Diglossia and identity in Northeast Thailand: Linguistic,social, and political hierarchy

The paper explores diglossic relations between Central Thai and phasa isan, a variety officially known as a dialect of Thai, but linguistically close to Lao. Phasa isan is spoken by almost one‐third of Thailand's population but its speakers in the Northeast are often stigmatized as uneducated and backward. We conducted field research mainly among university students in Ubon Ratchathani, a northeastern border province, by drawing upon data from survey questionnaires, reflective essays, interviews, and field observations. The findings suggest a transitional diglossic relationship in which Central Thai is the High and phasa isan the Low variety. These relationships are discussed in terms of nationalism, social hierarchy, and language maintenance and shift.     

Predictors of employment among sheltered homeless women

The effect of homelessness on the psychological and physical health of women is damaging and long lasting. Understanding of the personal factors that enable homeless women to secure employment and re-enter mainstream society is of utmost importance. A sample of homeless women residing in a US Midwestern nonprofit treatment and transitional living shelter for homeless women and their children were surveyed regarding the extent to which life satisfaction, social self-efficacy, and hopeful thinking predicted women's expected capabilities to obtain employment above and beyond social support provisions, while controlling for participants' age, ethnicity, and education level. Findings failed to reveal that social psychological (i.e., life satisfaction and social self-efficacy) and intrapersonal (i.e., hope) variables predicted homeless women's job procurement self-efficacy above and beyond perceived social support. The social support provision of social integration and younger age significantly predicted women's self-efficacy to secure employment. Implications of results for social justice initiatives and interventions are discussed.     

Does the retirement consumption puzzle differ across the distribution?

Previous research has repeatedly found a puzzling one-time drop in the mean and median of consumption at retirement, contrary to the predictions of the life-cycle hypothesis. However, very little is known as to whether these effects vary across the consumption distribution. This study expands upon the previous work by examining changes in the consumption distribution between the non-retired and the retired using quantile regression techniques on pseudo-cohorts from the cross-sectional data of the 1990–2007 Consumer Expenditure Survey. The results indicate that there are insignificant changes between these groups at the lower end of the consumption distribution, while there are significant decreases at the higher end of this distribution. In addition, these changes in the distribution are gradually larger in magnitude when moving from the lower end to the higher end, which is found using several different measures of consumption. Work-related expenditures are instead shown to decrease uniformly across the consumption distribution. This evidence reveals that there is a progressive distributional component to the retirement consumption puzzle.     

Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes,Faces, and The Gaydar Myth

In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called “gaydar,” to detect who is gay. We propose that “gaydar” is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay). Another account, however, argues that people possess a facial perception process that enables them to identify sexual orientation from facial structure. We report five experiments testing these accounts. Participants made gay-or-straight judgments about fictional targets that were constructed using experimentally manipulated stereotypic cues and real gay/straight people's face cues. These studies revealed that orientation is not visible from the face—purportedly “face-based” gaydar arises from a third-variable confound. People do, however, readily infer orientation from stereotypic attributes (e.g., fashion, career). Furthermore, the folk concept of gaydar serves as a legitimizing myth: Compared to a control group, people stereotyped more often when led to believe in gaydar, whereas people stereotyped less when told gaydar is an alternate label for stereotyping. Discussion focuses on the implications of the gaydar myth and why, contrary to some prior claims, stereotyping is highly unlikely to result in accurate judgments about orientation.     

Identifying the Drivers of the Exceptionally High Rates of Lethal and Racially Biased Violence by Police in the United States Requires Geographically Resolved Data and Analysis

This essay serves as a response to Hirschfield's (2015) article, “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” published in the December 2015 issue of this journal.     

Strength in Diversity? Group Heterogeneity in the Mobilization of Grassroots Organizations

Grassroots groups often find that they need to manage issues of diversity along racial/ethnic, class, gender, religious, and/or citizenship lines, among several other axes of difference. There are strong reasons to expect that diversity is a benefit to such groups, especially in terms of coalition breadth and the widely held expectation that internal heterogeneity helps organizations to resolve collective action dilemmas. Nonetheless, a long tradition within sociological research sets out the expectation that group heterogeneity thwarts the formation of collective identities and group solidarity, and therefore limits the potential for effective organizing. With a particular emphasis on groups active in local community‐based organizing since the 1970s, we review studies on a variety of features of group diversity and their effects on mobilizing processes. We find that although researchers remain somewhat divided on these critical issues, the preponderance of evidence suggests that managing diversity poses significant challenges for grassroots organizing efforts. While these challenges may not easily be overcome, we point to a variety of cases in which group differences offered a significant asset to social change efforts.     

Accelerometry analysis of physical activity and sedentary behavior in older adults: a systematic review and data analysis

Accelerometers objectively monitor physical activity and sedentary patterns and are increasingly used in the research setting. It is important to maintain consistency in data analysis and reporting, therefore, we: (1) systematically identified studies using accelerometry (ActiGraph, Pensacola, FL, USA) to measure moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and sedentary time in older adults, and (2) based on the review findings, we used different cut-points obtained to analyze accelerometry data from a sample of community-dwelling older women. We identified 59 articles with cut-points ranging between 574 and 3,250 counts/min for MVPA and 50 and 500 counts/min for sedentary time. Using these cut-points and data from women (mean age, 70 years), the median MVPA minutes per day ranged between 4 and 80 min while percentage of sedentary time per day ranged between 62 % and 86 %. These data highlight (1) the importance of reporting detailed information on the analysis assumptions and (2) that results can differ greatly depending on analysis parameters.