A model for the assessment of static and dynamic factors in sexual offenders

A sample of 519 sexual offenders who were consecutive admissions to the Ontario Region of Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) were assessed with reference to a large series of variables thought to be related to sexual offending. We grouped these variables into five domains: criminality, social competence, sexual deviance, substance abuse and treatment readiness. We standardized scores on each of these domains to facilitate the calculation of total scores for each domain. We then performed a variety of analyses to determine whether these domains might constitute a reasonable model for the comprehensive evaluation of sexual offenders. Analyses indicated that overall the model received a moderate level of support.     

How scientists and engineers use cultural resources to make controversies and selves meaningful

In this essay, I provide an overview of recent sociological studies of science, technology, religion, and spirituality; the ways they contribute to sociological theorizing; and make some recommendations for future research. There are two major themes in these studies. One of them analyzes religious and spiritual discourse as controversy practice, suggesting how religion and spirituality are used as cultural discourses to understand controversy, who the actors are or should be, how to act in a controversy, and how popular discourses inform, and are informed by, science and technology discourses. This theme contributes to theorizing by describing how forms of cultural talk organize understandings of controversies, interactions, and action. The second theme explores scientific and religious identities, and how they are made compatible with each other. This theme points sociological theory toward considering science and religion relations as intertextual relations.     

Collaboration and competition in a children's health initiative coalition: a network analysis

Activating communities to achieve public health change and initiate policy reform usually requires collective action from many entities. This case study analyzes inter-organizational networks among members of a coalition created to expand health insurance coverage to uninsured children in a large metropolitan area. Six networks were measured: collaboration, competition, formal agreements, receive funding from, send funding to, and greater communication. The response rate was 65.8% (50 of the 76 active members). Positive network questions such as “who do you collaborate with” elicited many network choices whereas negative ones such as “who do you compete with” elicited few. The collaboration network had a core–periphery structure and analysis showed that a large network can be reduced to a small set of core organizations one-sixth the size of the whole. Centrality (out- and in-degree) was associated with perceived organizational function and perceived barriers to success. For example, organizations that received many choices as collaboration partners were more likely to perceive the coalition functioned well than those who received few choices. The study suggests that perceptions of organizational performance are associated with position in the network, central members are more likely to perceive the organization performs well than those on the periphery.     

The Global War on Terror and Automatic License Plate Recognition

En sciences sociales un produit un vaste corpus de recherche concernant la pratique et la politique des Systèmes de Surveillance en Circuit Fermé (CCTV). La recherche a cependant négligé les CCTV automatisés et informatisés. Je m'adresse à ces formes de culture de la surveillance au moyen d'un point de vue institutionnel d'explorer ce qui a été appelé de reconnaissance automatique des plaques d'immatriculation (ALPR). En retraçant la manière dont les plans d'un système de surveillance Warzone sont utilisés comme une ressource dans les pratiques policières américaines, je trouve qu'ils ont tous deux impliquent un positionnement géo‐des véhicules, l'analyse de l'apparence des véhicules, et en minimisant le travail de l'analyse des plaques d'immatriculation. Je montre comment ces liens sont obscurcies, puis terminera par une discussion de trois implications de ce point de vue institutionnel sur ALPR. Social science has produced a fine body of research on the practices and politics of closed‐circuit television (CCTV) surveillance. Automated CCTV systems, however, have been neglected. I address these growing forms of surveillance through an institutional perspective to explore what has been called Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR). By tracing how plans for a war‐zone surveillance system are used as a resource in American policing practices, I find that they both involve a geo‐positioning of vehicles, analyzing the appearance of vehicles, and minimizing the labor of analyzing license plates. I show how these links are obscured, and then conclude with a discussion of three implications of this institutional perspective on ALPR.     

Are elderly men worried about crime?

It has been well documented that older adults, especially women, are more inclined to express fear of crime, but their risk of victimization is significantly lower than for people from other age groups. Even if gender issues related to fear are known, fear of crime among men is undocumented. This article explores how worry about victimization among older men (N = 156), from 3 francophone cities in Quebec, Canada, is influenced by age groups (60–69, 70–79 and 80 years old and over), health, depression, social support and prior victimization. There are significant results associated with the 3 dimensions of worry about crime (emotional, behavioural and cognitive). We conclude by commenting on the following question: Is worry about crime among elderly men a reality?     

Web-based nutrition education for college students: Is it feasible?

College students have poor nutrition habits and often exhibit at-risk weight control behaviors; yet, health promotion efforts on campuses often target other risk behaviors such as alcohol and tobacco use. The goal of this study was to determine program content and examine the feasibility of a web-based nutrition education program for college students using innovative applications of tailoring, targeting and personalization of information. Comprehensive program planning entailed three phases: focus groups and use of concept mapping methodology, prototype web program development, and feasibility testing of the prototype. Results of concept mapping suggested that students and experts agreed on the relative importance of the major content areas unique to the college audience. A prototype web program, informed by health promotion theories, was developed and evaluated. Students and college health professionals participated in the feasibility evaluation, which included acceptance and usability testing of the prototype. Mean scores were computed for the acceptance ratings that indicated that the prototype web program was not only feasible, but also compelling and relevant for the college audience. In conclusion, a tailored, web-based interactive nutrition program could potentially be used to provide individualized nutrition information to encourage college students to adopt healthy eating behaviors.     

Revisiting the sociology of identities and selves with discursive resources

In recent years, a growing body of multidisciplinary research has used the concept of the discursive resource. Discursive psychologists, communications scholars, and sociologists have all used this concept. Discursive resources are clusters of categories supplied by culture that present explanations for past and future activities, provide individual and collective identities for self‐construction, and enable and constrain texts. In this essay, I describe how this research contributes to sociological theorizing of identity, and make some recommendations for researchers who wish to use these concepts or improve these concepts. Studies using the concept of the discursive resource contribute to sociological theorizing of identity by showing how discursive resources are related to important features of social life such as future talk; collective identities; space and time; and complex and political divisions of labor, culture, and postmodernity. I then conclude by suggesting that future research analyze the social distribution of discursive resources across different kinds of social environments.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

Blumer's work on life histories and symbolic interactionism represents an important contribution in the twenty-first century. I join his work with research on storytelling to build a Blumerian approach to storytelling. This approach holds that social actors use stories to construct subjective meanings, stories exist in some social context, stories are told or written for some audience, a wide range of social processes produce stories, the temporal sequence of storytelling audiences is important, social actors use interactional techniques of showing story preferences, and symbolic structures and narrative linkages are the resources social actors use to compose stories. Future research can continue to develop this approach.     

A collaborative approach to nutrition education for college students

It is well established in the literature that college students have poor eating habits and that many barriers exist to achieving optimal nutrition for this busy population. Little is known about students' perceptions of this problem or suggestions for improving their dietary habits. Similarly, college health professionals need innovative approaches to nutritional education. In an effort to develop an online nutrition resource specifically geared to college students, the authors assessed the availability of Internet-based nutritional information for this population and conducted focus groups with students and health professionals to identify relevant nutrition concerns. They used concept-mapping techniques to conduct a systematic analysis of the qualitative information generated from their focus group participants. Their findings emphasize the need for targeted resources for college students and the importance of using students' suggestions in developing nutrition programs.