Racial differences in urban neighboring

Despite mixed expectations generated by existing theories and evidence, this analysis documents clear racial differences in urban neighboring behavior. Using data from a survey of Nashville, Tennessee, residents, we show that blacks interact with their neighbors more often than whites do, and in a greater variety of ways. The only noteworthy similarity between the two groups is the positive impact of neighboring on feelings of community affect. Overall, our results support the view that neighbor relations — like other kinds of informal participation — have helped blacks cope with constrained social opportunities and provided them with access to resources unavailable through formal institutional channels.Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1989.     

WHOSE GAY COMMUNITY? SOCIAL CLASS,SEXUAL SELF‐EXPRESSION,AND GAY COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

The visible and political gay community has been characterized as an increasingly middle-class, white institution. It is hypothesized that this middle-class nature requires economic and psychosocial resources that are not available to the working class and, thus, may limit the expression of sexual orientation for the working class. An analysis of data from the multicity Urban Men's Health Study supports this hypothesis. Nine of 14 hypothesized effects are statistically significant and indicate that working-class men who are homosexually active are less likely to describe themselves as gay, are more likely to have heterosexual experience, and are less likely to be involved in the gay community. Thus, it is important to incorporate class differences when addressing the social and the political dynamics of sexual orientation.     

Linguistic differentiation and Mayan language revitalization in Guatemala1

This paper presents a quantitative study of syntactic change in the context of Mayan language revitalization in Guatemala. Quantitative analyses of grammatical variation and code‐switching patterns were used to examine the degree of Spanish influence in the speech of three generations of Sipakapense‐Spanish bilinguals. The younger generations show lower frequencies of code‐switching compared to the oldest generation. In terms of syntactic variation, younger speakers show patterns that suggest a resistance to influence from Spanish. The results suggest that younger speakers are hyperdifferentiating the two languages by avoiding traditional Sipakapense constructions that could be interpreted as resulting from Spanish influence. The analysis highlights the important role of language ideology in cases of language change due to contact and language shift.     

Female Labor Force Participation in Urban and Rural China1

Abstract The objective of this study is to examine female labor force participation and its determinants in rural and urban China. The sociological literature has demonstrated that participation tends to increase in urban and industrialized places where women have higher levels of education and fewer children, where more workers are engaged in service pursuits, and where family structure is less traditional. With the use of data on counties and cities (N = 2,377) from the I-percent sample of the 1982 census of the People's Republic of China, it was found that female labor force participation is likely to rise in areas with increased agricultural employment, educational levels, proportion of female-headed households, and higher male-to-female sex ratios. Both the size of the service sector and the fertility rate had negligible effects on female labor force participation. Although, on average, rural places have slightly higher levels of female labor force participation, when other variables are controlled, urban places have a higher rate of female participation. In addition, the findings suggest that market factors (i.e., education) are more likely to determine the rate of female labor force participation in urban areas; whereas demographic and social factors (i.e., sex ratio and household structure) play a more important role in explaining the female labor force participation in rural counties.     

Exploring the Hierarchical Structure of Pacific Identity and Wellbeing

To understand outcomes for Pacific peoples in New Zealand we need to further our psychological knowledge of the relationship between Pacific identity and wellbeing. We map the hierarchical organization of Pacific identity and wellbeing using a novel top-down factor analytic approach applied to the Pacific Identity and Wellbeing Scale (PIWBS; N = 586). Analyses indicated that Pacific identity experiences were organized within two broad dimensions reflecting Identity Engagement and Cultural Wellbeing. Critically, our analysis showed that Religious Centrality and Embeddedness emerged jointly from these dual broad domains. Religious identification provides a bridging link between identity and wellbeing for Pacific peoples. Identifying the relationships of Pacific identity and wellbeing factors, and how religious identification emerges jointly from these two broad domains, provides valuable information in how the Pacific self may be cognitively organized and may assist in future research directions in this area. We assert that this general statistical model provides broad conceptual insights into how Pacific peoples experience their identity and culture, and how this relates to various social indicators of health and wellbeing at a broad, theoretical level. In particular, we offer a conceptual analysis of possible insights from our hierarchical model of identity and wellbeing for understanding Pacific suicide in New Zealand.     

Individual Differences in Infant Oculomotor Behavior During the Viewing of Complex Naturalistic Scenes

Little research hitherto has examined how individual differences in attention, as assessed using standard experimental paradigms, relate to individual differences in how attention is spontaneously allocated in more naturalistic contexts. Here, we analyzed the time intervals between refoveating eye movements (fixation durations) while typically developing 11‐month‐old infants viewed a 90‐min battery ranging from complex dynamic to noncomplex static materials. The same infants also completed experimental assessments of cognitive control, psychomotor reaction times (RT), processing speed (indexed via peak look during habituation), and arousal (indexed via tonic pupil size). High test–retest reliability was found for fixation duration, across testing sessions and across types of viewing material. Increased cognitive control and increased arousal were associated with reduced variability in fixation duration. For fixations to dynamic stimuli, in which a large proportion of saccades may be exogenously cued, we found that psychomotor RT measures were most predictive of mean fixation duration; for fixations to static stimuli, in contrast, in which there is less exogenous attentional capture, we found that psychomotor RT did not predict performance, but that measures of cognitive control and arousal did. The implications of these findings for understanding the development of attentional control in naturalistic settings are discussed.     

Leadership of highly creative people in highly creative fields: A historiometric study of scientific leaders

In recent years there has been a marked increase in the study of the influence of leadership on creativity, and the effects of this relationship on organizational performance. While a number of explanations have been broached with regard to the positive effects of leadership on creativity, many of these studies propose different, and often contradictory, methods for leaders to achieve these positive effects on creativity within their organizations and work groups. Additionally, little work has been done examining the effects of leadership on highly creative people in fields requiring creativity. The purpose of this study is to examine two existing leadership theories with regard to their viability as models to explain creative performance of eminent scientists. Eminent scientists represent a population of leaders of highly creative individuals in a field that values the production of innovative ideas and products as a marker of performance. Ninety-three excerpts from the biographies of scientists were content coded for leader behaviors and performance criteria. The results of this analysis indicate that a model based on strategic planning and product championing may serve to explain the positive effects of leadership on creativity in a highly creative population.