Personal Identity and Civic Responsibility: "Rising to the Occasion" Narratives and Generativity in Community Action Student Interns

Twenty–two students in a community action certificate program supplied "rising to the occasion" narratives during summer–long internships. They also filled out measures of generativity. Twenty–one students in an international studies certificate program that also included a summer internship served as a comparison group. Both groups reported equal personal growth from rising to the occasion experiences and no differences on measures of optimism, self–esteem or generativity. However, the community action students linked their personal growth experiences to future community service; a regression analysis also revealed that the best predictor of their stress–related growth was their level of generative concern. No comparable links emerged for the comparison group. Implications for cultivating connections between personal identity and civic responsibility through service–learning are discussed.     

Are Poor Neighborhoods Resource Deprived? A Case Study of Childcare Centers in New York*

Objective. Many social scientists believe poor mothers are better off in middle‐class than in poor neighborhoods, partly because the latter are deprived of important institutional resources. We test whether poor neighborhoods are more likely to lack one critical institutional resource, the childcare center. Methods. We use geocoded data on all licensed centers in the City of New York, address matched to Census tracts. We estimate logit models of presence of center in tract, testing for the linear and nonlinear effects of tract poverty level after controlling for residential instability, joblessness, ethnic makeup, and other demographic factors. We complement the analysis with documentary, interview, and ethnographic data on centers in one poor and one nonpoor neighborhood in the city. Results. We find (1) that the probability of presence of a childcare center does not decrease as poverty level increases; (2) the relationship depends strongly on funding source, with privately funded centers being less likely and publicly funded ones more likely to be present in poor neighborhoods; and (3) at least two factors affect why poor neighborhoods are more likely to have certain centers, the local state and the (often neglected) nonprofit infrastructure. Conclusions. The findings suggest that poor mothers are not necessarily better off in middle‐class neighborhoods in this respect. The market assumptions underlying the initial hypothesis should be modified. More empirical research on the effect of the nonprofit sector on the prevalence of neighborhood institutions is needed.     

Governance and Participation in Local Welfare: The Case of the Italian Piani di Zona

This article analyses four cases of governance in Italian local welfare systems. Following Law 328/2000, the design and management of the social services system in Italy involve different public responsibility levels, mainly regional and municipal. In order to manage social policies, Italian municipalities have to join in new inter‐municipal groupings called ‘Piani di Zona’ (Area Plans). Moreover, the law provides for engaging in these Plans even local third‐sector organizations and citizens. The article attempts to highlight the implications of this complex system that is leading local authorities to open new governance arenas. We hereby present the results of a research project on two Piani di Zona in the Region of Lombardy (Northern Italy) and on two in the Region of Campania (Southern Italy), carried out by means of institutional analysis. We particularly focus on the dynamics of participation triggered by the Piani di Zona. Our hypothesis is that the role of public administration is a fundamental variable to understand the different ways of participating. In this sense, we discuss the dynamics of local governance by relaying them to four main questions: who participates in what, where and how?     

The impact of prison hospice: collaboration among social workers and other professionals in a criminal justice setting that promotes care for the dying

This study reports on a qualitative national telephone survey with coordinators of 14 prison hospice programs in 11 states. The rationale behind the survey was to learn about interdisciplinary collaboration between social work and criminal justice, using prison hospice as an exemplar of this collaboration. In addition to learning that all prison hospices in the study operate using an interdisciplinary team model and that most report high quality collaboration on the hospice team, the following additional five themes emerged: administrators and wardens are very supportive while correctional staff provides mixed support to team and program; greater collaboration with those outside prison hospice is critical; collaboration through prison hospice has a positive impact on dying prisoners; collaboration through prison hospice has a positive impact on prisoner volunteers; and, collaboration through prison hospice has a positive impact on the entire culture of the prison.     

Psychosocial Interventions for Maltreated and Violence-Exposed Children

Child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse as well as child neglect and domestic violence, community violence, and Childhood Traumatic Grief may result in significant and long-lasting emotional and behavioral difficulties. This article reviews randomized controlled studies that have assessed child mental health outcomes for maltreated and violence-exposed children. Key points of this review include the following: (1) maltreated and violence-exposed children typically experience more than one of these types of traumas; (2) effective psychosocial treatments are available to address Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and behavioral problems in these children; (3) it is likely that treatments which effectively reduce mental health symptoms in children exposed to one type of child maltreatment or violence exposure will also be effective for other or multiple types; and (4) mental health outcomes are not the only important outcomes to address in future treatment or intervention efforts. These future directions for treatment intervention research are addressed.     

Fertility Changes Among Immigrants: Generations,Neighborhoods, and Personal Characteristics*

Objective. To understand how adaptation/assimilation, disruption, and diffusion interact to produce changes in fertility levels among successive generations of Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States. Method. Using restricted access data that link individual data (CPS) to neighborhood data (census tracts), we examine the role of generation, personal characteristics, and neighborhood characteristics in determining children ever born (CEB). Results. There are significant differences in fertility across generations and, to a lesser extent, between women who live in ethnic enclaves and those who do not. Once personal characteristics are considered, the independent effect of generation on fertility is nearly eliminated. Personal characteristics dominate neighborhood characteristics in their ability to predict fertility. The most consistent predictor of CEB at the neighborhood level is the percentage of Hispanic adults. Conclusions. Personal characteristics dominate fertility change across generation, and were it not for increases in educational attainment, fertility might be higher in successive generations rather than lower or unchanged.     

Modified quasi-profile likelihoods from estimating functions

We discuss higher-order adjustments for a quasi-profile likelihood for a scalar parameter of interest, in order to alleviate some of the problems inherent to the presence of nuisance parameters, such as bias and inconsistency. Indeed, quasi-profile score functions for the parameter of interest have bias of order O(1)$\mathrm{O}(1)$, and such bias can lead to poor inference on the parameter of interest. The higher-order adjustments are obtained so that the adjusted quasi-profile score estimating function is unbiased and its variance is the negative expected derivative matrix of the adjusted profile estimating equation. The modified quasi-profile likelihood is then obtained as the integral of the adjusted profile estimating function. We discuss two methods for the computation of the modified quasi-profile likelihoods: a bootstrap simulation method and a first-order asymptotic expression, which can be simplified under an orthogonality assumption. Examples in the context of generalized linear models and of robust inference are provided, showing that the use of a modified quasi-profile likelihood ratio statistic may lead to coverage probabilities more accurate than those pertaining to first-order Wald-type confidence intervals.     

Analysis of growth curve data by using cubic smoothing splines

Longitudinal data frequently arises in various fields of applied sciences where individuals are measured according to some ordered variable, e.g. time. A common approach used to model such data is based on the mixed models for repeated measures. This model provides an eminently flexible approach to modeling of a wide range of mean and covariance structures. However, such models are forced into a rigidly defined class of mathematical formulas which may not be well supported by the data within the whole sequence of observations. A possible non-parametric alternative is a cubic smoothing spline, which is highly flexible and has useful smoothing properties. It can be shown that under normality assumption, the solution of the penalized log-likelihood equation is the cubic smoothing spline, and this solution can be further expressed as a solution of the linear mixed model. It is shown here how cubic smoothing splines can be easily used in the analysis of complete and balanced data. Analysis can be greatly simplified by using the unweighted estimator studied in the paper. It is shown that if the covariance structure of random errors belong to certain class of matrices, the unweighted estimator is the solution to the penalized log-likelihood function. This result is new in smoothing spline context and it is not only confined to growth curve settings. The connection to mixed models is used in developing a rough testing of group profiles. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the techniques proposed.