High School Dropouts After They Exit School: Challenges and Directions for Sociological Research

Sociological research on high school dropouts is largely concerned with who drops out of school and why. Research on the consequences of dropping out is less common. There are clear theoretical reasons to expect dropping out to have a direct and negative effect on life outcomes; however, empirically evaluating these theories is difficult because students who drop out are different from high school graduates in meaningful and complex ways. In this article, I first provide a brief review of sociological research on high school dropouts, emphasizing the demographics of dropouts and reasons for dropping out. I then discuss the possible role of human capital differences, signaling theory, and social closure in creating worse outcomes for high school dropouts and outline the empirical challenges to researching the effects of dropping out. I conclude by discussing avenues for future research and important unanswered questions about the consequences of dropping out.     

Risk factors for femicide-suicide in abusive relationships: results from a multisite case control study

The killing of women by men who then take their own lives (femicide-suicide) is the most common form of homicide-suicide. This study identified femicide-suicide risk factors in an 11-city case-control study of femicide in the United States. Perpetrator, victim, relationship, and incident characteristics were analyzed for femicide-suicide cases (n = 67) and controls (n = 356, women living in the community with nonfatal physical abuse) using logistic regression modeling. Two risk factors emerged that were unique to femicide-suicides cases compared to overall femicide risk analyses: prior perpetrator suicide threats and victims having ever been married to the perpetrator.     

Are Self‐Service Customers Satisfied or Stuck?

This paper investigates the impact of self‐service technology (SST) usage on customer satisfaction and retention. Specifically, we disentangle the distinct effects of satisfaction and switching costs as drivers of retention among self‐service customers. Our empirical analysis examines 26,924 multi‐channel customers of a nationwide retail bank. We track each customer's channel usage, overall satisfaction, and retention over a 1‐year period. We find that, relative to face‐to‐face service, customers who use self‐service channels for a greater proportion of their transactions are either no more satisfied, or less satisfied with the service they receive, depending on the channel. However, we also find that these same customers are predictably less likely to defect to a competitor if they are heavily reliant on self‐service channels characterized by high switching costs. Through a mediation model, we demonstrate that, when self‐service usage promotes retention, it does so in a way that is consistent with switching costs. As a robustness check, we examine the behavior of channel enthusiasts, who concentrate transactions among specific channels. Relative to more diversified customers, we find that self‐service enthusiasts in low switching cost channels defect with greater frequency, while self‐service enthusiasts in high switching cost channels are retained with greater frequency.     

Organic and sustainable

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, spawned 252 new nonprofit organizations. We know little about these organizations, including how they emerged, formalized, met constituents' expectations for immediate performance, and ultimately survived. This article explores these issues through a case study of one successful organization, the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund. Using concepts from disaster, organizational ecology, and entrepreneurship research, the analysis identifies six propositions that link these literatures, notably the role of resource acquisition in formalization and the role of legitimacy in both fund development and organizational endurance. The study contributes new knowledge about the role of collaboration in acquiring capacity to enhance responsiveness. The findings suggest potential parallels to the evolution of new nonprofit organizations in other contexts.     

Around Consensual Nonmonogamies: Assessing Attitudes Toward Nonexclusive Relationships

Consensual nonmonogamy is a term used to describe intimate romantic relationships that are sexually and/or emotionally nonexclusive. The present study examined the social norms that are violated by different forms of consensual nonmonogamy and the negative judgments that result. We asked 375 participants to rate hypothetical vignettes of people involved in one of five relationship types (monogamy, polyamory, open relationship, swinging, and cheating) on items related to relationship satisfaction, morality, and cognitive abilities. The monogamous couple was perceived most favorably, followed by the polyamorous couple, then the open and swinging couples who were rated equally. Participants judged the cheating couple most negatively. Although social norms of sexual and emotional monogamy are important, we conclude that the aspect that has the most effect on judgments is whether the relationship structure has been agreed to by all parties.     

A critical appraisal of participatory methods in development research

Anthropologists and others working in the field of development are making increasing use of participatory research methods. While aware of the value of such methods, this paper outlines a number of methodological issues that need to be carefully considered. Such issues, when taken together with the problem of combining participatory with other forms of qualitative and quantitative research, argue strongly not only for caution but the need to undertake basic research on the participatory methods themselves. This paper looks at the development of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) in development research, and critically examines three methods/techniques--interviewing, visualization and ranking/scoring--in terms of their relation to qualitative research. Finally, the issue of the validity of PRA is discussed in relation to arguments about the role of sequencing/triangulating research techniques that are shown to be as problematic as the unexamined use of PRA methods.     

Social work education and political conflict: preparing students to address the needs of victims and survivors of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

This paper reports on the evaluation of a European PEACE III sponsored teaching and learning project that was designed to enable social work students to better understand the needs of victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The paper begins with an introduction to policy, practice and educational contexts before reviewing the literature on social work, conflict and trauma. It also summarises key, innovative pedagogical approaches used in the teaching, including the use of ground rules, teaching teams consisting of lecturer and service user dyads, learning exercises and case studies. The paper then explains the evaluation methodology. This involved two surveys which returned 144 student and 34 practice teacher questionnaires. The findings revealed that students were generally committed to this form of teaching and engagement with victims and survivors of the conflict, although some students reported that their attitudes towards this subject had were not changed. Some students also discussed how the conflict had affected their lives and the lives of families and friends; it is argued that such biographical details are crucial in developing new pedagogical approaches in this area. Practice teachers who supervised some of these students on placement reported general levels of satisfaction with preparedness to work with conflict related situations but were less convinced that organisations were so committed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study limitations and a recommendation for more robust methods of teaching and evaluation in this area of social work education and practice.     

After the ‘Organic Industrial Complex’: An ontological expedition through commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand

This article uses the evolving understandings of commercial organic agriculture within two research programmes in New Zealand to address three problematic claims and associated framings that have underpinned analysis of the political economy of commercial organic agriculture. These three framings are: 1) that recent commercial developments in organic agriculture have become organised around a grand binary of large-scale, corporate, industrialised organic agriculture that is inhabited by pragmatic newcomers to the industry, against a small-scale, local, authentic remnant of the original organic social movement. This grand binary is most popularly recognisable in the claim by author Michael Pollan of the existence of an ‘Organic Industrial Complex’ that is slowly subsuming authentic organic agriculture. This relates to claim 2) that commercialisation creates inevitable pressures by which organic agriculture becomes ‘conventionalised’. Finally, claim 3) positions organic agriculture alone as the only option for enabling improved environmental outcomes in agriculture. The Greening Food and ARGOS research programmes in New Zealand have studied the emergence of commercial forms of organic and other ‘sustainable’ agriculture in the period since 1995. A series of key engagements are highlighted in the unfolding history of these two programmes which demonstrate moments of transition in understandings of commercial organic, particularly in relation to situations of engagements between the research team and wider actors in the organic sector. These key engagements establish a clear sense in which the three major framings around the political economy of organic commercialisation could not explain the unfolding dynamics of the New Zealand organic sector. Rather, engagement with diverse actors enabled a whole new set of theoretical questions that opened up new areas of politics, contestation and elaboration of commercial forms of organic agriculture – particularly around shifts in power to the retail end of the agri-food chain, around new forms of agri-food governance, and around the politics of new audit systems. Within these shifts, the ontology of some of the researchers within these projects underwent parallel transformation. These transformative influences operated in two simultaneous directions. While the engaged research strategy of the two programmes clearly discomforted the researchers’ underlying assumptions for framing the major trajectories of commercial organic development, the presence of the two research programmes also had an important enactive power in the sector by both rendering ‘thinkable’ particular trajectories and economic experiments and also by reinforcing a ‘metric-centric’ tendency in the evolution of global environmental audit systems. Seen in this light, these engagements open up new questions about the research programmes themselves in terms of the emerging politics of what Philip Lowe describes as a more ‘enactive’ rural sociology and help direct attention to an emerging ‘ontological turn’ in the practice and politics of research.