there are many similarities in barriers to service use among rural and urban women; however, there are some important differences suggesting barriers are contextual. Future research is needed to further clarify barriers to service use for women with victimization histories in general, and specifically for rural and urban women. In addition, future research is needed to better understand how women cope with victimization in the context of the specific barriers they face in their communities.     

Domestic Outsourcing in an Ultra-Low Fertility Context: Employing Live-in Domestic Help and Fertility in Hong Kong

The fertility rate in Hong Kong has been very low for decades. Because work–family conflict is one of the major barriers for married couples in actualizing their fertility ideals, domestic outsourcing that relieves women from the burden of domestic labor may help reduce the gap between ideal and actual fertility. Hiring live-in domestic helpers, who co-reside with the hiring families and work on a full-time basis, is gaining popularity in Hong Kong. However, past studies neither inside nor outside of East Asia have examined how employing live-in helpers affects fertility. This study investigates the relationship between live-in helpers and fertility by analyzing retrospective event-history data we collected from a representative survey of married couples in Hong Kong (n?=?1697). Our results show that married couples employing live-in helpers tend to have more children than couples not employing live-in helpers. Specifically, the practice is associated with higher odds of first childbirth and of second childbirth, with no evidence of a positive effect beyond bearing a second child. The findings have implications for other East Asian societies, which share similar backgrounds of ultra-low fertility rates, rising female labor force participation rates, rigid gender inequalities in domestic labor, and demanding work cultures.