Vlogging on YouTube: the online,political engagement of young Canadians advocating for social change

Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young people's active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives.     

“Dude,I’m Seventeen … It’s Okay Not to Have Sex by This Age”: Feelings,Reasons, Pressures,and Intentions Reported by Adolescents Who Have Not Had Sexual Intercourse

This study investigated feelings, reasons, pressures, and previous sexual experiences reported by students who have not had sexual intercourse and how these factors are associated with self-rated likelihood of having sex during the next year. Using data from the Fifth National Survey of Australian Secondary Students and Sexual Health (n = 783), this study found, in general, students had positive feelings about not having sex. Reasons for not having sex such as being proud to say no and not being ready were rated higher in importance than fear of potential outcomes or religious/cultural beliefs. Students reported limited pressure from parents and friends and, despite not having sexual intercourse, more than half of the sample had experienced some form of sexual activity. Stronger likelihoods of having sex during the next year were reported by students who had previously engaged in other sexual practices, reported more pressure from friends to have sex, and had negative feelings about not having sex. Sexuality educators can use these findings to guide approaches to sex education, emphasizing feelings, intentions, and reasoning over fear tactics. Discussion of a range of sexual practices will address more closely the experiences of young students as they begin their sexual lives.     

FIXING THE ECONOMY

‘Fixing the Economy’, shows how the modern understanding of ‘the economy’ as the totality of the relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region arose in a mid-twentieth-century crisis of economic representation. The economy, represented as an autonomous domain, participated in the (largely post-Second World War) re-imagining of the nation-state and the postcolonial international order, and provided a concept of development without political upheaval. In considering the economic life of an Egyptian village, however, Mitchell demonstrates that market and domestic production and consumption are irreducibly hybrid and that the practical foundations of the economy as representation make it impossible any longer to see its imagined referent as the very type of the non-discursive and the material.     

Why Do Men Report More Opposite-Sex Sexual Partners Than Women? Analysis of the Gender Discrepancy in a British National Probability Survey

In a closed population and defined time period, the mean number of opposite-sex partners reported by men and women should be equal. However, in all surveys, men report more partners. This inconsistency is pivotal to debate about the reliability of self-reported sexual behavior. We used data from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3), a probability sample survey of the British population, to investigate the extent to which survey sampling, accounting strategies (e.g., estimating versus counting), and (mis)reporting due to social norms might explain the inconsistency. Men reported a mean of 14.14 lifetime partners; women reported 7.12. The gender gap of 7.02 reduced to 5.47 after capping the lifetime partner number at the 99th percentile. In addition, adjusting for counting versus estimation reduced the gender gap to 3.24, and further adjusting for sexual attitudes narrowed it to 2.63. Together, these may account for almost two-thirds of the gender disparity. Sampling explanations (e.g., non-U.K.-resident partners included in counts; sex workers underrepresented) had modest effects. The findings underscore the need for survey methods that facilitate candid reporting and suggest that approaches to encourage counting rather than estimating may be helpful. This study is novel in interrogating a range of potential explanations within the same nationally representative data set.     

An Integrated Risk Model of a Drinking-Water – Borne Cryptosporidiosis Outbreak

A dynamic risk model is developed to track the occurrence and evolution of a drinking-water–borne cryptosporidiosis outbreak. The model characterizes and integrates the various environmental, medical, institutional, and behavioral factors that determine outbreak development and outcome. These include contaminant delivery and detection, water treatment efficiency, the timing of interventions, and the choices that people make when confronted with a known or suspected risk. The model is used to evaluate the efficacy of alternative strategies for improving risk management during an outbreak, and to identify priorities for improvements in the public health system. Modeling results indicate that the greatest opportunity for curtailing a large outbreak is realized by minimizing delays in identifying and correcting a drinking-water problem. If these delays cannot be reduced, then the effectiveness of risk communication in preemptively reaching and persuading target populations to avoid exposure becomes important.     

Mediating the Self: The Case of Sue

This article is a response to the case study presented by M. C. Rehfuss (2003) regarding a client, Sue, who is experiencing discord in her career as a mediator. A conceptualization of the client and additional areas for client exploration are presented. Five steps of a constructivist career counseling approach are applied to the case to assist Sue with experiencing optimal functioning in her career through her proactive commitment to her life theme of mediation.     

De-Unionization and macro performance: What Freeman and Medoff didn’t do

Most, if not all, unions have monopoly power, which they can use to raise wages above competitive levels.-Freeman and Medoff (1984: 6) The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.-Preamble to the Wagner Act of 1935     

Union influence on plant size

Much research has focused on the direct effect of unions on production efficiency given set technology and plant scale. However, another path through which unions may influence productivity has received virtually no attention: the indirect productivity effect that unions may exert on the firm’s choice of plant size. We present a model in which firms explicitly consider the positive correlation between the probability of being unionized and plant scale in choosing plant scale and show that unions may prevent firms from fully exploiting economies of scale by their threat of organizing. Although it may be difficult to directly estimate this effect, there is ample casual empirical support that union status and plant scale are positively related.