Heart ed 101

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States. Risk factors and health behaviors combine over time to contribute to the disease process. College communities provide a unique environment for health promotion, risk reduction, and primary intervention. Heart health should be an integral part of college health.     

Efficiency and equity as goals for contemporary U.S. immigration policy

As the United States has entered its postindustrial stage of economic development, mass immigration has again become a distinguishing feature of the U.S. economy. In all of its diverse forms, immigration presently accounts for anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the annual growth of the U.S. labor force. By the turn of the 21st century, it could conceivably comprise all of such growth.Immigration is the one aspect of population and labor force growth that public policy should be able to shape and control. Unfortunately, however, the extant public policies that govern the size and composition of the immigrant and refugee flows are largely unrelated to emerging economic considerations.The revival of mass immigration is not taking place in a vacuum. Indeed, it appears that the labor market is being radically transformed. The demand for labor is increasingly favoring those workers with skill and education. There are diminishing needs for job seekers without these human capital endowments. On the labor supply side, it is unfortunately the case that the United States already has a significant number of adults who are ill-prepared for many jobs that are being created.To assist in this effort to enhance efficiency, immigration policy should be flexible. It should be capable of responding to changing domestic economic conditions. Currently, the nation's immigration policy is dominated by political motivations that give priority to family reunification and humanitarian goals. Immigration can be a short run means to provide skilled and educated workers to fill critical worker shortages. But in the long run, equity considerations derived from the nation's multiracial and multicultural character of the labor force also come into play. It is imperative that citizen workers be prepared for the high quality jobs in the growth industries of its postindustrial economy. Immigration must not inhibit market pressures from encouraging employers to provide better opportunities for training and employment of citizens.The obverse is also true. It is essential that immigration does not provide only workers who can be employed in the declining occupations and industries. With a sizeable adult illiteracy problem already, the nation can ill-afford to increase the pool of unskilled and poorly educated workers, which increases the competition among such workers for the shrinking number of jobs available to them.     

How does POSSLQ measure up? Historical estimates of cohabitation

We use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1977 to 1997 to produce a new historical series of indirect cohabitation prevalence estimates. We compare our new estimates with those produced by the traditional method and evaluate the new estimates. We then compare the indirect estimates with the new direct estimates to investigate whether biases exist in the indirect estimates. Our findings indicate that the traditional indirect method of estimating cohabitation prevalence underestimates cohabitors in different subpopulations, especially among those with children. We also find that the new indirect measure produces relatively unbiased estimates of cohabitors' characteristics.     

Self-care: Why do parents leave their children unsupervised?

We used a preferences-and-constraints model to develop four hypotheses to explain why parents may choose self-care (an unsupervised arrangement) as the primary child care arrangement for their children over supervised alternatives and tested them in a multivariate framework using 1995 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We found that the choice of self-care over supervised care alternatives is linked to the availability of parents' time to care for children, the child's level of responsibility and maturity, and the neighborhood context. However, we found no evidence that parents' ability to pay for child care is related to the choice of self-care. The results also suggest that parents use different decision-making processes, depending on their children's ages.     

Social-Cognitive Factors in Childhood Social Anxiety: A Preliminary Investigation

The present study addresses the social cognition of socially anxious children, with particular emphasis on their ability to understand others' mental states in interpersonal situations. The heterogeneous sample used in this preliminary investigation consisted of 63 primary school children in England and the USA. The English children were from a mainstream classroom of 8- to 9-year-olds, while the children from the USA ranged in age from 6 to 11 years and had been selected by school district officials for a variety of social interaction difficulties. All children completed measures of social anxiety, shy negative affect, and various social-cognitive abilities, and teacher ratings of social skills were additionally available for the USA subgroup. Results showed that feelings of social anxiety are not associated with any basic deficit in the understanding of recursive mental states which concern facts about the physical world. However, there was evidence that socially anxious children—particularly those with high levels of shy negative affect—do experience specific social-cognitive difficulties in understanding the links between emotions, intentions, and beliefs in social situations. Providing further support for this link, socially anxious children were rated by their teachers as poorer than non-anxious children only on social skills that require insight into others' mental states. Directions for further examination of this complex interplay between cognitive and emotional factors in the development of social anxiety are discussed.     

Public relations practice in Japan: an exploratory study

Ninety-four (62%) survey responses in the Japanese language from 151 corporate public relations professionals in Japan were analyzed to investigate how Japanese management styles have changed since the recent economic recession, and how present management styles have impacted public relations practice in Japan. Findings suggest today’s Japanese management styles are not a static system unaffected by the economic pressures, and that current public relations practices in Japan align more closely with mixed models of public relations practiced in Western societies.     

Gendered Work Meets Gendered Goods: Selling and Service in Clothing Retail

This article explores the way retail work entails a complex form of gendering. Three distinct, but related, forms of gendering interweave in this sector of the service economy. These are the gendering of the work tasks, the gendered structure of the occupation and the gender of the retail environment. Using insights from the sociology of consumption and expanding the notion of aesthetic labour to incorporate insights from Bourdieu's sociology, the article explores how retail workers manifest particular forms of gendered embodiment, enacting a different sort of feminine performance according to the brand strategies of the organization they are employed in. The gendered objects of consumption are thus shown to be critical to understanding the nature of retail service work.     

The governance of free/open source software projects: monolithic, multidimensional, or configurational?

This paper presents the results of a qualitative review and synthesis of the literature on open source governance, addressing four key questions: (1) How has open source software (OSS) governance been defined? (2) Has the phenomenon of OSS governance been conceptualized as a monolithic or multidimensional phenomenon? (3) What purposes is OSS governance hypothesized to serve? and (4) What are the dimensions of OSS governance, and how are these dimensions related to each other? The results of the review suggest a framework for future comparative and case study research on OSS governance, and they provide a basis for comparison with research on the governance of other distributed, community-based forms of content and creation.