The design of a multilevel survey of children, families, and communities: The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey

In this paper, we describe the development and implementation of the multilevel sample design for the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, a study of children, adults, families, and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. This survey was designed to support multilevel analyses on a number of topics, including child development, residential mobility, and welfare reform. We describe the design of the baseline wave, highlighting the analytical and statistical issues that shaped the study. We also present the results of an in-depth statistical investigation of the survey’s ability to support multilevel analyses that was carried out as part of the study design. The results of this study provide important guideposts for future studies of neighborhoods and their effects on adults and children.     

A Sense of Place: The Politics of Immigration and the Symbolic Construction of Identity in Southern California and the New York Metropolitan Area

American immigration has long been characterized by spatial concentration within major urban areas. Los Angeles and New York City are two of the most important immigrant meccas today. Recent studies of immigrant adaptation within these cities have emphasized material factors at the expense of cultural considerations. This paper adopts a comparative perspective to demonstrate extreme differences in the symbolic construction of identity vis-a-vis immigrants in these two urban areas. Using The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times as indicators of elite cultural orientations, a content analysis is performed. The results demonstrate the social construction of an exclusive threat narrative in Southern California, and an inclusive immigrant as victim narrative in the New York metropolitan area. I argue that this extreme variation in cultural orientations must be understood as the result of divergent material and symbolic contexts. In order to demonstrate the importance of cultural factors, this paper focuses on symbolic differences between these areas and the influence these differences have on the political process of inclusion/exclusion.     

广州与美国洛杉矶城市化比较

本文从比较的角度探讨了广州与美国洛杉矶在城市化过程中的共性与差异。作者认为,在城市化过程中,由于广州与洛杉矶都具有良好的地理条件和发展机遇,因而两者都曾有过城市化高速发展的时期。同时,由于两者受工业化、交通运输、城市化道路制约,因而两者又存在着在发展速度与城市化水平上的差异。     

Eyes on the Block: Measuring Urban Physical Disorder Through In-Person Observation

In this paper, we present results from measuring physical disorder in Los Angeles neighborhoods. Disorder measures came from structured observations conducted by trained field interviewers. We examine inter-rater reliability of disorder measures in depth. We assess the effects of observation conditions on the reliability of reporting. Finally, we examine the relationships between disorder, other indicators of neighborhood status, and selected individual outcomes.Our results indicate that there is considerable variation in the level of agreement among independent observations across items, although overall agreement is moderate to high. Durable indicators of disorder provide the most reliable measures of neighborhood conditions. Circumstances of observation have statistically significant effects on the observers’ perceived level of disorder. Physical disorder is significantly related to other indicators of neighborhood status, and to children’s reading and behavior development.This result suggests a need for further research into the effects of neighborhood disorder on children.     

Second-generation Central Americans and the formation of an ethnoracial identity in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Whether Latinos in the United States are an ethnic or racial group is extensively debated. Some propose Latinos are an ethnic group on their way to becoming white, others contend Latinos are a racialised group, and an alternate perspective posits Latinos are an ethnoracial group. This study intervenes in this debate by examining the identities of second- and 1.5-generation Central Americans in Los Angeles, California. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews, I show Central Americans have an identity repertoire, which includes national origin, panethnic, racial, and minority identities. I also capture the situations and reference groups that influence the deployment of ethnic and racial identities. These results suggest Central Americans develop an ethnoracial identity. I argue Central Americans’ ethnoracial identity emerges from agency – subjective understandings of themselves and resisting invisibility in Mexican Los Angeles – and from structure – a racialised society, institutionally-created panethnic categories, and racially-based experiences.     

美国1992年洛杉矶骚乱的爆发及其后果

1992年 4月 2 9日美国洛杉矶市爆发了前所未有的大骚乱 ,其起因于四名警察殴打一名黑人。虽然黑人期盼司法公正 ,严惩施暴警察 ,但法庭却宣布其无罪释放 ,导致骚乱爆发。由于市政府和警察局之间矛盾重重 ,缺乏协作 ,行动迟缓 ,使骚乱从开始就处于无政府状态 ,并且迅速蔓延和升级。暴力程度之激烈、持续时间之长、波及面之广、人员伤亡和财产损失之大 ,史无前例 ,反映了美国城市社会问题的普遍性和严重性     

The evaluation and selection of adequate causal models: a compensatory education example

Procedures for ascertaining relative model adequacy in latent variable structural relations models are discussed. Under diverse methods of estimation, this determination may be assessed using the chi square goodness of fit statistic, incremental fit indices for covariance structure models, and latent variable coefficients of determination. An example from evaluation research is taken (cf. Magidson, 1977; Bentler & Woodward, 1978). Numerical sensitivity of parameter estimates under alternative model specifications is demonstrated. Interpretive implications based on these procedures are discussed in terms of parameter sensitivity to alternative model specifications.     

Rhythms of urban space: skateboarding the canyons,plains, and asphalt-banked schoolyards of coastal Los Angeles in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which pioneering skateboarders in Southern California reacted to, and exploited a capital-intensive urban landscape to create a sport that today has tremendous economic, political, and cultural implications. The analysis focuses on archival material drawn from Skateboarder Magazine from 1975 to 1980. Ultimately, the skateboarders and those who documented their emerging sport express deep awareness and understanding of urban space as influenced by topography, urban development and emerging notions of mobility. The asphalt-banked schoolyards of Los Angeles provided an unintended playground for skateboarders and served as a starting point for the modern-era of the sport.     

MADE IN THE USA: LATINAS/OS?, GARMENT WORK AND ETHNIC CONFLICT IN LOS ANGELES' SWEAT SHOPS

In the 1990s Latino identity is increasingly constructed as a ‘universal’, ‘classless’ and genderless pan-ethnicity. In this article I problematize this construct through an ethnographic study of Latina workers in the Los Angeles garment industry whose jobs are not only gender and ethnic specific but also immigrant specific. These women are located at the bottom of a complex organizational structure of an industry that promotes Third World conditions in the US in addition to promoting inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic conflict among workers. The voiced testimonies of these Latina garment workers provide a vivid record of contractor abuse, the unrelenting demands and difficulties of garment work, and the exploitative conditions and ethnic rivalries that make it difficult for Latinas to forge an effective culture of resistance. I argue that the survival of Latina garment workers rests on their ability to negotiate collaborative relations based on their unique struggles and experiences within the garment industry as women, immigrants, racialized workers and specific types of Latina Americanas. Finally, I highlight the importance of recording the insights of those women who not only experience the contemporary conditions of global capitalism, but also endeavour to speak rather than silence these conditions.