Why repressive policies towards urban youths do not make streets safe: four hypotheses

There is an increasing concern in various European cities with ‘youth’ in public space. This concern is by no means new. Young men have been a cause for public concern for a long time. In some countries in the global North, such as Holland, the marginalization along lines of class and ethnicity rather than just class have brought a relatively new dimension to perceived ‘problems’ of youth. Holland is particularly interesting, as it moved from championing tolerance to rather harsh policies and an often overly racist discourse on urban youth. This shift to a more repressive policy model has responded to an increasing public fear. Two peculiar empirical patterns raise the question of effectiveness of such repressive policies. First, the neighbourhoods targeted by these policies continue to show strong feelings of fear. Second, the number of incidents between youth and police do not drop, but rise, affecting the crime and nuisance statistics. This paper explores four hypotheses to explain these trends, drawing on empirical data from studies in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Rotterdam and The Hague, the Netherlands.     

Multiple dimensions of attitudes about homosexuality: development of a multifaceted scale measuring attitudes toward homosexuality

Attitudes toward homosexuality are complex. To get a comprehensive view on the attitudes of people, different dimensions need to be included in research. Based on a review of the literature, we distinguish five dimensions: acceptance of homosexuality in a general sense; attitude toward equal rights; reactions to homosexuality "at close quarters"; reactions to homosexuality in public; and so-called modern homonegativity. In a study on a representative sample of Dutch Defence personnel (N = 1,607) we tested this model. Structural equation modeling of several items measuring the attitude toward homosexuality offers a six factor solution. These six factors are more or less comparable to the five dimensions we distinguished. The dimension "reactions to homosexuality at close quarters" is, however, empirically split in a dimension on affective reactions to homosexuality and homosexual persons in general and a dimension on affective reaction to homosexual friends or acquaintances.     

Black and White Photography as Theorizing: Seeing What the Eye Cannot See

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s work as well as documentary photography in general. ²     

TESTIMONIO AND SPACES OF RISK

Asylum seekers and refugees tend to be marginalized in physical and discursive spaces, especially in times that are orchestrated as socially, politically, financially and environmentally risky. This article explores the interrelationship between genre and social space from the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees, and how refugees and asylum seekers in the USA, Germany and Hong Kong exposed spaces of risk through testimonio (testimonio is a genre term used throughout the paper and will be explained later). Asylum seekers and refugees testified to social practices like lengthy asylum processes, immobility, criminalization of asylum seekers, or distrust by locals in virtual space and in face-to-face encounters. Testimonio, thus, reflected on social practices and through this reflection, exposed spaces of risk that threatened the well-being of forced migrants. However, asylum seekers did not dwell in those spaces of risk. By publishing testimonios in virtual environments, some asylum seekers became agents of their biographies and created spaces in which they could voice themselves on their own terms.     

The Power and Morals of Policy Makers: Reassessing the Control Gap Debate1

For more than 15 years, there has been a lively debate among migration scholars in Europe and North America about how to explain “why liberal states accept unwanted migration.” This paper assesses existent hypotheses in the “most‐likely” case of the making of Dutch family migration policies. This empirical test raises serious doubts as to the validity of the broadly shared assumption that national policy makers have lost the power to regulate migration flows. Accounts that focus on the mechanisms of domestic politics do yield valuable insights, but fail to capture the crucial role of immaterial values in the decision‐making process.     

USE OF THE DSM IN MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPY PROGRAMS: CURRENT PRACTICES AND ATTITUDES

The DSM has largely become the common language of behavioral health which its authors intended. Although family systems theory resulted in part from the study of major mental illness, it later became distanced from considerations of individual psychopathology. No studies have assessed current practices and views within the field of family therapy on teaching students the use of the DSM. Member training programs of the Education and Training Council of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy were surveyed regarding their practices in teaching the DSM. Seventy-nine of 177 surveys (45%) were returned. Ninety-one percent of these programs offered training in the DSM, and in 93% of those such training was mandatory. Written comments indicated that pragmatic concerns about students being able to speak a common language with other behavioral health providers were among the primary reasons for teaching the DSM.     

Identity as a site of difference: toward a complex understanding of identity in multilingual,multicultural classrooms

Cummins suggested that within a social context of unequal power relations, classroom interactions are never neutral, but located on a continuum ranging between the reinforcement of coercive relations of power and the promotion of collaborative relations of power. Drawing on this understanding, the purpose of this paper is to examine instructional practices and interactional dynamics in elementary English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to explore the impact of the English-dominant instructional context on emergent bilingual students’ access to and investment in literacy learning. The paper is based upon a selection of data from a collaborative research project conducted in a multilingual, multicultural elementary school in a large Canadian city. The paper describes students’ creation of multimodal, multilingual stories about their migration experiences and explores how making these stories opened opportunities for negotiating understandings of students’ identifications. The paper concludes that, though relations of power tend to endure in English language teaching, pedagogical pivot points exist, offering the possibility to transform these understandings through an affective practice and relation.     

A comparison between bootstrap methods and generalized estimating equations for correlated outcomes in generalized linear models

We discuss and evaluate bootstrap algorithms for obtaining confidence intervals for parameters in Generalized Linear Models when the data are correlated. The methods are based on a stratified bootstrap and are suited to correlation occurring within “blocks” of data (e.g., individuals within a family, teeth within a mouth, etc.). Application of the intervals to data from a Dutch follow-up study on preterm infants shows the corroborative usefulness of the intervals, while the intervals are seen to be a powerful diagnostic in studying annual measles data. In a simulation study, we compare the coverage rates of the proposed intervals with existing methods (e.g., via Generalized Estimating Equations). In most cases, the bootstrap intervals are seen to perform better than current methods, and are produced in an automatic fashion, so that the user need not know (or have to guess) the dependence structure within a block.     

Ownership claims,valuation practices,and the unpacking of energy-landscape conflicts

There is now a substantive body of academic literature which focuses on protests against local infrastructural developments. This literature is often characterised by the key words ‘NIMBY’ or (facility-) ‘siting controversies’. The rapid development of renewable energy technologies – which are largely sited in rural areas – has created a new version of this controversy; energy-landscape conflicts. In many countries, large infrastructural developments are regulated through spatial planning legislation, often causing various tensions between new technologies, an evolving policy agenda, and a legislative framework which was largely conceived in a different era and which is slow to adapt. Alternatively, and in line with neo-liberal thinking, the logic of development can be subjected to cost-benefit analysis, whereby the value of the wind farm can be compared with the value of the ‘unspoiled’ landscape. This paper takes a more holistic approach to energy-landscape conflicts, by examining claims of ownership and notions and measures of value inherent in different claims and value systems which (seek to) influence decision-making. We examine both the logic of monetary valuation and the implicit value statements in various policy intervention options to point at the need for a more heterogeneous and multidisciplinary approach to policy evaluation. We then look at notions of ownership, rights and duties in relation to landscape and to our energy future, and we highlight the potential for using an analytical property rights framework which cuts across various levels of claims and value statements, from the national and ideological to the personal and practice-based.     

Declining Social Cohesion in The Netherlands?

In the Netherlands, topics related to social cohesion, such as various aspects of participation and trust, are prominently on the political agenda. The bottom line is a widespread feeling that social cohesion in Dutch society is eroding, which is also reflected in a perception of a change from a high trust into a low trust society. Based on large-scale surveys (e.g. Labour Force Surveys, Permanent Survey on Living Conditions, Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies, and European Social Survey) and (population) registers, we investigate the development of: (a) Social contacts, informal help and volunteering; (b) Political participation (turnout and participation in political actions); (c) Social, institutional and political trust. Overall, we found no empirical evidence for a decline in participation and trust levels. However, there are large gaps between prevailing groups in Dutch society, in particular between lower and higher educated, natives and ethnic minorities, and various religious groups. Such gaps are rather stable for participation (since 1997) and trust (since 2002).