Applying Image Norms Across Super's Career Development Stages

D. E. Super's (1957) theory of career development has long been of interest to careers researchers (M. Savickas, 1994; S. C. Whiston & B. K. Brecheisen, 2002). Its insightful illustration of career stages has made it widely applied by careers practitioners. Image norms may influence the career decisions and developmental tasks inherent in each stage. An image norm is the belief that individuals must present or possess a certain image, consistent with occupational, organizational, or industry standards, in order to achieve career success. Understanding the effects of image norms across D. E. Super's (1957) career stages has important implications for individuals, organizations, and career counseling professionals.     

Determinants and Consequences of Social Trust*

This article provides an overview of social trust, examining its various aspects and components. Trust is best understood in a sociological sense by focusing on its important relational characteristic. Following this lead, the article discusses briefly how social trust relates to social capital and examines factors that shape the development of social trust, along with outcomes related to variations in trust, classifying them by analytical level (i.e., individual, community, group, organizational, and societal). The article concludes by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing research and by identifying some important questions that have not yet been adequately addressed.     

The current state of the labor queue: National and regional Evidence

We employ vector autoregressive techniques to determine the current state of the labor queue. Unemployment rate differentials have narrowed in recent years, potentially due to a change in the queue ordering, though a tight labor market and a stable queue would yield similar results. We find no evidence that the queue ordering has changed, which brings into question the resiliency of gains made by minority groups. We employ the same techniques to reveal the state of the queue across geographic regions and find that substantial differences exist across regions, implying variation in the relative labor force status of demographic groups.     

Household strategies in the face of resource scarcity in coastal Ghana: are they associated with development priorities?

In many developing regions, women and young girls spend several hours daily in the collection of natural resources. Still the link between these household resource strategies and stakeholder perceptions of development priorities remains unexplored. This project examines this association with survey data representative of the adult population from Ghana’s Coastal Region. Although natural resource scarcity and the sustainability of resource use represent key development challenges, there are others (e.g., energy, sanitation, employment, and educational opportunities). As such, even in the face of natural resource scarcity, individuals may place greater importance on other dimensions of development, especially if household resource strategies are perceived as relatively efficient. The analytical focus here is on water and the results suggest that gender roles shape household water collection strategies, while also shaping these strategies’ perceived opportunity costs. Specifically, Ghanian adults more often see drinking water provision as their primary development need when water sources are distant and/or when male household members collect water (particularly male heads). In the end, I argue that social science inquiry benefits by contextualizing social dynamics within environmental context, particularly within cultural settings in which human subsistence is intimately tied to the state of the natural environment.     

The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty

Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a single index through some arbitrary function and defining a poverty line and associated poverty measures on the basis of that index. This is merely redefining more generally the concept of poverty, which then essentially remains a one dimensional concept. The present paper suggests that an alternative way to take into account the multi-dimensionality of poverty is to specify a poverty line for each dimension of poverty and to consider that a person is poor if he/she falls below at least one of these various lines. The paper then explores how to combine these various poverty lines and associated one-dimensional gaps into multidimensional poverty measures. An application of these measures to the rural population in Brazil is also given with poverty defined on income and education.     

Parenting Behaviors Among Mainland Puerto Rican Adolescent Mothers: The Role of Grandmother and Partner Involvement

Relations between grandmother and partner involvement (coresidence, social support, child care) and Puerto Rican adolescent mothers' parenting behaviors were examined. Few associations between grandmother involvement and behavior emerged, and these were moderated by coresidence. In contrast, partner involvement showed a number of significant (positive) direct and moderated relations with behavior. For both providers, the direction of the relations between social support and behavior during teaching was the opposite depending on coresidence: Greater social support was related to the display of more positive behavior among coresiding mothers but to less competent behavior among non‐coresiding mothers. The relations between child care support and behavior differed across providers. For grandmothers, greater child care was related to less positive behavior during teaching among coresiding mothers but to more competent behavior among non‐coresiding mothers. For partners, greater child care was more strongly related to positive behavior during play among non‐coresiding than coresiding mothers. Results are discussed in light of Latino cultural values, developmental issues, and implications for intervention.     

Silphids in urban forests: Diversity and function

Many ecologists have examined the process of how urbanization reduces biological diversity but rarely have its ecological consequences been assessed. We studied forest-dwelling burying beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae)—a guild of insects that requires carrion to complete their life cycles—along an urban-rural gradient of land use in Maryland. Our objective was to determine how forest fragmentation associated with urbanization affects (1) beetle community diversity and structure and (2) the ecological function provided by these insects, that is, decomposition of vertebrate carcasses. Forest fragmentation strongly reduced burying beetle diversity and abundance, and did so far more pervasively than urbanization of the surrounding landscape. The likelihood that beetles interred experimental baits was a direct, positive function of burying beetle diversity. We conclude that loss of burying beetle diversity resulting from forest fragmentation could have important ecological consequences in urban forests.