Building Skills for Civic Engagement: Children as Agents of Neighborhood Change

ABSTRACT

This study examines civic engagement and social development in children (N = 73) from public housing neighborhoods. Much of the research on civic engagement and social development focuses on youths and college students and the influence of participation in community service. This study addresses younger children in the process of social development and acquiring the seeds for civic engagement. Participants (X age = 9.25 years) learned to observe, photograph, and assess neighborhood strengths and challenges. They engaged in democratic processes to compile findings and present them to community members. Results indicate statistically significant changes in civic engagement and social development. Qualitative findings expand on these quantitative results. Implications for community practice and research are discussed.     

The value of conducting door-to-door surveys

This paper argues that door-to-door surveys are a valuable tool for collecting information about health and the environment in urban areas in a manner consistent with community-based participatory research principles. We describe in detail how a door-to-door survey on food shopping and physical activity was conducted with the primary food shopper in 514 households on 30 randomly selected blocks in West and Southwest Philadelphia over seven weeks during the summer of 2010. We identify the elements of our door-to-door protocol that had benefits for the quality of the data collected, flow of data collection, the perceived safety of interviewers and residents, and that informed subsequent phases of this multimethod four-year study of urban food and physical activity environments. We conclude that door-to-door surveys are appropriate and valuable in certain research contexts, when spending time in a community, conducting observations and building relationships are central to the goals and success of a study.     

The Impact of Mispronunciations on Toddler Word Recognition: Evidence for Cascaded Activation of Semantically Related Words from Mispronunciations of Familiar Words

While the specificity of infants' early lexical representations has been studied extensively, researchers have only recently begun to investigate how words are organized in the developing lexicon and what mental representations are activated during processing of a word. Integrating these two lines of research, the current study asks how specific the phonological match between a perceived word and its stored form has to be in order to lead to (cascaded) lexical activation of related words during infant lexical processing. We presented German 24‐month‐olds with a cross‐modal semantic priming task where the prime word was either correctly or incorrectly pronounced. Results indicate that correct pronunciations and mispronunciations both elicit similar semantic priming effects, suggesting that the infant word recognition system is flexible enough to handle deviations from the correct form. This might be an important prerequisite to children's ability to cope with imperfect input and to recognize words under more challenging circumstances.     

Negative affect as a moderator of the relationship between hookup motives and hookup consequences

ABSTRACT

Objective: The current study examined the extent to which negative affect moderates the relationships between distinct hookup motives and hookup consequences. Participants: Data were collected from 271 heavy-drinking undergraduate college students. Methods: Students from 3 US universities completed online surveys assessing hooking up–related motives, behaviors, and consequences. Results: The results showed that conformity motives to hookup and negative affect predicted hookup consequences. Furthermore, negative affect moderated the relationship between hooking up for relationship reasons and hookup consequences. Specifically, among students with high negative affect, hooking up to secure a long-term relationship was positively associated with hookup consequences whereas among students with low negative affect, securing a long-term relationship was negatively associated with hookup consequences. Conclusions: These findings highlight the role that motives and negative affect play in the prediction of negative hookup consequences. Moreover, the findings from the current study have the potential to inform prevention efforts designed to reduce hookup consequences.     

‘They should have just taken a gun and shot my son’: Taser deployment and the downtrodden in Canada

This study interrogates ostensible differential deployment of an increasingly ubiquitous tool of policing in Canada – the Taser. Taser-related deaths are problematized as evidence of a teething new urban terrorism essentially against the downtrodden. The paper argues that a combination of intersecting factors: gender, low socio-economic status, mental illness, drug use, and ethnicity are fundamental to who gets tased by the police. The paper investigates the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekański at Vancouver airport as a quintessential ‘media event’. It highlights the concomitant disarticulation of the police as repositories of order and their re-articulation as insouciant villains. Dziekański's death, the paper contends, inter alia benefitted from the Canadian ‘cultural feeling rules’ in a manner that earlier recorded Taser-related fatalities did not. In addition, the paper argues that if the current trend continues, not only will the downtrodden continue to bear the brunt of Taser injuries and fatalities, but there may be scant public outcry accompanying such gory incidents.     

Does the DSW Practice Doctorate Provide Opportunities for Closing Gaps in Gerontology?

The 2019 annual conference of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work (GADE) highlighted the increasing role that the Doctor of Social Work (DSW) degree is playing in social work education. Over the past 15 years, social work has followed suit with a number of other health and helping professions (PsyD, DNP, DPT, etc.) by expanding access to practice doctorate programs for professionals who are interested in doctoral-level training, but primarily have interest to remain working in the field as practitioners, rather than become researchers. As more DSW programs have emerged, questions and concerns persist about the DSW, with most questions pertaining to the meaning of the degree for the overall field and the value of having an additional advanced practice degree in social work beyond the MSW degree. However, I urge readers of the Journal of Gerontological Social Work to consider the opportunities that the DSW may present for advancing gerontological education, research, and practice.     

Lord of the Guys: Alpha Girls and the Post-feminist Landscape of American Education

A recent discourse of girlhood, that of alpha girl and empowerment, has emerged in US popular literature with claims that adolescent girls are uniquely positioned to become the new economic, cultural and social winners of the twenty-first century. Similar to Sheryl Sandberg’s story in Lean In, Alpha girls embody both traditional masculine characteristics, such as competitiveness and independence, with traditional features of femininity such as collaboration, according to psychologist Dan Kindlon, author of Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She is Changing the World. However, little research has been conducted that explores the alpha girl discourse in the day-to-day lives of adolescent girls, deemed alpha, in US public school classrooms. Using interview and observation data, this paper examines how Kindlon’s supposed alpha girls and their middle school teacher make sense of and live this notion of empowerment, and argues that their experiences both complicate and reify the alpha girl discourse.     

Corporate sustainability and risk

This study analyses the relationship between corporate sustainability and corporate risk. Different grades of sustainability are constructed from the inclusion of companies into sustainability indices and the number of years included. The grades are measured against variables of expected and unexpected risk and drivers of a sustainable company’s risk (sustainability risk). Based on the assumption that the level of sustainability impacts upon the dimension of risk, a sample of 167 European companies and different subsamples are assessed on available accounting data. However, the findings do not provide any clear evidence, suggesting that companies, once rated as sustainable, display similar patterns of risk and that a high degree of sustainability may be achieved without adverse impacts on risk and risk-adjusted return.