Nonprofit competition in the grants marketplace

In this study, we test the impact of nonprofit financial health and financial efficiency ratios on the grant amount awarded by foundations using the Georgia grants marketplace as a case. Using hierarchical linear modeling analysis, we can understand the effects of these ratios both within and across foundation grant portfolios. We found statistically significant evidence that grantees with higher debt ratios and higher fundraising ratios receive lower grant amounts. We did not find statistically significant impacts for administrative ratios, revenue diversification, and surplus margin.     

A Conscious and Inclusive Family Studies

I argue that family scholars must take bolder steps to engage the tensions between our heritage of positivist science and its postmodern challenges. I also argue that constructing theories, utilizing research methods, and examining substantive issues should be relevant to the diversity of the families we study and to ourselves as members of families. I offer examples of developing an informed reflexive consciousness to broaden the rationalist foundation that dominates family scholarship. For a more inclusive, balanced, and invigorated family studies, our subjective experiences and commitments as researchers should be acknowledged, confronted, and integrated. A family studies that is responsible to our readers, students, selves, and the people whose lives we study requires that we engage the critical intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age as they define family diversity.     

Family Stress During the Czech Transformation

Using three waves of data (1994–1996) from Czech households, we examined the mediating role of family interactions on the relation between 1994 family economic pressure and increased marital instability 1994–1996. The models demonstrate that economic pressure made both husbands and wives irritable, and their tension exacerbated problem behaviors (e.g., drinking and fighting) and depression. Husbands' problem behaviors generated hostility toward their wives, which increased wives' reports of greater marital instability. Wives' irritability increased their behavior problems, as well, but behavior problems were unrelated to wives' hostility or husbands' marital instability. Instead, wives' irritability directly increased their hostility toward their husbands, which in turn, increased husbands' reports of greater marital instability.     

The Learning Square: Four Domains that Impact on Strategy

In the search for strategic competitive advantage, the importance of learning and knowledge is increasingly recognized. In this paper, we identify four domains synthesized from the literature – multi-dimensional goals, using tacit knowledge, continual learning, and shared vision – that impact upon and provide a framework for developing strategy. Three themes are drawn from learning organization literature linking to a fourth from strategy literature. These domains are brought together in a holistic model proposed for use by managers in evaluating and developing strategy –'The Learning Square'.     

Expanded medical home model works for children in foster care

The Illinois Child Welfare Department implemented a statewide health care system to ensure that children in foster care obtain quality health care by providing each child with a medical home. This study demonstrates that the Medical Home model works for children in foster care providing better health outcomes in higher immunization rates.These children used the health care system more effectively and cost-effective as reflected in the higher utilization rates of primary care and well-child visits and lower utilization of emergency room care for children with chronic conditions.     

The potential for international and transnational public service advertising in public spaces in American and Chinese global cities: Conclusions from a 2010 survey of advertisements in subways in Beijing,New York,Shanghai and Washington,DC

Can we construct transnational or international public service advertising to counterbalance the proliferation of transnational commercial advertising? As an important first step in exploring the possibility of such an application of shared media public diplomacy among nations, this paper describes a complete survey of commercial and public service advertisements collected from the public spaces of subway systems in American and Chinese cities in 2010 – New York, Washington, DC, Shanghai and Beijing – to reveal the range of themes of commercial and public service ads in these spaces. The study reveals first that analogous commercial and public service ads are ubiquitous in the public spaces of both Chinese and American cities. Second, many of the themes that might appear in international or transnational public service ads are already being portrayed in ads created by local or national governments or NGOs, although these themes are portrayed in ads created by different sets of actors in China and in the US: government actors and a few international NGOs in Chinese cities, and governments, corporations and non-profit organizations in the case of American cities. Finally, the survey reveals that in all four cities there are many commercial advertisements that appeal to the identity of a transnational consumer, but that there are almost no public service ads that appeal to the identity of a transnational citizen: merely local or national ones who can solve such public problems as global warming, education, and health issues.     

‘It's People's Whole Lives’: Gender,Class and the Emotion Work of User Involvement in Mental Health Services

The concept of emotion work has been widely applied to the study of service work. Yet its use in understanding the social dynamics of user involvement in public services remains under explored. Drawing on a study of user involvement in mental health service development, I show its utility for understanding this social and political realm. The article discusses findings from a critical discursive and contextual emotional labour perspective, taking into account organizational and institutional factors as well as social structural dimensions of gender and social class. It shows how discourses on emotion, constructed through articulation of personal experiences of service usage both reflected and constructed the ideological and structural positionings of women service users, while emotional discourse — displays of anger in user involvement forums — worked to constitute traditionally male and ideologically masculine elements of the field, as well as the working‐class identities of some participants. These forms of emotion work, and the ways in which they elicited further emotion management from service users and workers alike, are located in relation to the rules of engagement of user involvement and the bureaucratic institutional forms within which this took place. The article concludes that the emotion work of user involvement ultimately helped to reproduce the dominant institutional and social order, including its gender and class dimensions. Implications for policies and practices of user involvement in mental health services are provided.     

ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS FROM ADOLESCENCE TO YOUNG ADULTHOOD: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

Theories of romantic relationship development posit a progression of involvement and intensity with age, relationship duration, and experience in romantic relationships. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study tests these propositions by considering relationship type and patterns of relationships over the course of adolescence and their influence on relationship formation in young adulthood. Results confirm recent theories of relationship progression and the findings of smaller-scale empirical studies. Moreover, the findings add depth to debates on racial differences in relationship formation and demonstrate the developmental currency of adolescent relationship experience for young-adult relationship formation. Rather than being trivial or fleeting, adolescent romantic relationships are an integral part of the social scaffolding on which young-adult romantic relationships rest.