Nationwide Newspaper Coverage of Same-Sex Marriage: A Community Structure Approach

Using the community structure approach to compare coverage of same-sex marriage in leading U.S. newspapers in 35 major cities nationwide, all articles of 250+ words were sampled from a 5-year span of January 1, 2007, to June 23, 2011, for a total of 577 articles. Articles were coded for “prominence” and “direction,” and then combined into a “Media Vector” score for each newspaper, ranging from .4523 to ?.1067. Initial Pearson correlations revealed three clusters had significant relationships: stakeholder (stakeholder proportions correlating with favorable coverage of stakeholder concerns), buffer (privilege correlating with favorable coverage of human rights issues), and vulnerability (vulnerable populations correlating with coverage favoring their perspectives). The stakeholder cluster includes: (percentage 25–44: r = .506, p = .001; gay market index: r = .432, p = .005; percentage 65+: r = ?.397, p = .009; percentage voting Democratic: r = .335, p = .025; percentage voting Republican: r = ?.330, p = .026). The buffer hypothesis was also confirmed (percentage college educated: r = .465, p = .002; percentage family income of $100,000+: r = .383, p = .012; and percentage professional/technical occupations: r = .300, p = .040). One vulnerability indicator, percentage below the poverty line, was also confirmed (r = ?.297, p = .041). A varimax rotated factor analysis and regression yielded 2 factors accounting for more than 29% of the variance: privilege/gay marketing/political identity, 24%, and Evangelicals, 5%.     

#BlackLivesMatter: Innovative Black Resistance

Since 2013, extrajudicial police killings of black people have captured the attention of U.S. and international media, substantially because of the work of leaders in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement. #BLM is simultaneously a group of localized organizations and a broad online social movement. In this article, we examine the #BLM movement in detail, with particular emphasis on the following aspects of the movement: (1) its innovative organizational practices and social media use; (2) its accent on black perspectives (counterframing) of systemic racial oppression, heteronormativity, and capitalism; and (3) its broad emphasis on oppressed Americans, including black women and LGBTQ people. We also situate the #BLM movement within the surrounding system of racial oppression, including the historical role of racialized policing in maintaining social control of blacks. We detail the long tradition of black social movements, especially black feminist organizing, against systemic racial oppression. In doing so, we intend to contribute social movement theorizing that more fully considers powerful counterframed perspectives of black activists in U.S. social movements. Although the #BLM movement reflects black feminism and past civil rights movement struggles, it is a uniquely twenty‐first‐century social movement that uses new technologies for innovative social protest.     

Deception in Family Therapy: Recognition,Implications, and Intervention

Deception, in its many forms, is present in families and relationships across the globe. The impact of the presence and discovery of family secrets or deceptive acts on the individual, the family unit, and the therapeutic process, particularly in the field of marriage and family therapy, has not been thoroughly studied or discussed. Further, deceptive acts during the therapeutic process may have implications for effective treatment planning. This article defines the various forms of deception and its systemic effects on relationships and on the therapeutic process. Possible interventions to address deception in a family therapeutic setting are proposed.     

Do taboo trade-offs explain the difficulty in valuing health and social interventions?

Persistent anomalies in the results of willingness to pay studies, despite improvements in measurement technique, challenge the assumption in economics that all sources of value are commensurable. Two sources of incommensurability have been identified: interdimensional incommensurability, which refers to the cognitive difficulty that people encounter when trying to assign a monetary value to health; and constitutive incommensurability, which arises when some forms of trade-off are regarded as ‘taboo’. In this paper we explore whether the notion of taboo trade-offs might explain some of the difficulties experienced in health-related willingness to pay studies.     

Race and Child Welfare Policy: State-Level Variations in Disproportionality

African American children are represented among those housed in foster care at more than twice the rate of their overall representation in the US population. This racial disproportionality is well known among child welfare researchers, who have been attempting to explain the phenomenon. Are African American families under more surveillance than white families because of involvement with TANF and other government aid programs, resulting in higher rates of foster care placements? Are investigators more likely to pursue allegations of abuse within African American families? Are African American children more likely to suffer from maltreatment? My research makes a unique contribution by investigating state-level variations in child welfare policy outcomes. Following the innovative work of Soss et al. (American Journal of Political Science 52(3):536–553, 2008) who find that states with larger African American populations have more stringent welfare regimes, it would be reasonable to expect that states with larger African American populations would have more aggressive child protection policies, resulting in higher numbers of children being housed in state protective custody. This work exposes a strikingly different pattern: States with larger African American populations are distinctly less likely to take children into protective custody. In addition, states with larger African American populations have dramatically lower levels of racial disproportionality among their children in foster care. States with larger white majorities place more children in foster care and place disproportionately higher percentages of African American children in foster care.     

Evaluation of single and mixed verbal operant arrangements for teaching mands and tacts

The purpose of this series of experiments was to evaluate the effects of mixed mand-tact arrangements on the acquisition of mands and tacts in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, the effects of three training arrangements (mand-only training, tact-only training, and mand-tact training) were investigated with 3 typically developing children. Rates of acquisition in single (mand-only and tact-only) versus mixed (mand-tact) presentation were comparable, in contrast to earlier investigations. Experiment 2 attempted to clarify the equivocal findings of Experiment 1 by directly replicating the Carroll and Hesse (1987) investigation with 2 typically developing children. Results again demonstrated no clear benefit of mixed verbal operant training on tact acquisition. In Experiment 3, these same arrangements were evaluated with a boy with autism and included assessments to determine that a relevant establishing operation was in effect prior to each mand training session. Experiment 3 again failed to demonstrate the facilitative effects of mand-tact training on the acquisition of mands or tacts. Taken together, the data from these three experiments fail to support the improved efficiency of mand-tact training suggested by prior studies. Findings are discussed in the context of future research investigating mixed verbal operant arrangements.     

The Social Contagion of Gambling: How Venue Size Contributes to Player Losses

The Social Facilitation Effect shows performance on many simple tasks is enhanced by crowds of onlookers or co-actors (others performing the same activity). Previous experimental research has shown that Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) betting behavior is intensified by the belief that others are gambling along with the subject (Rockloff and Dyer, J Gambl Stud 23(1):1–12, 2007). The present study extends these findings by simulating crowds of differing sizes using a fake video-conference along with a live confederate who gambles concurrently with the subjects. Fifty-four male and 81 female subjects aged 18–82 (M = 46.9, SD = 16.7) played a laptop simulated 3-reel EGM using a $20 stake in 3 conditions: (1) alone, (2) in a simulated group of 5 persons plus 1 live confederate, or (3) in a simulated group of 25 persons plus 1 live confederate. The EGM outcomes were rigged with a fixed 20 trial winning sequence followed by an indefinite losing sequence. As hypothesised, gambling intensity, as measured by trials played, speed of betting and final payouts, was progressively greater with larger crowd sizes (P < .05). In contrast, bet-size was slightly lower with larger crowds. The results suggest that gambling venues with more players tend to increase gambling persistence and contribute to greater long term monetary losses.     

Is the Problem of European Citizenship a Problem of Social Citizenship? Social Policy,Federalism, and Democracy in the EU and United States*

The development of supranational (European) social rights, and therefore social citizenship, is undermined by strong, direct relationships between citizens and national welfare states. Social policies contribute to national identities because they entail direct relationships between states and citizens. In well‐developed European welfare states strong relationships between citizens and their member‐states are expected. This may prevent the development of a similar relationship at the European level. The U.S. provides a comparison case, wherein a successful transference of citizenship identity from a lower to higher level has occurred, partly as a result of the building of national‐level social citizenship, at least for certain classes of people. Revolutionary War Pensions provide an example of how social policy influences national identity. The lack of EU‐level social policy precludes the possibility of this type of identity formation. Finally, the interplay of social citizenship and democracy in both cases is explored. T.H. Marshall’s work regarding citizenship as the basis for democracy is used to understand how the inability to create a common social policy in the EU is harmful to democracy.     

Relationships Between (Step)Parents and Adult (Step)Children: Explaining Influences on Life Satisfaction and Marital Quality

The purpose of this study was to examine important influences of adult (step)children’s relationships with their biological fathers, biological mothers, and resident stepparents on their life satisfaction and marital quality and the moderating role of stepparent gender. The sample (N = 215) was from Wave 3 of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). Results illustrate that (a) biological mothers and stepparents positively influenced life satisfaction among adult (step)children regardless of stepfamily type; and (b) that the influence of parent–child relationship quality on the adult child’s marital quality did vary as a function of stepfamily type. Specifically, there was a positive link between current stepmother–child relationship quality and the focal child’s current marital quality. The opposite link was found for those reared in stepfather households.     

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION ON RETIREMENT PLANNING: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD STUDY

Many households neglect the pivotal task of planning for retirement. Proposals to stimulate employees to save for retirement in the workplace include tax subsidies, which are costly, and using automatic defaults, which may not complement the heterogeneous preferences of savers. This randomized field study shows that an information‐based intervention increases reported retirement plan participation, emergency savings, and using a budget. Employees offered access to education increased actual retirement deferrals by $26 per month. These results suggest that retirement education programs may be an effective strategy to increase retirement planning and saving behavior. (JEL J26, D14, D91)