Shaping American Higher Education,Logan Wilson. Washington,D.C.: American Council on Education, 1972. 301 Pages, $8.00 Hardbound

Abstract

Social work educators seeking promotion and/or tenure must demonstrate achievement in the area of productive scholarship. Judgments are made by administrators regarding the quantity and quality of a candidate's record of publication. We surveyed deans of graduate programs to ascertain the importance of various factors in their quality assessment of a journal article or book publication. The findings are presented and discussed.     

Math Anxiety

Social work students often complain and grumble about having to take courses in research methods and statistics. Do their complaints originate from deep-seated math anxiety? The current study investigated the math anxiety and math backgrounds of 163 undergraduate social work students and 256 non—social work majors. Social work majors were found to have much higher levels of math anxiety than a cross section of students enrolled in introductory statistics courses and found to have taken fewer math courses in high school and college.     

Project VOGUE: A Partnership for Increasing HIV Knowledge and HIV Vaccine Trial Awareness Among House Ball Leaders in Western New York

Men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender individuals of color, the largest demographic in the House Ball Community (HBC), are amongst the group at highest risk for HIV infection in the United States. The HBC have limited access to culturally appropriate HIV education. This study aimed to develop a partnership with HBC leaders to uncover strategies for increasing HIV prevention knowledge, including participation in HIV vaccine trials. To this end a research institution-community-HBC partnership was established. In-depth qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the 14 HBC leaders in Western New York, revealing that knowledge of HIV and related vaccine trials was limited. Barriers to increasing HIV knowledge included fear of peer judgment, having inaccurate information about HIV, and lack of education. Among the HBC, community partnerships will further aid in the development of future HIV prevention programs and increase individuals’ willingness to participate in future HIV vaccine trials.     

Syrian refugee men as objects of humanitarian care

Critical feminist scholars of conflict and displacement have demonstrated that “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1993) have become an uncontroversial object of humanitarian concern in these contexts (Carpenter 2003; Hyndman and Giles 2011). Yet very little scholarly work has attempted to understand the position of refugee men as a demographic within humanitarianism. Through an analysis of the Syria refugee response in Jordan, this article investigates how humanitarian workers relate to refugee men and think about refugee masculinities. It argues that refugee men have an uncertain position as objects of humanitarian care. Seeing refugee men as objects of humanitarian care would disrupt prevailing humanitarian understandings of refugeehood as a feminized subject position and of gender work as work that “helps women” (Cornwall 2007; Johnson 2011). It would furthermore challenge prevailing binary visions of refugee men as agential, political actors, and refugee women as in need of “empowerment” through the implementation of technocratic programming. In the context of the Syria refugee response, these gendered and racialized understandings of refugee men and masculinities are mediated by particular conceptions of “Arabness.” This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with humanitarian workers and Syrian refugees, which was undertaken in Jordan in 2015–2016.     

Producing change in attitudes toward abortion∗

This study examines several factors affecting reactions to persons identified as homosexual. Reactions are operationalized in terms of expressed rejection of the homosexual as indicated by responses to a social distance scale. The major variables examined are sex of homosexual, sex of reactor, and acceptance of two commonly held stereotypes. These stereotypes—perceived danger and psychological disturbance—both suggest that a sense of threat is associated with rejection of the homosexual. A particularly interesting finding was that male subjects are especially rejecting of male homosexuals. Presumably male subjects tend to view the male homosexual as a sexual failure and to perceive him as personally threatening or dangerous.     

Biography,Nationalism and Yvonne Vera's Nehanda

Abstract

This paper shows how biographies of individuals and nations are interlinked. While this story-telling has generally been seen as pivotal to anti-colonial African nationalist struggles, it is also a vital feature of the present. Nation-building, policy-making and a range of internal struggles within the nation are conveyed through distinctive stories about individuals and groups. Many stories about individuals and collectivities can be described as hagiographical in the sense that they extol messages of nationalism triumphantalism and the courage and altruism of those who struggled for liberation. Traditions of patriotic history in the postcolonial context have drawn on hagiography to bolster the precarious authority of elites: the censoring of certain memories and the rewriting of others have worked to create artificial collectivities, spurious alliances and fabricated enemies. The imaginative writing of Yvonne Vera, who revisions the story of Nehanda as an icon in Zimabwean nationalist history, radically rethinks fundamental assumptions about nationalism in relation to biographical storytelling. While clearly offering a laudatory and hagiographical representation, Vera contests the patrilineal and patriotic focus of much nationalist hagiography. Emphasising the imaginative and productive powers of biographical storytelling, Vera seeks to configure inspirational, resonant and liberating stories of pasts, presents and futures.     

Pathways to Becoming a Church Musician

This article is the second in our series on dimensions of the social world of church musicians. For the current analysis of how people first become church musicians, we draw on data from in-depth interviews with 47 church musicians conducted by the three authors. The respondents ranged in age from 18 to 71 years (mean age 43.8 years). There were 19 women and 28 men interviewed. Keyboard players, vocalists, guitarists (acoustic and electric), bass players, drummers, a flautist, and a choir director were interviewed. Results indicate the importance of both early and ongoing socialization in the process of becoming a church musician. Our respondents took a variety of pathways to becoming church musicians, including having parents who were church musicians, regularly attending church services during childhood, and receiving early musical and/or vocal training. Our results also indicate the functioning of three enabling mechanisms—being authority directed, volunteering, and being recruited/invited—that determine the likelihood of an individual becoming a church musician as a child, as an adolescent, or as an adult.     

Event history modeling of world fertility survey data∗

Event history analysis seems ideally suited for the analysis of World Fertility Survey, WFS, data, which consists of full birth histories and related information, but it has not been much used for this purpose. This may be because event history analysis has practical drawbacks for WFS data, namely partial dates, computational burden, the need to take account of five clocks at once and the difficulty of interpreting coefficients.

We propose a modeling strategy for the event history analysis of WFS data which overcomes these problems, and we apply it to the previously unanalyzed WFS data from Iran. This yields estimates of the time of onset of fertility decline and the extent to which it was due to compositional changes in the population. It also enables us to determine whether it was a period effect, a cohort effect, or both. These results would have been hard to obtain using other approaches. In addition, the usefulness of ACE as an exploratory tool for determining the best coding of independent variables is illustrated.     

Associations between acoustic features of maternal speech and infants’ emotion regulation following a social stressor

Caregiver voices may provide cues to mobilize or calm infants. This study examined whether maternal prosody predicted changes in infants’ biobehavioral state after the still face, a stressor in which the mother withdraws and reinstates social engagement. Ninety-four dyads participated in the study (infant age 4–8 months). Infants’ heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (measuring cardiac vagal tone) were derived from an electrocardiogram (ECG). Infants’ behavioral distress was measured by negative vocalizations, facial expressions, and gaze aversion. Mothers’ vocalizations were measured via a composite of spectral analysis and spectro-temporal modulation using a two-dimensional fast Fourier transformation of the audio spectrogram. High values on the maternal prosody composite were associated with decreases in infants’ heart rate (β = ?.26, 95% CI: [?0.46, ?0.05]) and behavioral distress (β = ?.23, 95% CI: [?0.42, ?0.03]), and increases in cardiac vagal tone in infants whose vagal tone was low during the stressor (1 SD below mean β = .39, 95% CI: [0.06, 0.73]). High infant heart rate predicted increases in the maternal prosody composite (β = .18, 95% CI: [0.03, 0.33]). These results suggest specific vocal acoustic features of speech that are relevant for regulating infants’ biobehavioral state and demonstrate mother–infant bi-directional dynamics.