The Interactive Relationship Between Class Identity and the College Experience: The Case of Lower Income Students

To probe the role that college context plays in influencing the class-based aspects of identity for lower income students, we interviewed 30 lower income students, 15 from an elite college and 15 from a state college. Significant disparities of wealth between students at the elite college heightened awareness of class, and led to feelings of intimidation, discomfort, inadequacy, deficiency, exclusion, and powerlessness among lower income students, feelings that were less prevalent among state college students. Students at both colleges acquired new forms of cultural capital and coped with class-based discontinuities between who they were before college and who they were becoming, but these issues became heightened for the elite college students.     

Strain Trauma: Effects on Symptom and Character Development in an Eight Year Old Girl

The concept of traumatic strain is reviewed and illustrated with case material from the treatment of an 8-year-old girl. Clinical formulation about the impact of strain trauma upon this girl’s development is provided to further highlight the literature on the subject.Danille Drake is affiliated with Baltimore-Washington center for Psychoanalysis and Clinical Social Work Institute, Washington, DC.     

The Diverse Experiences of Hispanic Students in the American Educational System

Hispanic students have long been considered at risk in the American educational system. A better understanding of the diverse experiences of Hispanics can help to counteract this risk—in what ways, and where, do they do well or poorly or some mixture of both? To further this understanding, this study applies developmental and demographic perspectives to a representative sample of Hispanic high school students. First, analyses of the sample identified four student profiles based on various indicators of academic achievement and school orientation: (1) low-achieving and weakly oriented, (2) low-achieving and strongly oriented, (3) high-achieving and moderately oriented, (4) high achieving and strongly oriented. Second, compositional analyses mapped these profiles onto different segments of the Hispanic population and different sectors of the American educational system.     

The World Bank,INGOs, and Civil Society: Converging Agendas? The Case of Universal Basic Education in Niger

This paper explores, through a case study of the World Bank's pursuit of universal basic education, the gulf between the Bank's dialogue with international civil society elites and its treatment of grassroots civil society in its development practice. It argues that the World Bank is pursuing a conscious program to build a global elite governance system similar to Bank vice-president J. F. Rischard's concept of global issues networks, in which experts from business, government, and civil society will set globally binding social and economic policies. There is a risk of co-optation of international NGOs into this autocratic global managerial system.     

Patterns of Giving in South Africa

Abstact This paper reflects on the results of a national quantitative survey on giving in South Africa. It explores the extent and character of giving; who gives, to whom, with what intention? The survey results revealed that South Africa is richly resourced with a diverse and multicultural spectrum of giving behaviors, which are commonplace in everyday life. The spectrum of giving behaviors is so diverse in shape and form that it contradicts many of the basic assumptions of the philanthropic literature, which locate the act of giving primarily in the domain of the wealthy and powerful.     

Explaining Intimate Partner Violence: The Sociological Limitations of Victimization Studies

This paper examines whether differentiating among types of intimate partner violence enhances the explanatory capacity of extant empirical models.The analysis uses national-level Canadian data to evaluate an alternative approach to operationalizing intimate partner violence, drawing upon Black's (1990) and Johnson's (1995) theoretical work. The main argument suggests that current efforts to explain intimate partner violence with victimization studies are inadequate because they typically do not measure key sociological variables. The failure to assess the contexts within which different types of violence occur further hinders explanatory efforts.The paper concludes with recommendations for innovative theoretical and methodological strategies to address these limitations.