Determinants and Consequences of Social Trust*

This article provides an overview of social trust, examining its various aspects and components. Trust is best understood in a sociological sense by focusing on its important relational characteristic. Following this lead, the article discusses briefly how social trust relates to social capital and examines factors that shape the development of social trust, along with outcomes related to variations in trust, classifying them by analytical level (i.e., individual, community, group, organizational, and societal). The article concludes by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing research and by identifying some important questions that have not yet been adequately addressed.     

Assimilation as multiracialism: The case of Singapore's Malays

The myths of meritocracy and multiracialism ‘explain’ between them both the ‘fairness’ of the Singapore system and the subordinate role of the non-Chinese minority races. They also purport to assure the minorities that they enjoy full status as members of the nation-building project and that their cultural and religious mores are embraced and protected within its framework. Using the Malay minority as its case study, and arguing from archival, oral, official government and secondary sources, this paper argues that the Singapore systems of meritocracy and multiracialism have not been concerned primarily with intercommunal tolerance since the 1970s, but are now programmes of assimilation of the racial minorities into a Chinese-dominated society.     

Culturalising the Abject: Islam,Law and Moral Panic in the West

This paper explores the construction of Islam as abject and the symbolic positioning of Muslims as being outside secular modernity in Australia through an analysis of the way the criminal legal process and perceptions of criminality are culturalised. The empirical focus is gang rape and the trials of Muslim youth on gang rape charges in Sydney between 2000–2003 which quickly became culturally inflected as ‘Muslim’ and ‘Lebanese’ by media reporting of the criminal trials and moral panic about them as source of social menace. Three dimensions of culturalisation of crime and the criminalisation of culture are identified in the criminal legal process and media reporting of it; firstly the cultural inflection of new laws against gang rape by their association with particular events and trials; secondly the introduction of ‘cultural defence’ by the accused as a mitigating factor in the criminal legal process; thirdly, media reporting and commentary on criminal cases which emphasize cultural explanations for individual criminal behaviour.     

Population constraints on pooled surveys in demographic hazard modeling

In non-experimental research, data on the same population process may be collected simultaneously by more than one instrument. For example, in the present application, two sample surveys and a population birth registration system all collect observations on first births by age and year, while the two surveys additionally collect information on women’s education. To make maximum use of the three data sources, the survey data are pooled and the population data introduced as constraints in a logistic regression equation. Reductions in standard errors about the age and birth-cohort parameters of the regression equation in the order of three-quarters are obtained by introducing the population data as constraints. A halving of the standard errors about the education parameters is achieved by pooling observations from the larger survey dataset with those from the smaller survey. The percentage reduction in the standard errors through imposing population constraints is independent of the total survey sample size.     

2½‐Year‐Old Children Use Animacy and Syntax to Learn a New Noun

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 × 3 design, animacy status (e.g., animate agent, inanimate patient) and labeling syntax (agent, patient, nonlabel control) were varied. Across most events, 2 1/2‐year‐old participants responded as if they expected animate entities to be named. However, in a prototypical (animate agent‐inanimate patient) event condition, children responded differentially across different syntactic structures. Thus, the clearest evidence for attention to syntactic cues was found in the prototypical event condition. These results suggest that young children attend to the animacy status of unfamiliar entities, that they have expectations about animacy relations in events, and that these expectations support emerging syntactic knowledge.     

Direct and Indirect Causal Effects via Potential Outcomes*

Abstract. The use of the concept of ‘direct’ versus ‘indirect’ causal effects is common, not only in statistics but also in many areas of social and economic sciences. The related terms of ‘biomarkers’ and ‘surrogates’ are common in pharmacological and biomedical sciences. Sometimes this concept is represented by graphical displays of various kinds. The view here is that there is a great deal of imprecise discussion surrounding this topic and, moreover, that the most straightforward way to clarify the situation is by using potential outcomes to define causal effects. In particular, I suggest that the use of principal stratification is key to understanding the meaning of direct and indirect causal effects. A current study of anthrax vaccine will be used to illustrate ideas.     

Rural/Urban Differences in Child Growth and Survival in Bolivia

Abstract Using data from a national survey in Bolivia and from a regional sample of poor communities in two regions of Bolivia, we model the effects of community conditions, household characteristics, and social relations on child health as measured by child mortality and stunted growth. Based on national data, children in rural areas are twice as likely to die before the age of two than are children in large cities, and about one‐third of the children in rural areas are stunted. Including measures of community, household, and maternal characteristics accounts for at least two‐thirds of the urban/rural difference in child health. We conclude that expansion of health services, improvements in household and community sanitation, and socioeco‐nomic development are all needed to overcome the rural disadvantage in child health.     

Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects

Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is conditioned by race. We find that Black women in the experimental group have a 21% lower birth rate and a 32% higher abortion rate than Black women in the control group. We do not find a birth effect for Hispanic or White women. We discuss the policy implications of the effects of a segmented family cap.     

Farming Patterns,Rural Restructuring,and Poverty: A Comparative Regional Analysis1

Abstract This study examines the contentions of two recent perspectives on rural economic organization and their implications for poverty. Building from (1) agrarian political economy and (2) the rural restructuring literatures, we present a comparative regional analysis of how farming patterns and other aspects of economic organization differentially affect poverty in rural areas. Data are based on 2,349 nonmetropolitan U.S. counties for the 1970–1980 period. Nonhired labor-dependent, family-operated farming (smaller and larger family farming) has relatively similar cross-regional effects on rural poverty. The effects of industrialized farming are more spatially variant, suggesting that this type of farming is integrated into regional political economies in different ways than are simple commodity units. However, farming patterns have only a small effect on rural poverty relative to other factors, such as the local employment structure, characteristics of the population, and geographic location. The results of this study highlight the need to move beyond the farm sector to understand both the dynamics of this sector and the socioeconomic consequences of rural restructuring. More broadly, the study underscores the importance of testing general sociological relationships under different spatial (e.g., regional) contexts.     

Ethnic preferences and perceptions among Asian and White British middle school children

Asian and White middle school children were shown photographs of unknown Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and White individuals of approximately the same age as themselves, and asked which one wax most like them, which one they would prefer to be, which ones they would prefer to engage in various activities with, and finally, to allocate positive and negative traits to the three groups or to nobody. A similar majority of both Asian and While children selected an own-race photograph as being most like them, but only about a half selected the own-race photograph as the one they would most like to he. For sharing activities, children showed a strong own-tender preference, followed by an own-race preference. White children stated a greater preference for sharing activities with White children, then with Afro-Caribbean children, and least with Asian children. Asian children preferred Asian and White children the most, Afro-Caribbean the least. On a stereotypes test, similar trends were obtained; White children evaluated While children highest and Asian lowest; Asian children tended to evaluate Asian children highest but to a nonsignificant extent. The relative proportion of Asian/White children in school appeared to have little systematic influence on the results, thus arguing against the contact hypothesis of prejudice reduction in its simple form.