Class,Family, Education,and the Process of Status Attainment: A Comparison of American and British Women College Graduates*

Turner's conceptualization of the relationship between education and social mobility in Great Britain and the United States as forming “sponsored” and “contest” systems is used as a theoretical framework for comparing the process of occupational status attainment of British and American women college graduates. British women graduates are more occupationally mobile than Americans; they gain more from attending prestigious institutions, studying science and mathematics and securing a higher class degree as compared with American women with similar qualifications. American graduate women benefit more from attaining a Ph.D. Marriage and motherhood have less significant, but different, cross-national effects.     

Perceptions of Bilinguals

An important argument has been advanced by Francois Grosjean that there are two views of bilinguals. First, there is a fractional, two monolinguals in one person, view of bilinguals. There is secondly a holistic view which argues that the bilingual is not the sum of two complete or incomplete monolinguals, but has an unique and special linguistic profile. These two viewpoints will be discussed in this paper and illustrated in terms of attitudes and self identity.     

The risk climate and the delivery of child welfare services

The community is conceptualized as a “risk climate” in which the traditional child welfare services such as own-home services, foster placement, adoption and institutionalization are delivered. The community generates incidence of child welfare cases through the pressure of conditions, and affects prevalence by the extent of its response. Any method of allocating scarce resources should take variations in the risk climate into account in order to put resources where the problem is. This report presents an effort to achieve such a procedure through (1) a literature review to isolate variables related to child welfare service delivery; (2) a report of zero order relationships between these variables and outcome measures; and (3) the use of a multiple regression analysis to develop predictive procedures. The process developed is put forward as an equitable way of distributing scarce resources.     

Covariates of length of stay in residential treatment

This study explores variables associated with length of stay in a child welfare residential treatment center. The study followed three entry cohorts (416 boys) from admission through discharge. The researchers conducted event history analyses to examine the rates of discharge over time and the covariates of length of stay. They conducted analyses by discharge destination (reunified, transferred, or ran away). The results demonstrated that mental health issues slowed down rates of discharge for youth who were reunified or transferred. For children who left by running away, age and prior substance history were associated with faster rates of exit. These results have important public policy implications for improving the application of length of stay variables in planning and treatment.     

Coping with Compassion: Role Transformation Amongst Oregon Food Pantry Directors

In stark contrast to the robust social safety nets found in many developed nations around the world, the modern American welfare state is increasingly operated by a variety of non-governmental actors and voluntary organizations. The operation of this welfare regime depends on the discretionary decisions of street-level bureaucrats. As street-level bureaucrats confront new circumstances, their discretionary decisions change. Normative institutionalism and the concept of bricolage are used to explore how discretionary decisions change within an organizational role in the context of a voluntary organization. Understanding this process of bricolage sheds light on the decision-making processes of street-level bureaucrats, explains how behavior in an organizational role shifts over time, and points to the dynamic nature of institutions. We present an in-depth qualitative study of the emergency food network in Oregon as a critical case to illustrate this argument.     

Spatial weighting improves accuracy in small-area demographic forecasts of urban census tract populations

Existing research in small-area demographic forecasting suffers from two important limitations: (1) a paucity of studies that quantify patterns of error in either total or age/sex-specific estimates and (2) limited methodological innovation aimed specifically at improving the accuracy of such forecasts. This paper attempts to fill, in part, these gaps in existing research by presenting a comparative evaluation of the accuracy of standard and spatially-weighted Hamilton–Perry forecasts for urbanized census tracts within incorporated New Mexico municipalities. These comparative forecasts are constructed for a 10-year horizon (base 1 April 2000 and target 1 April 2010), then compared to the results of the 2010 Census in an ex post facto evaluation. Results are presented for the standard Hamilton–Perry forecasts as well as two sets that incorporate two common variants of spatial weights to improve forecast accuracy. Findings are discussed in the context of what is currently known about error in small-area demographic forecasts and with an eye toward continued innovations.     

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL REFORMS:

The Chicago school reforms have received significant national attention due to their sweeping, radical nature. Growing out of state legislation in 1988 and 1995, the reforms encompass a powerful bottom-up/top-down strategy that provides multiple avenues for initiating building-level changes in teaching and learning. We offer a provisional answer concerning the effects of these reforms by comparing the 1993–1998 performance of Chicago's grammar schools with all other grade-equivalent schools in the State of Illinois. We find city schools making major gains over the last three years. Regression residuals show that Chicago's schools now significantly outperform Cook County suburban schools and schools in the rest of the state after controlling for rates of poverty and student mobility. While schools placed on probation have predominantly African American and low-income student bodies, rates of improvement among schools as a whole appear to be equitably distributed across the city neighborhoods. We close with several policy recommendations, one of which focuses on the potential for major goal displacement as a result of the reform board's criterion for determining the probationary status of schools.     

Training foster parents in loyalty conflict: A training evaluation

Fifty two foster parents participated in one of seven offerings of a two-and-a-half hour training on the issue of children caught in a loyalty conflict. Prior to the training foster parents completed a measure of their demographics, receptivity to learning about the issue, and their knowledge about the issue. Following the training the participants completed a measure of their perception that the training was helpful, their intent to change based on the training, and their knowledge about loyalty conflicts. They also participated in a focused discussion about loyalty conflicts. In this sample foster parents were found to have high levels of receptivity to training, high rates of perceived helpfulness of the training, and high levels of intent to change after the training as well as an increase in knowledge regarding loyalty conflict from before to after the training. Despite limitations in sampling strategy and sample size, the data support the belief that foster parents want to learn about this issue and can benefit from a single training on it.