Second generation decline? Children of immigrants,past and present--a reconsideration

"Is the contemporary second generation on the road to the upward mobility and assimilation that in retrospect characterized the second generation of earlier immigrations? Or are the American economic context and the racial origins of today's immigration likely to result in a much less favorable future for the contemporary second generation? While several recent papers have argued for the latter position, we suspect they are too pessimistic. We briefly review the second generation upward mobility in the past and then turn to the crucial comparisons between past and present."     

Mexico-United States labor migration flows

"International migration from Mexico to the United Sates is viewed very differently depending on from which side of the border this phenomenon is observed and evaluated....[It is] imperative to begin a process of ?demythifying' migration as a necessary and sufficient condition that would allow both countries to come together within the context of bilateral relations and find ways to act jointly to address the impacts of the issue. Such a demythifying effort must begin with scientific research which can help develop a diagnosis of the costs and benefits that labor migration from Mexico to the United States brings to the two countries."     

Book reviews

The Political Sociology of Florian Znaniecki and Contemporary Politics (in Polish), Olgierd Sochacki (Ed.) Wydawnictwo Gdanskie, The Scientific Society of Gdansk, 1996

Why Read. Internal Space and the Social Function of Literature: An Investigation with. Psychoanalysts and Psychology Students, Graziella Pagliano (Ed.) Bonanno Editore, 1994

Voix Littéraires de Femmes

Cuadernos sobre Vico, Nos 5–6, José M. Sevilla et al. 1995–96

Studi in memoria di Ernesto Grassi Proceedings of the International Conference in Memory of Ernesto Grassi (Ischia, 4–6 October 1993), Emilio Hidalgo‐Serna and Massimo Marassi (Eds), Napoli, La Città del Sole, 1996

Naples Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Fiosofici, La Gittà del Sole, Napoli, 1996

Family, Women and Employment in Central‐Eastern Europe, Barbara Lobodzinska (Ed.) Greenwood Press, 1995     

Disciplines of Organizational Learning: Contributions and Critiques

The paper argues against attempts to create asingle framework for understanding organizationallearning. Relevant literature is reviewed from sixdisciplinary perspectives: psychology and OD; management science; sociology and organizational theory;strategy; production management; and culturalanthropology. It is argued that each discipline providesdistinct contributions and conceptions of problems.Furthermore, a basic distinction between organizationallearning and the new idea of the learning organizationis noted. Whereas the former is discipline based andanalytic,the latter is multidisciplinary and emphasizes action and the creation of anideal-type of organization. Due to thediversity of purpose and perspective, it is suggestedthat it is better to consider organizational learning asa multidisciplinary field containing complementary contributions andresearch agendas.     

Evaluation design for a community prevention trial. An environmental approach to reduce alcohol-involved trauma

The Community Prevention Trial was 5-year effort to reduce alcohol-involved injuries and death through a comprehensive program of community awareness and policy activities. The three experimental communities were of approximately 100,000 population each (one in Northern California, one in Southern California, and one in South Carolina). Matched comparison communities were used for each experimental community. This article describes the evaluation approach used in a program that sought to change environmental factors not a specific population or target group. This approach demanded unique evaluation approaches for determining overall community aggregate effects, that is, distal outcomes, as well as changes in key mediating variables, that is, process effects. The problem of trending and lagged effects of community prevention programs are discussed.     

Analysis approaches to community evaluation

Analysis approaches to the evaluation of community interventions must be sensitive to a wide variety of analytic contaminants that may bias the statistical assessment of changes in outcome measures. These contaminants include model misspecifications related to failures to control for community-specific time trends, temporal autocorrelated errors in equations, spatial autocorrelated errors among geographic units, and other failures of unit independence otherwise indexed by estimated intraclass correlations. Although an enormous amount of progress has been made toward the solution of many of these analytic problems over the past years, the contemporary evaluator of community interventions is left with a number of unenviable design and analysis choices; choices that inevitably force an assessment of the relative threats of different sources of error to the internal and external validity of the evaluation. This article describes the choices made for the evaluation of the Community Trial Project outcome data.     

Summing up. Recommendations and experiences for evaluation of community-level prevention programs

This article provides recommendations and observations about evaluation of a locally based prevention project to reduce problems at a total community or aggregate level. The shift from targeting specific individuals or subpopulations to the overall structure and environment of a community is most demanding. Evaluation tools and analysis techniques have lagged behind program development because community-level interventions are not linked to a specific target group who can be separately studied. Thus assumptions about using random assignment and/or comparison communities as means to control for confounding variables are weakened when the unit of analysis is the community itself and dependent measures are subject to trending and the effects of history.     

Validating quality indicators. Quality as relationship between structure, process, and outcome

Theory and research have not kept pace with the growing interest in evaluating quality of mental health care, resulting in the use of unvalidated quality indicators. A framework for validating quality indicators is offered by which quality is viewed as the relationship between service structures, processes, and outcomes. Adoption of this framework will facilitate the measurement of quality using valid indicators and should be useful to agencies in their continuous quality improvement efforts. Valid information about the quality of mental health care services will help purchasers and consumers make more informed health care decisions.