Suicidal and Help-Seeking Behaviors Among Youth in an Online Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,Transgender, Queer,and Questioning Social Network

LGBTQ youth have a great burden for suicidal ideation/behavior compared to their non-LGBTQ peers. While scholars have explored risk factors for suicidal behaviors, little is known about protective factors among LGBTQ youth, let alone within group differences in terms of help-seeking. Data were collected from 203 TrevorSpace (e.g., a social network for LGBTQ youth) users via online survey to examine suicidal and help-seeking behaviors among LGBTQ individuals. Among participants who reported suicidal ideation/behavior, a large proportion did not seek help (73.1% of gay men, 33.3% of bisexual men, 42.9% of bisexual women, 14.3% of lesbian women, 41.2% of queer individuals) when they considered or attempted suicide. Among those who sought support, reaching out to a friend was most common. However, family support was associated with fewer suicidal behaviors. Our findings underscore the need to examine the effectiveness of specific sources of help and the impact of exposure to social connectedness.     

From Economic Gains to Social Losses

This paper analyzes how stories shaped treasurers’ expectations in municipal swap activities and contributes to the sociological debate on the mechanisms of expectation formation. Employing a deductive variant of process tracing, it synthesizes the literature on expectations in economic decision making with the literature on the diffusion of “ideas,” “myths,” and “fashions” in organization theory and management studies. The swap story has spread since the mid-1990s among German municipalities. At the heart of this story is the replacement of traditional borrowing with active portfolio optimization; financial instruments known as swaps play a leading role. This paper examines how stories shape expectations. Specifically, it delves into how the swap story, as a solution to the financial woes of local governments, shaped these governments’ expectations despite the uncertainty resulting from the instruments’ complexity. We argue that the effect of stories on expectations depends on timing. Expectations at an early stage are shaped by economic analyses to reduce uncertainty, while expectations at a later stage are primarily shaped by societal pressures and an established trend. These two distinct mechanisms produce expectations related to economic and social consequences, respectively. Selecting four typical cases, our analysis confirms that stories affected the formation of treasurers’ expectations regarding the use of swaps through these different mechanisms.     

What Explains the Decline in First Marriage in the United States? Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1969 to 2013

Rates of entry into first marriage have declined sharply in the United States during the past half century, and there is evidence of broad gaps in marriage entry by race and education. Although a large literature explores the influences on marriage for single cohorts, there is little research that tests explanations for this decline across multiple cohorts. The authors use individual and contextual measures of employment and incarceration to predict transitions to first marriage in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1969–2013). They test two prominent theories of why marriage rates have declined: the decreased availability of “marriageable” men and the increased economic standing of women. They find that men's reduced economic prospects and increased risk of incarceration contributed to the decline in first marriage rates during the past 45 years in the United States, although these basic measures of economic and carceral conditions cannot explain the entire decline.     

DO BUSINESSMEN MAKE GOOD GOVERNORS?

This paper evaluates the economic performance of U.S. state governors with a business background (chief executive officer [CEO] governors). Applying a matching method, I find, first, that businesspeople tend to take office in times of economic and fiscal strain. Second, the tenures of CEO governors are associated with a 0.5 percentage points (pp.) higher annual income growth rate, a 0.4 pp. higher growth rate of the private capital stock, and a 0.6 pp. lower unemployment rate than are the tenures of non‐CEO governors. State‐level income inequality is not affected by CEO governors holding office, indicating that low‐income households benefit from the economic upswing. (JEL C21, E24, O47)     

Antiracism Expanding Social Work Education: A Qualitative Analysis of the Undoing Racism Workshop Experience

The importance of addressing implications of racism has reached a critical point at colleges and universities across the United States, and schools of social work are no exception. This study uses grounded theory methods to thematically analyze data from student participants (N=30) on their thoughts and reactions during a 2 1/2-day Undoing Racism workshop sponsored by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Qualitative data were collected to answer the research question, How do students experience an intensive Undoing Racism workshop, and what are the implications for integrating antiracism into social work education? Findings imply that workshop-based learning may be more effective than solely using course content to teach antiracism material and also indicate the importance of activity-based learning, as well as an emphasis on developing concrete strategies to combat racism.     

Official standards and local knowledge in asylum procedures: decision-making in Germany’s asylum system

ABSTRACT

The role of public officials in asylum procedures is generally a critical concern in scholarly and political debates. Focusing on the asylum system in Germany, this paper seeks to understand asylum procedures with regard to officially claimed standards and the still varying practices of decision-making. It draws on the findings of a qualitative study based on a multi-method design and carried out in the asylum administration. Based on a sociology of knowledge approach, the paper shows that administrative practices are largely a matter of how decision-makers on the ground interpret legal and political regulations. We demonstrate that decision-makers utilise shifting strategies to handle official claims and cope with local settings in their daily work, from defining the applicant to reaching decisions about asylum requests. The administration of asylum applications is discussed as a field that uses and (re-)produces both authorised and informal knowledge. Caseworkers develop a pragmatic knowledge of how to deal with the discrepancies between official standards and local working conditions. However, it is the asylum institution that provides the context in which they navigate the pitfalls and challenges of the asylum procedure.     

The voice of lived experience: mobile video narratives in the courtroom

Video is overtaking other modes of communication in new media. Whether from a smartphone, a wearable device or surveillance camera, video is being made, stored and shared in unprecedented ways. Once the exclusive territory of institutions becomes large enough to finance video production and its storytelling power, technology’s contemporary democratization is changing the landscape of visual narrative. This project explores the discursive nature of video based on a case study of a courtroom trial that was both about the legality of filming crime scenes and the evidentiary use of videos from crime scenes. This unique intersection of surveillance, counter-surveillance, word and image, body and text allows for deeper understanding of how video serves human purposes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, we build upon Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm by identifying significant attributes of unedited, evidentiary video that distinguish it from other forms of visual documentation. Raw video’s hard-edged timeline presents narrative coherence in a way that resists discursive contextualization. This has important implications for public policy and citizen-generated video evidence.     

Determinants of Work-life Balance: Shortcomings in the Contemporary Measurement of WLB in Large-scale Surveys

Research on work-life balance (WLB) has presented important insights into the problems of combining family aspirations with paid work in relation to policy relevant agendas. Using the ESS II (2004/2005), we examine work-related and household/family-related causes of WLB. We can corroborate other research findings that show that work-related aspects explain by far the largest part of the variation in WLB. However, we illustrate that the measurement of WLB is partly problematic. Because WLB scales conceptualize the work component more specifically than the life component, what ‘life’ means remains rather intangible apart from general references to the ‘home’, ‘housework’ and ‘family responsibilities’. This largely neglects different emic dimensions to WLB common to specific subgroups and renders the measurement rather abstract. Second, the wordings of WLB indicators already include their most probable explanations. There is the danger of a circular argument here and many explanations seem tautological. This makes it difficult to conclude on the effects of other than work-related aspects on WLB, which are, arguably, also important aspects of WLB. Finally, WLB scales hardly correlate with relevant external criteria, for instance subjective well-being. Following from these findings, we discuss what these WLB scales could really measure and propose to broaden quantitative empirical approaches to it.

An inspection game of internal audit and the influence of whistle-blowing

In this paper we analyse how whistle-blowing affects fraudulent behaviour of managers while the company instigates imperfect internal audit to detect the fraud. To do so, we employ in a first step a non-cooperative inspection game to analyse fraudulent behaviour of a manager controlled by an internal auditor. In a second step we introduce exogenous whistle-blowing of a manager’s employee to aid the auditor to reveal the fraud. In a third step, the two-person inspection game is extended to a three-person approach with endogenous whistle-blowing. Our novel results are that the intensity of internal audit is always lower with whistle-blowing than without and that whistle-blowing renders the manager to act less fraudulently than compared to the basic inspection game if and only if she is unaware of the whistle-blower’s expected pay-off and the efficacy of internal audit is sufficiently low.