From Home to the Home Corner: Observing Children's Identity‐Maintenance in Early Childhood Settings

This article draws on data from two recent studies of young children in early childhood settings. One study was of children in a Korean private kindergarten, the other of children in a UK reception class. In each study, the data discussed include both evidence from ‘home’ (including parent interviews) and evidence from ‘school’ (including conversations with the children themselves) on the gendered and ethnic identities the children display in the classroom. The children's stated beliefs and preferences, and their observed choice of activities and friends, appear to be influenced both by the beliefs and behaviour of their families, and by the early childhood environments they are offered. The transition from home to group settings, it is suggested, may reinforce rather than diminish the stereotyping along gendered and ethnic lines, while participation in ‘research’ conversations may provide a rare opportunity for the children to question and reflect on stereotypes.
Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).     

TEACHING TOOLS: HOW IS INTRODUCTORY ECONOMICS TAUGHT IN AMERICA?

We describe the faculty, students, teaching methods, and assessment instruments used in 180 introductory economics classes taught by 122 different instructors at 53 different colleges and universities. Despite variation in class size and types of institution, both introductory macroeconomics and introductory microeconomics are taught predominantly as lecture courses, with the largest part of students' course grades determined by performance on multiple-choice question tests. There seems to be little experimentation with alternative pedagogies or assessment techniques despite an in-creasing amount of attention to these issues in recent years.     

'Good Enough Parenting': parental disability and child protection

This paper presents the findings of research into Children's Court practice in Victoria (Australia) regarding child protection matters involving parental disability. The research examined Court records of hearings and considered the practices of the Court in the light of the particular needs of parents with a disability. The research found that such parents were often unrepresented and that formal Court interventions only infrequently made recommendations regarding the support, training and advice such parents needed in order to retain or regain care of their children. The anecdotal experience of parents with a disability that their capacity to care was likely to be more harshly judged than that of non-disabled parents, was supported. The research also suggested that the assumption of a nexus between parental disability and inability to care must be challenged, given the imperatives of legislation and child protection philosophy.     

Dead Poets' Society: Teaching,Publish‐or‐Perish,and Professors' Experiences of Authenticity

Within social psychology, the concept of authenticity of the self has traditionally suffered from lack of definitional clarity. In this article, after conceptualizing authenticity as the phenomenological emotional experience of feeling true to one's self, the author empirically examines the diversity of emotions associated with various degrees of authenticity and inauthenticity. Data for this study are from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with forty‐six faculty members employed at a public research university in the United States. Professors' experiences of and dispositions toward teaching, and their experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity, are examined against the background of structural and cultural forces and changes in American higher education. Data interpretation shows that teaching is mostly a source of authenticity for professors in the humanities, and less for those professors who identify themselves primarily as researchers.     

ANASE: measuring aircraft noise annoyance very unreliably

Does anyone who lives under a flight-path like aircraft noise? It is a political hot potato as well as a peace-destroyer. Tens of thousands of people will hear the noise from any third runway at Heathrow. So, when a study commissioned by the government claimed that people are becoming less tolerant of aircraft noise, it made highly unpleasant reading for supporters of a third runway. But the Department for Transport rejected the report as unreliable. Peter Brooker senses the vibrations.     

A Note on Using State-Dependent Models With a Time-Dependent Variance

This research presents an extension of the state-dependent models (SDM) developed by Priestley. For some series, improvement in SDM performance may be achieved by permitting the residual variance to vary through time according to a moving-average scheme.     

An empirical analysis of the welfare magnet debate using the NLSY

This paper examines the extent to which differences in welfare generosity across states leads to interstate migration. Using microdata from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) between 1979 and 1992, we employ a quasi-experimental design that utilizes the categorical eligibility of the welfare system. The pattern of cross-state moves among poor single women with children, who are likely to be eligible for benefits is compared to the pattern among other poor households. We find little evidence indicating that welfare-induced migration is a widespread phenomenon. Received: 3 April 1997/Accepted: 4 September 1998     

Collaborative Music‐Making with Digital Audio Workstations: The “nth Member” as a Heuristic Device for Understanding the Role of Technologies in Audio Composition

This article examines amateur music‐making using a digital audio workstation, showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music‐making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi‐modal activity through a heuristic device: the “nth member.” Whereas sociology has typically been concerned with the cultural facets of how music is made and consumed, we explore the material practices of collaborative song creation utilizing conversation analytic techniques—“turn‐taking” and “next‐selection”—to capture two key interactional moments.     

Pubertal Timing as a Potential Mediator of Adoption Effects on Problem Behaviors

Adopted children show more problem behaviors than nonadopted children. Given that internationally adopted individuals show earlier puberty than nonadopted individuals, and early puberty is associated with problem behaviors in nonadopted youth, we analyzed data from adopted domestic adoptees to determine whether problem behaviors could be explained by differences in pubertal timing. Relative to nonadopted controls (n = 153), domestically adopted girls (n = 121) had earlier menarche, earlier sexual initiation, and more conduct disorder symptoms. Age at menarche partially mediated the relation of adoptive status to sexual initiation, but not to conduct disorder symptoms. Extending findings from international adoptees, results show that domestic adoption is also linked to earlier puberty, and suggest early puberty as one mechanism linking adoption to problematic outcomes.