Racial/Ethnic Minority Community College Students' Critical Consciousness and Social Cognitive Career Outcomes

A need exists to better understand how racial/ethnic minority students' critical consciousness development in response to marginalization may be involved in their educational and career development. We therefore examined the link between critical consciousness development and career decision self-efficacy and career outcome expectations among racial/ethnic minority community college students. Following social cognitive career theory's conceptual pillars, we developed a testable model integrating critical consciousness and social cognitive variables. This model was tested with 135 racially and ethnically diverse community college students. Data analysis included path analyses and tests of model fit using structural equation modeling. Results suggested that (a) higher critical agency is linked to higher career decision self-efficacy and outcome expectations and (b) critical action and reflection have a bidirectional link and predict higher critical agency. Implications for research and practice aiming to close educational and career gaps among racial/ethnic minorities are discussed.     

Archival Work as Qualitative Sociology

Qualitative Sociology -     

How School Contexts Shape the Relations Among Adolescents’ Beliefs,Peer Victimization,and Depressive Symptoms

The present research examined how school contexts shape the extent to which beliefs about the potential for change (implicit theories) interact with social adversity to predict depressive symptoms. A preregistered multilevel regression analysis using data from 6,237 ninth‐grade adolescents in 25 U.S. high schools showed a three‐way interaction: Implicit theories moderated the associations between victimization and depressive symptoms only in schools with high levels of school‐level victimization, but not in schools with low victimization levels. In high‐victimization schools, adolescents who believed that people cannot change (an entity theory of personality) were more depressed when they were victimized more frequently. Thus, the mental health correlates of adolescents’ implicit theories depend on both personal experiences and the norms in the context.     

Palm snags are a critical nesting resource for woodpeckers in an urbanized tropical region

Urban Ecosystems - Critical resources for birds nesting in cities can support populations in spite of the challenges imposed by urbanization, and the identification of such resources can shed light...     

Recent developments in school social control

In the U.S., decisions regarding social control are increasingly modeled on two dominant institutions: the criminal justice and medical/healthcare systems. Sociologists and other scholars refer to this adoption of legal and/or medical terminology and technologies as criminalization and medicalization. These models of social control are particular evident in how America defines and manages child behavior. Public schools borrow from both the criminal justice and medical systems as part of the routine educational setting. In this article, I provide the first synthesis and review of the school criminalization and medicalization literatures. In doing so, I argue that criminalized school social controls provide harsh, repressive responses to student misbehavior, while medicalized school social controls provide rehabilitative and restitutive responses. Given these fundamentally different approaches to student behavior, I argue that the disproportionate use of criminalized and medicalized social control across racial/ethnic groups and children from different socioeconomic backgrounds entrenches inequalities and functions to channel racial/ethnic minorities and poor children into the school‐to‐prison pipeline while keeping socially advantaged children in school and away from the problems associated with criminalized social control.     

Comparative Perspectives on Social Indicators

Social Indicators Research -     

Prediction of tumour pathological subtype from genomic profile using sparse logistic regression with random effects

The purpose of this study is to highlight the application of sparse logistic regression models in dealing with prediction of tumour pathological subtypes based on lung cancer patients'' genomic information. We consider sparse logistic regression models to deal with the high dimensionality and correlation between genomic regions. In a hierarchical likelihood (HL) method, it is assumed that the random effects follow a normal distribution and its variance is assumed to follow a gamma distribution. This formulation considers ridge and lasso penalties as special cases. We extend the HL penalty to include a ridge penalty (called ‘HLnet’) in a similar principle of the elastic net penalty, which is constructed from lasso penalty. The results indicate that the HL penalty creates more sparse estimates than lasso penalty with comparable prediction performance, while HLnet and elastic net penalties have the best prediction performance in real data. We illustrate the methods in a lung cancer study.     

An elastic-net penalized expectile regression with applications

To perform variable selection in expectile regression, we introduce the elastic-net penalty into expectile regression and propose an elastic-net penalized expectile regression (ER-EN) model. We then adopt the semismooth Newton coordinate descent (SNCD) algorithm to solve the proposed ER-EN model in high-dimensional settings. The advantages of ER-EN model are illustrated via extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The numerical results show that the ER-EN model outperforms the elastic-net penalized least squares regression (LSR-EN), the elastic-net penalized Huber regression (HR-EN), the elastic-net penalized quantile regression (QR-EN) and conventional expectile regression (ER) in terms of variable selection and predictive ability, especially for asymmetric distributions. We also apply the ER-EN model to two real-world applications: relative location of CT slices on the axial axis and metabolism of tacrolimus (Tac) drug. Empirical results also demonstrate the superiority of the ER-EN model.     

Industrial Policy Capture in Taiwan and South Korea

Whatever the theoretical merits of an industrial policy, in practice state incentives in support of infant industry are difficult to withdraw once they have been granted. Infant maturation is thereby delayed, resulting in ‘policy capture’ which confers rents on the assisted firms at the expense of consumers and/or taxpayers. The process is well-documented in poorly managed economies pursuing autarkic industrial policies (Auty, 1994a). This article examines evidence of policy capture in well-managed economies pursuing competitive industrial policies. Examples are drawn from the heavy (and chemical) industry drives of South Korea (hereafter Korea) and Taiwan, but the research is first set in the context of the industrial policy debate.     

The Effects of Personality Type on Choices Made in Strategic Decision Situations*

Jung's personality-theory typology is used as a framework for exploring the effects of cognitive style on the type and radicalness of choices made in strategic decision situations. Extending the work of Haley and Stumpf [23], it is proposed that individuals with different personality-type preferences exhibit cognitive styles that are associated with specific biases in the pattern of choices they make. Through participation in an interactive behavioral simulation, 407 participants confronted over one hundred ill-structured decision situations and proposed whatever actions they perceived appropriate. The results support the hypothesized relationships that individuals with different personality-type preferences (i.e., sensing-thinking, intuition-thinking, sensing-feeling, and intuition-feeling) take patterns of actions that reflect specific biases (i.e., selective perception, positivity, social desirability, and reasoning-by-analogy, respectively). The implications of these findings for evaluating the likely effectiveness of strategic decisions and making senior-level staffing decisions are discussed.