The relationship between neighborhood racial concentration and verbal ability: An investigation using the institutional resources model

Relatively few studies examine the relationship between racial residential segregation and educational or cognitive outcomes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the institutional resources model of neighborhood effects, I investigate one account of how macrostructural arrangements between race, neighborhood segregation, and school quality interact to produce inequalities in test scores. Consistent with the institutional resources model, results suggest that school quality varies across neighborhoods based, in part, on their degree of racial concentration. Indeed, school quality and other school characteristics mediate the relationship between racial concentration and verbal skills, particularly among black males. These findings have implications not only for inequalities in cognitive skills among blacks across residential space, but also between blacks and whites given high levels of residential segregation in the United States. In sum, findings illustrate yet another way in which residential segregation contributes to, and not merely reflects, racial inequalities.     

Diversity in Pathways to Parenthood: Patterns,Implications, and Emerging Research Directions

This review examines and synthesizes recent research on pathways to parenthood. We begin by providing basic information about patterns, differentials, and trends and discussing adoption and new reproductive technologies. We next turn to several areas of inquiry that became particularly prominent in the last decade: the continued “decoupling” of marriage and childbearing, the parental relationship context of nonmarital childbearing, family structure stability, multiplepartner fertility, and racial and ethnic variation in childbearing patterns. We then consider the implications of this body of scholarship and identify avenues for future research. Throughout, we highlight racial/ethnic and social class variation in childbearing patterns.     

A perfect storm: Challenges encountered by family caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease during natural disasters

ABSTRACT

Since Hurricane Katrina there has been a movement across the U.S. to examine best practice for disaster response within the aging population. However, little is known about the experience of natural disasters from the perspective of family caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD). In this exploratory, qualitative study, family caregivers (n=27) were interviewed about their experience with the historic 2015 South Carolina flood. By using thematic analysis, themes were identified to better understand what unique challenges caregivers of person with ADRD experienced. While many caregivers stated they had experienced a natural disaster previously, none had ever done so in their current caregiving role. The caregiving role affected their ability to prepare for the storm and influenced their decision-making regarding evacuation and utilization of recovery resources. Thus, caregivers were confronted by a “perfect storm” of circumstances and uncertainty. Family caregivers need to have actionable emergency plans for disasters that are specific to their role as caregivers of persons with ADRD. Study implications also suggest the role social work professionals can have in educating, advocating, evaluating, and coordinating support to assist caregivers of persons with ADRD as a potentially vulnerable and at-risk population during all phases of disaster.     

Brief Screening and Intervention for Alcohol and Drug Use in a College Student Health Clinic: Feasibility,Implementation, and Outcomes

Abstract

Objective: Evaluation of the Brief Alcohol Screen and Intervention in College Students (BASICS) in a university primary care setting. Participants/Methods: Undergraduates (N = 449) participated in BASICS and electronic surveys assessing frequency/quantity of alcohol and drug use, psychosocial and mental health outcomes, and demographic information. Data were collected at baseline and 6-month follow-up between August 2006 and August 2008. Results: Drinking and drug use decreased between baseline and 6 months. Participants reported an increase in protective factors and in readiness to change alcohol-related behaviors, and a decrease in alcohol-related consequences and in distress symptoms. Heavy episodic drinking at baseline significantly moderated the changes in number of drinks in a typical week and in a typical weekend, and number of drinks on the occasion drank most on a weekend. Conclusions: BASICS can be implemented in a primary health care setting and university students may reduce their alcohol and/or drug use.     

Assessing Knowledge of Elder Financial Abuse: A First Step in Enhancing Prosecutions

Financial exploitation by a family member is the most common form of elder mistreatment; yet, it is a difficult crime to detect and prosecute. Psychologists have traditionally assisted prosecutors by assessing decisional capacity and opining in court whether an alleged victim was able to consent to the contested transactions. This article proposes and evaluates a novel form of psychological expertise in financial abuse trials—social framework testimony to reeducate jurors who are misinformed about aspects of this largely hidden crime. Findings suggest that, as in cases of child and spousal abuse, social framework testimony on the general dispositional and situational factors inherent in elder financial abuse may enhance prosecutions.     

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION,EMINENT DOMAIN,AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF NEO-LIBERALISM

Abstract

This essay addresses the institutional conditions of cultural studies, especially those bearing on cultural studies teaching. It does so by reviewing the history of the Open University Popular Culture course from an insider's perspective. Whereas most published accounts of this course have related it closely to the concerns of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, this essay suggests that the two projects — while overlapping in certain respects — are more usefully thought of as distinct. Having disentangled the history of the Open University course from that of the Birmingham Centre, the author goes on to advance a more general argument concerning the politics and practice of cultural studies pedagogy. The essay's main contention in this regard is that a conception of cultural studies teaching which connects it to the cultivation of resistive practices in the classroom is incoherent. It is suggested that this now influential current of thought is best assessed as a negative outcome of the encounter between the projects of cultural studies and US liberationist philosophy.     

Accommodating strangers: British hospitality and the asylum hotel debate

This article examines the accommodation of asylum seekers through Jacques Derrida's ethical writings on hospitality, generosity and parasitism. The differing hospitable spaces of the asylum and the hotel, and of the strange figures of the asylum seeker and the tourist, are discussed with reference to these discourses of “giving” and “taking”, paralleling Derrida's opposition between unconditional hospitality and hospitality‐as‐economy. This “new racism” towards asylum seekers is thus located within the economic sphere, as asylum control is linked to the welfare state and to fears of strangers' parasiting the host nation. However, I argue that it is the nation‐state that parasites asylum seekers both through their defining difference and their contribution to service economies. Ultimately then the asylum hotel does exist, as Stephen Frears' film, Dirty Pretty Things (2002), illustrates.