Researching Giving and Volunteering in Australia

The giving of time and money, mainly to private nonprofit organisations is not trivial, but in Australia has been little studied. This article introduces a special issue of the Australian Journal of Social Issues which draws on data collected in the largest study of giving and volunteering conducted in Australia hitherto. It seeks to establish terminological guidelines and reviews past Australian research on giving and volunteering, arguing that there has been a disproportionate interest in volunteering. It seeks to put to rest some common myths about giving and explores whether the increase in giving and volunteering can be attributed to government policy. It concludes by introducing the other papers in the collection.     

Publication rates after the first retraction for biomedical researchers with multiple retracted publications

Retraction of scientific publications can unmask scientific misconduct. We undertook a survey of publication rates, for authors with multiple retractions in the biomedical literature, to determine whether they changed after authors’ first retractions.

We collected publication and citation data from Scopus for 100 authors with multiple retractions (either >10 retractions or 2–5 retractions) in the Retraction Watch database.

Publication rates increased until the year of the first retraction and decreased rapidly thereafter. By 4 years after the first retraction, the proportion of authors actively publishing at least one paper/year was <50%, annual publication rates were <50% of the pre-retraction rate, and only 22% of authors had a publication rate >50% of their pre-retraction rate. There was no difference in the decline in publication rates between authors associated with a retraction for misconduct and those not associated with such a retraction. After the first retraction, citation rates of retracted papers declined whereas those of unretracted papers by the same authors remained unchanged.

In summary, publication rates of authors with multiple retractions, most of whom were associated with scientific misconduct, declined rapidly after their first retraction but a small minority continued to publish regularly.     

O. J. Simpson: A Threat to Internal Validity?

We examined the effects of a naturally occurring social event that had the potential to affect the results of an ongoing research project evaluating knowledge of and beliefs about battering in a simulated battered woman's homicide trial. When the O. J. Simpson murder allegations first unfolded, the study was 75% completed. The extent of media attention to issues of battering and domestic homicide necessitated the inclusion of additional research participants and more in-depth study of several related issues. Very few differences between pre-Simpson and post-Simpson participants were unearthed. For the majority of participants, the issue of domestic violence was likely not salient and was seen as a contextual factor for understanding why the homicides might have occurred, rather than as an independent focal point of substantive concern.     

The Parameters of Agency-School Social Work Educational Planning

Abstract

Reduced financial support and increased service demand have led many human service administrators to undertake coordination activities with other organizations in order to maintain services for clients. Many social work administrators have little understanding of interorganizational theory and techniques. This paper suggests, from a political economy perspective, that interorganizational theory and practice skills should be further developed in the social work administration curriculum. As a step in this direction, the paper first identifies key interorganizational concepts and research. Factors crucial to successful coordination are then summarized, and strategies for promoting successful coordination are detailed, with attention to benefits and costs of each strategy. Finally, the paper describes several alternative ways to integrate interorganizational content in the social work administration classroom and field placement.     

Parental Divorce and First-Year Students' Transition to University: The Need to Include Baseline Data and Gender

This research examines parental divorce and first-year students' transition to university. Incoming students (N = 2,724) to six diverse universities completed questionnaires in August, before university, and again in November and March. Initial baseline measures indicated that females of divorced parents reported more depressive symptoms than females of intact families, whereas males of divorced parents reported lower levels of perceived stress than those of intact families. These findings remained over the first year. Regarding adjustment to university, males with divorced parents reported the best academic adjustment, and females with divorced parents were most vulnerable regarding personal-emotional adjustment.     

Volunteering to Assist the Homeless: Public Service and Individual Differences

Abstract

The present investigation examined the effects of three public service announcements (PSAs) on undergraduates’ willingness to volunteer to assist the homeless at a local emergency shelter. A PSA designed to arouse empathy in listeners generally yielded a higher rate of volunteering to assist the homeless than either a self-oriented PSA or an unemotional, other-oriented PSA. The PSA designed to arouse empathy was found to be especially effective in promoting volunteering in individuals who scored relatively high on trait affective empathy and who, in turn, reported a relatively strong empathic response to this message.     

Imagined Futures and Communities: Older Lesbian and Gay People's Narratives on Health and Aged Care

This study examined older lesbians' and gays' experiences and expectations of Australian health and aged care service delivery. It was exploratory and comprised in-depth interviews with 14 older lesbian and gay people in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Interview data were analyzed according to the principles and techniques of narrative research. This included an analysis of the socio-linguistic properties of specific narratives, as well as a wider socio-cultural analysis of the meaning expressed in these narratives. Participants conveyed different types of narratives, including narratives on specific past events, habitual narratives, and hypothetical narratives. These involved reflections on past and anticipated care in local communities, lesbian and gay communities, and friendship networks.     

Identity Satisfaction Over the Life Course in Sexual Minorities

A variety of models have been proposed to understand the process of coming to terms with a sexual minority identity. What has not been so clearly explored is how an individual's satisfaction with his or her sexual identity develops over the life course. This article explores satisfaction with sexual identity in a large cohort (N = 2,269) of self-identified lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, and considers satisfaction not only from a chronos (life span) but also from a chairos (stage of development) framework. Data show a clear relationship between age group and increased satisfaction with a sexual minority identity. Resilience may be an important contributor to increased satisfaction.     

Reordering Public and Private in Iranian Cyberspace: Identity,Politics, and Mobilization

The capacity of cyberspace to bypass some of the spatial divisions that underpin social inequality endows it with political significance. This article examines some of the ways in which cyberspace has contributed to redrawing the boundaries between public and private and some of the consequences of this for people, things, and ideas in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. It shows how cyberspace influences a wide range of political phenomena including political mobilization and censorship, intergenerational communication, identity formation, sexuality, sense of belonging, and forms and location of symbolic capital. The relationship between net users in the diaspora and cyberspace involves a circuit of reorderings of one's understanding of the diaspora, one's contact with it in cyberspace, of one's own ideas on the basis of what one finds there, and of social relationships established and maintained in cyberspace. Paradoxically, the very richness and diversity of the ideas and opinions found in Iranian cyberspace may undermine the idea of there actually being a single Iranian diaspora.     

Buffalo's old first ward: A photographic study

This paper explores my journey into documentary photography and visual sociology. I will explain some of the events which led me to documentary photography, and eventually to the Old First Ward, a neighborhood in Buffalo I studied and photographed in depth. I wish to emphasize both the difficulty of finding my own “eye” as a photographer as well as the personal relationships which have made this process of self discovery and photographic practice fruitful.