Perspectives of Young People in Care About their School-to-Work Transition

Abstract

Achieving in education and employment has long-term effects on quality of life. With below-average levels of educational attainment, many young people in care are ill-equipped for the transition from school to further education and work. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that explored the school to work transition experiences of young people currently or previously in care, and their ideas about future employment. A range of personal and contextual factors that influence study and work goals were identified. Young people spoke about the importance of personal confidence and determination, supportive relationships, someone to believe in them and encourage them, opportunities to pursue their goals, avenues to gain information about how to get desired jobs, positive school experiences, and the need for stability in their lives. The study suggests widening the agenda for case planning, transition from care and after-care support, to include career planning and vocational assistance.     

The Archive as a Social World

Qualitative Sociology - Historical scholars often adopt a solitary ethic, conceiving of their work as the product of a lonely and isolated individual toiling away in a dusty archive. In this...     

Sources of Support for Mandatory Military Service in the Context of the War on Terrorism: Survey Evidence Pre‐ and Post‐September 11, 2001*

Objectives. The advent of the War on Terrorism raises the question of the short‐term impacts on public opinion of terrorist attacks with respect to the idea of universal military service in the United States. Previous studies indicate that international crises tend to produce a polarizing effect on public opinion with respect to military service. Methods. Multinomial logistic regression analysis is used here to analyze an archival data set featuring survey data collected among 18,000+ citizens in 18 major U.S. metropolitan areas in 2000, 2001, and 2002. Results and Conclusions. This article offers further support for previous analyses into the principal sources of support for military service. However, the analysis also indicates that the initial impact of the War on Terrorism may have been to produce a decline in support for mandatory military service and a mild unifying effect on the distribution of attitudes rather than the expected polarization. Attitudes toward military service were more polarized in 2000 and 2001 than in the post‐9/11 2002 studies.     

A cultivated environment: Exploring the global distribution of plants in gardens, parks and streetscapes

Plants cultivated in gardens, parks and streetscapes are becoming increasingly important to peoples?? experience of biological life, and have been the recent focus of research in ecology, invasion biology, human geography and sociology. However patterns of distribution have not previously been explored at a global scale. In this study, global patterns in the distribution of cultivated floras were explored to determine the significance of biophysical and social factors driving species distributions. The taxonomic similarity of 72 published species lists was examined, covering a wide geographic and climatic range and a variety of land uses. Cultivated floras across urban and rural settlements were found to be very different and unsurprisingly to be strongly filtered by temperature. However we found that human behaviour may overcome other physical drivers of plant distribution such as rainfall in some instances. Social factors were also found to be important. Having a different dominant language (a proxy for cultural background) and difference in GDP per person (a proxy for household income) were also related to the dissimilarity of cultivated floras. Differences in both the social and physical environment are related to floristic differences between cities. However, we recognise that other factors identified in the literature but unsuited to meta-analysis, may also influence the composition of cultivated landscapes. These include changes in policy relating to the provision of street and park vegetation, the availability of plants from nurseries and the preferences of influential gardeners and landscape designers. The significance of the relationship between temperature and species composition suggests that cultivated floras are likely to change in response to climate change. The high level of dissimilarity observed between settlements suggests that patterns of potential naturalisation of cultivated plants are likely to be more complex than currently accepted.     

What is the Influence of News Media on People’s Perception of Corruption? Parametric and Non-Parametric Approaches

Does the source of one’s news media have a systematic effect on one’s perception of political corruption? While numerous studies have investigated the extent to which media affects trust in institutions, or the polarization of political values, this study shifts the focus on to how one’s media source conceived here as social media versus traditional media affects the perception of corruption in 2 ways. First, we hypothesize that citizens who consume their news predominately from social media will have higher perceptions of political corruption than consumers of more traditional media sources. Second, we hypothesize that perceptions among social media consumers will be more polarized. Specifically, we argue that the gap in corruption perception between supporters of government and opposition political parties will be larger among social media consumers compared to traditional news consumers. We test our hypotheses using newly collected survey data from the European Quality of Government Index survey from 2017, which contains nearly 78,000 respondents in 21 countries in the European Union. Estimating our model with both parametric and non-parametric approaches, we find robust empirical support for two of our 3 hypotheses.

     

An Integrated Scenario Ensemble-Based Framework for Hurricane Evacuation Modeling: Part 2—Hazard Modeling

Hurricane track and intensity can change rapidly in unexpected ways, thus making predictions of hurricanes and related hazards uncertain. This inherent uncertainty often translates into suboptimal decision-making outcomes, such as unnecessary evacuation. Representing this uncertainty is thus critical in evacuation planning and related activities. We describe a physics-based hazard modeling approach that (1) dynamically accounts for the physical interactions among hazard components and (2) captures hurricane evolution uncertainty using an ensemble method. This loosely coupled model system provides a framework for probabilistic water inundation and wind speed levels for a new, risk-based approach to evacuation modeling, described in a companion article in this issue. It combines the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) meteorological model, the Coupled Routing and Excess STorage (CREST) hydrologic model, and the ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) storm surge, tide, and wind-wave model to compute inundation levels and wind speeds for an ensemble of hurricane predictions. Perturbations to WRF's initial and boundary conditions and different model physics/parameterizations generate an ensemble of storm solutions, which are then used to drive the coupled hydrologic + hydrodynamic models. Hurricane Isabel (2003) is used as a case study to illustrate the ensemble-based approach. The inundation, river runoff, and wind hazard results are strongly dependent on the accuracy of the mesoscale meteorological simulations, which improves with decreasing lead time to hurricane landfall. The ensemble envelope brackets the observed behavior while providing “best-case” and “worst-case” scenarios for the subsequent risk-based evacuation model.