Parents' roles and question‐asking during pretend and real activities

All activities—real and pretend—provide children opportunities to learn new facts and skills, and parents are often facilitators. Yet little is known about whether and how parents' roles and interactions differ during pretend versus real activities. Here, we examine whether parents self‐report adopting different roles during pretend and real activities and whether we observe changes in their behavior, in particular in their question‐asking; either could impact the potential learning opportunities available to children. Thirty‐two parents engaged their 4‐year ‐olds in one pretend and one real activity (cleaning and snacking, counterbalanced). They self‐reported their roles, and speech was transcribed and coded. Parents regarded their role as a partner in fun during pretend and as a teacher or monitor during real activities. Across pretend and real contexts, they mostly asked information‐seeking questions, followed by rhetorical and pedagogical questions. They asked significantly more questions during pretend than real activities, particularly rhetorical questions. During real activities, parents' roles were not related to the number or types of questions they asked. However, during pretend, their roles were related to the number of rhetorical questions they asked: Monitors asked significantly fewer than teachers. Possible complementary benefits of each activity based on patterns of roles and questions are discussed.     

“SOCIOECONOMIC DIVERSITY IS OVERRATED”: WHITE ATTITUDES ON RACE AND CLASS IN A RACIALLY INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD

This article investigates homeowners' perceptions of race and class within a racially integrated neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Forty-two semi-structured interviews were completed with 59 white homeowners between September 2005 and September 2006. Adding a social class component to Bonilla-Silva's (2006 ——— . 2006 . Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, , 2nd edition . Lanham , MD : Rowman & Littlefield . [Google Scholar]) color-blind racism perspective, I ask if white homeowners in a racially-integrated neighborhood accept a color-blind worldview, or if they have an alternate framework for understanding race. Akin to O'Brien's antiracists (2001 Bonilla-Silva , Eduardo. 2001 . White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era . Boulder , CO : Lynne Rienner Publishers . [Google Scholar]), there was a range of rejection of color-blindness, from selective to reflexive race cognizance. Most homeowners recognized the institutional basis of racial inequality and their own white privilege. However, many conflated race and class and argued that it was really class differences that caused racial differences. While many supported more racial integration, most rejected class integration in the neighborhood. This paradoxical set of attitudes will most likely continue to be an obstacle to the maintenance of racially integrated neighborhoods.     

Mental Health Workforce Change Through Social Work Education: A California Case Study

The 2004 CaliforniaMental Health Services Act requires large-scale system change in the public mental health system through a shift to recovery-oriented services for diverse populations. This article describes an innovative strategy for workforce recruitment and retention to create and sustain these systemic changes. The California Social Work Education Center Mental Health Program provides stipends to master's of social work students at 17 California universities. In return, students must work for 1 year postgraduation in community mental health practice. Results of a 5-year study show that stipend recipients closely mirror the diverse demographics of the state, and 94% have remained in community mental health practice. The article also discusses lessons learned and implications for social work education in California and other states.     

Don't Ask,Don't Tell and Other LGB Civil Rights Issues: Effects of Terminology on Public Opinion

“Don't Ask, Don't Tell” was devised to combat the perceived costs associated with gays and lesbians openly serving in the military, including low unit cohesion, damage to the military's reputation, and the general population's lack of acceptance for homosexuals serving (Belkin, 2008). However, recent polls and policy reversal have shown growing public support for homosexuals being allowed to serve openly. Interestingly, the amount of support has varied as a function of question wording. Two polls conducted by CBS News found support for homosexuals serving in the military varied with greater support for “gays and lesbians” compared to “homosexuals.” Two studies were conducted to further examine the effect of terminology on reported support. Two samples reported opinions for homosexual civil rights issues. Sexual orientation was described using the terms gay men and lesbians, homosexuals, gay men, or lesbians. Percentage differences were found to be greater than those reported in the CBS polls, as wording choice had an effect on reported openness regarding homosexual civil rights. These differences indicate that it is important to consider precise terminology usage when measuring opinions. Levels of support, stereotypes activated, and the relationship between support for civil rights and general levels of prejudice were examined.     

Watching The Daily Show in Kenya

Global distribution of a popular American television programme – Jon Stewart's Daily Show – offers a rare opportunity to examine transnational contingencies of meaning in political satire. Drawing on focus group discussions in Kenya, this analysis shows how some East Africans appropriated and reinterpreted – indeed unexpectedly subverted – The Daily Show's political content, deriving from it insights that Stewart himself might have found surprising. Kenyan viewers perceived in The Daily Show gaps between the rhetoric and reality of empire and pointed to limitations of Stewart's dissident satire as they rejected its depictions of non-wealthy nations and marginalized peoples. They reconfigured Daily Show episodes as commentaries on global power relations; reflected critically on Kenyan politics, media and their own political subjectivities; and revised their own earlier assumptions about the gap between Africa and supposedly ‘mature’ democracies such as the United States. Thus, American political satire such as The Daily Show can activate in foreign audiences new perceptions of differences between the ‘West’ and the rest and new forms of political imagination.     

Movement Building and the United States Social Forum

Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.     

Opportunity, Community, and Reckless Lives: Social Distress Among Adolescents in West Virginia

Social distress among West Virginia adolescents has many manifestations. Among the most conspicuous of these are dropping out of high school, teen pregnancy, and violent death. For more than 30 years, state policy makers have explained these behaviors by invoking the notion of a pervasive culture of poverty and morbidity which is transmitted from generation to generation. Participants in this primitive and fatalistic culture, it is commonly claimed, lack the prudence and foresight needed to make best use of the opportunities offered by our modern world. Education-intensive strategies aimed at enabling West Virginia adolescents and their families to overcome this disabling world view seem the best responses. By contrast, however, based on 8 years of empirical research in West Virginia, we contend that an “Oh, what the Hell!” sort of recklessness is interpretable as a rational response to deteriorating social and economic circumstances. West Virginia communities have become increasingly anomic and devoid of economic opportunity. In this economically uncertain, culturally insubstantial world, adolescents rightly judge their prospects to be poor. In this social context, seemingly irrational acts make more sense. Why be prudent in the absence of opportunity and community? Why be prudent in the absence of a future?     

Exploring the role of gain versus loss framing and point of reference in messages to reduce human–bear conflicts

As a fundamental social process, communication can help natural resource managers prevent or manage many human–wildlife conflicts, but research on how to present effectively information that contributes to the reduction of human–wildlife conflicts is scant. We examined the effectiveness of point-of-reference and gain-versus-loss framing in heightening intentions to prevent human–black bear conflicts. We randomly assigned 811 participants to one of six message conditions as part of a 3 (point of reference: family versus community versus bear) × 2 (message framing: gain versus loss) between-subjects factorial design or a control condition. The findings show that a match between loss framing and low-construal referencing point (e.g., family-referencing), and a congruency between gain framing and high-construal referencing point (e.g., bear-referencing) lead to higher risk perception and behavioral intentions. This study provides guidance for continuing research and design of risk communication in the context of human–bear conflicts.     

NGOs,IOs, and the ICC: Diagnosing and Framing Darfur

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become influential forces in global society. They exert their influence in part by framing issues and thereby suggesting particular courses of action. This article examines how NGOs with distinct missions represent mass violence for the case of Darfur. Content analysis of reports, speeches, and other documents from Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Save Darfur reveals distinct patterns across organizations. In addition to the organizations' specialized fields, interventions by external actors such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court affect NGO framing, but they do so in organization‐specific ways. Against presumptions of a uniform Western position on Darfur, this analysis documents that depictions of violence by Western NGOs show field‐specific patterns and distinct responses to international political and judicial interventions.     

Reflections Regarding Future Cannabis Use Among High‐Frequency Users in a Canadian University Student Population

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug worldwide, and the most commonly used illicit drug in Canada, among postsecondary student populations. This cross‐sectional study qualitatively assessed 112 high‐frequency, cannabis‐using university students in Canada: It examined their subjective expectations regarding what they anticipated their cannabis use would look like in the short‐ and mid‐term future and explored factors they saw potentially contributing to changes in their prospective drug use. Results indicated that participants believe that decisions about future cannabis use will be influenced by several contextual factors, including education and employment responsibilities, intimate relationships, and peer associations. These findings help illuminate the natural evolution of cannabis use and can guide the development of interventions for high‐frequency cannabis users in the future.