ROUND GIVING: A FIELD EXPERIMENT ON SUGGESTED DONATION AMOUNTS IN PUBLIC‐TELEVISION FUNDRAISING

Direct‐mail fundraisers commonly provide a set of suggested donation amounts to potential donors, in addition to a write‐in option. Standard economic models of charitable fundraising do not predict an impact of suggested amounts on charitable giving. However, our field experiments on direct‐mail solicitations to over 10,000 members of a public television station tell a different story. We find that changing one of the suggested amounts in an ask string from $100 to $95 reduces the number of gifts greater than or equal to $90 by more than 30%. This contrasts with our finding that in three independent comparisons, increasing the entire vector of suggested amounts by 20%–40% reduces the probability of giving by approximately 15%, with little effect on the average size of the gift. Both manipulations lead to a larger proportion of write‐in donations, even as they reduce the number of total gifts. We propose a simple behavioral theory to explain the data: many donors prefer to give round numbers, and donors incur a cognitive cost when choosing to give a nonsuggested amount. (JEL C9, H4)     

Male-to-Female Transgender Individuals Building Social Support and Capital From Within a Gender-Focused Network

ABSTRACT

The literature on male-to-female transgender myriad problems such individuals face in their day-to-day lives, including high rates of HIV/AIDS, addiction to drugs, violence, and lack of health care. These problems are exacerbated for ethnic and racial minority MTFs. Support available from their social networks can help MTFs alleviate these problems. This article explores how minority MTFs, specifically in an urban environment, develop supportive social networks defined by their gender and sexual identities. Using principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), 20 African American and Latina MTFs were recruited at a community-based health care clinic. Their ages ranged from 18 to 53. Data were coded and analyzed following standard procedure for content analysis. The qualitative interviews revealed that participants formed their gender and sexual identities over time, developed gender-focused social networks based in the clinic from which they receive services, and engaged in social capital building and political action. Implications for using CBPR in research with MTFs are discussed.     

Strategies of valuation: repertoires of worth at the financial margins

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations.     

SYSTEMIC AND NONSYSTEMIC DIAGNOSTIC PROCESSES: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON

This study concerned the extent to which systemic and nonsystemic clinicians differ in their diagnostic processes. Experienced therapists, identified either with a family systems or a psychodynamic orientation, viewed a stimulus film of a family session and individual interviews with each parent and identified patient. Subjects listed "clinically relevant factors" and formulated hypotheses. Content analyses showed that the systemic clinicians, in contrast to the nonsystemic ones, identified as relevant a greater number of different subsystems, more triads, and fewer monads. Whereas they formulated more functional and fewer temporal hypotheses, almost no explicitly circular hypotheses were developed by either group of therapists.     

Prisoners of conscience in the Plowshares and School of the Americas Watch movements: the politics of privilege,gender, and religious identity

ABSTRACT

The American peace movement has always been predominantly white and Christian, and this essay makes the privileged identities of nonviolent prisoners of conscience in the Plowshares and School of the Americas Watch movements its analytical starting place. From the axes of gender (female or male) and religious identity (laity or vowed religious), it examines how privilege and experience are understood and animated by movement participants, and how this impacts activist experience. Specifically, it investigates how some prisoners of conscience negotiate and employ their whiteness, education, class, and status as a strategic use of ‘privilege power,’ as well as how the ‘moment of action’ is a gendered experience of empowerment that is shaped by religious identity. The data illuminate the ways that privilege can be a site of intentional contestation and power, while un-examined areas of identity can shape experience in meaningful ways.     

Confidence Matters: Self‐efficacy Moderates the Credit that Supervisors Give to Adaptive and Proactive Role Behaviours

In complex and uncertain work environments, employees need to not only be proficient in carrying out their core duties, but also to be adaptive (able to cope and respond to unpredictable events) and proactive (able to anticipate the situation and act in a self‐directed way) in their work roles. In this study we investigate the extent to which supervisors actually give credit to adaptive and proactive role behaviours when they judge employees’ overall job performance. Drawing on attribution theory, we propose that the extent to which these role behaviours are valued by supervisors will be enhanced by employees’ confidence for relevant role behaviours. Support for these ideas is provided using data from junior doctors and their supervisors in a hospital emergency department. Adaptive role behaviours positively influenced supervisors’ judgements of overall job performance. This relationship was stronger for employees with high self‐efficacy for achieving outcomes. Engaging in proactive role behaviours while also lacking role‐breadth self‐efficacy resulted in supervisors’ giving employees less credit for their proactive role behaviours. Findings support the argument that employees’ self‐efficacy for specific role behaviours provides attributional cues about capability that modify how adaptive and proactive role behaviours are interpreted and valued.     

Community college field placement internships: supervisors’ perspectives and recommendations

ABSTRACT

Community College human services students represent the future social service workforce. The defining feature of their training is 250 h supervised field placement internship. Despite burgeoning research describing best practices for supervision of Bachelors of social work (BSW) and Masters of social work (MSW), there is no research aimed at supervision for community college students, leaving a gap in our understanding of best practices for supporting community college students’ pedagogy and sustaining partnerships with agencies. This exploratory study offers recommendations for best practices supported by our discovery of the benefits, challenges, and strategies involved with offering community college student internships in New York City human services agencies. We analyzed data from semi-structured interviews with 30 field supervisors through qualitative content analysis. Community college students and agencies both benefit substantially from the field placement, however agencies identified significant social and structural challenges specific to working with community college students that require interventions for both field supervisors and students alike. Suggested interventions aimed at improving supervisor training, procedures for focusing goals of supervision sessions, assisting students in meeting their academic and social needs, as well as supporting supervisors’ professional goals to promote best practices are proposed.     

Modeling exchange rate dynamics: Non-linear dependence and thick tails

This paper illustrates a new approach to the statistical modeling of non-linear dependence and leptokurtosis in exchange rate data. The student's t autoregressive model withdynamic heteroskedasticity (STAR) of spanos (1992) is shown to provide a parsimonious and statistically adequate representation of the probabilistic information in exchange rate data. For the STAR model, volatility predictions are formed via a sequentially updated weighting scheme which uses all the past history of the series. The estimated STAR models are shown to statistically dominate alternative ARCH-type formulations and suggest that volatility predictions are not necessarily as large or as variable as other models indicate.     

关于法律实证与社会实证的双重立场分析——以我国农村土地立法为例

法律实证(分析法学派)和社会实证(法社会学派)是西方法学界倡导的分析法学问题的两大基本路径.我国法学者对诸多法学问题的分析,往往只择其一而用之,其结果因研究路径的缺漏,导致法学理论研究或立法的不完善.我国农村土地立法应采用法律实证和社会实证相结合,使二者相辅相成、相得益彰,方能既参考国外成功的立法和理论,又照顾中国农村的实际情况.     

Modeling exchange rate dynamics: Non-linear dependence and thick tails

This paper illustrates a new approach to the statistical modeling of non-linear dependence and leptokurtosis in exchange rate data. The student's t autoregressive model withdynamic heteroskedasticity (STAR) of spanos (1992) is shown to provide a parsimonious and statistically adequate representation of the probabilistic information in exchange rate data. For the STAR model, volatility predictions are formed via a sequentially updated weighting scheme which uses all the past history of the series. The estimated STAR models are shown to statistically dominate alternative ARCH-type formulations and suggest that volatility predictions are not necessarily as large or as variable as other models indicate.