Racial diversity in the suburbs: how race-neutral responses to demographic change perpetuate inequity in suburban school districts

Suburbs across the US are experiencing dramatic demographic shifts, yet there is little research available on how suburban school districts are dealing with these changes. In this article, we examine the discourses surrounding race and demographic change in three suburban school districts that have been undergoing rapid demographic changes and which contain demographically distinct areas within their district boundaries. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, we analyze how the policy context (federal and state) frames actors’ discourses and understandings of race, paying particular attention to the political and institutional factors affecting school policy. We illustrate how the discourse, in turn, is related to the actions (or inactions) taken by district and school leaders to respond to demographic change. We conclude the article by discussing policy implications and potential challenges districts may face in the future if efforts to purposively address racial changes continue to be avoided.     

Factors That Impact a Social Worker's Capacity to Supervise a Student

With sector constraints and higher education economic imperatives increasingly impacting the provision of social work field education, university programs lack an understanding of the factors that enable or prohibit field educators’ capacity to provide placements. Despite the significance of field education in the curriculum, it remains unclear what the experiences and motivations of field educators are to provide universities with student placements. This research addresses this gap through surveying 101 field educators that attended statewide Victorian field education training. Results indicated that although field educators recognised the benefits of supervising students, workload relief, additional training, and further student placement preparation by the university were emphasised as the primary factors that would enable them to respond positively to placement requests. Payments for placements did not necessarily ameliorate these issues nor guarantee the provision of more placements. The implications of these findings for universities and the field are discussed.     

Affirming the “S” in HBSE Through the Socio-Cultural Discourses of Lev Vygotsky,Barbara Myerhoff,Jerome Bruner,and Ken Gergen

Owing largely to the pioneering spirit of Sigmund Freud, social work's understanding of human behavior and development has supported individualist discourses that essentialize the self. Socio-cultural discourses present alternatives that strengthen the intentions of many social workers when they invoke the concept of human behavior in the social environment. In particular, Lev Vygotsky, Barbara Myerhoff, Jerome Bruner, and Ken Gergen offer compelling and salient accounts for genuinely regarding human behavior as embedded, even constituted by, social environments.     

Corporate Governance: Impulses from the Middle East

The sheer fact that the concept of Corporate Governance is not yet as widely spread in the countries of the Middle-East as in Western economies, may lead to our labelling, once again, this region as underdeveloped. The purpose of this article, however, is to lead the reader to let go of this Western perspective and to discover the distinctive impulses that the Arab-Muslim region has to offer for the further development of the human-social dimension of corporate governance, if not to ultimately transform it in such a “Middle-Eastern” light. We start then, in this article, by revealing some of the general limitations to corporate governance, before moving onto the specific impulses provided by the Muslim-Arab context. Islamic management is a new domain of knowledge that will be addressed in this paper to shed some light on how Islam can inform reform and transform the notion of corporate governance.      

Effects of correlated covariates on the asymptotic efficiency of matching and inverse probability weighting estimators for causal inference

In observational studies, the overall aim when fitting a model for the propensity score is to reduce bias for an estimator of the causal effect. To make the assumption of an unconfounded treatment plausible researchers might include many, possibly correlated, covariates in the propensity score model. In this paper, we study how the asymptotic efficiency of matching and inverse probability weighting estimators for average causal effects change when the covariates are correlated. We investigate the case with multivariate normal covariates, a logistic model for the propensity score and linear models for the potential outcomes and show results under different model assumptions. We show that the correlation can both increase and decrease the large sample variances of the estimators, and that the correlation affects the asymptotic efficiency of the estimators differently, both with regard to direction and magnitude. Moreover, the strength of the confounding towards the outcome and the treatment plays an important role.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Young at Eighty: The Prolific Public Life of Michael Young Geoff Dench, Tony Flower and Kate Davron (eds), Psychosocial Disorders in Young People: Time Trends and their Causes Michael Rutter and David J. Smith, (eds), Gender and the Professional Predicament of Nursing Celia Davies, A National Health Service? The Restructuring of Health Care in Britain since 1979 John Mohan, Drugs and Narcotics in History R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty Jeffrey Weeks, Childhood and Parenthood: Proceedings of the International Sociological Association Committee for Family Research Conference Julia Brannen and Margaret O'Brien, (eds). Changing Ethnic Identities Tariq Modood, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies Kobena Mercer, The Urban Context: Ethnicity, Social Networks and Situational Analysis Alisdair Rogers and Steven Vertovec (eds), Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies Daniel Miller, (ed.), The Sociology of the Meal Roy C. Wood, Interrogating Inequality: Essays on Class Analysis, Socialism and Marxism Erik Olin Wright, Bataille: Writing the Sacred Carolyn Bailey-Gill, (ed.), The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics T. Bennett, Disney and his Worlds Alan Bryman, Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, (eds), Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers H. Donnan and T.M. Wilson (eds).     

Did fertility go up after the oklahoma city bombing? An analysis of births in metropolitan counties in Oklahoma, 1990–1999

Political and sociocultural events (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the German reunification in 1989) and natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Hugo in 1989) can affect fertility. In our research, we addressed the question of whether the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, a man-made disaster, influenced fertility patterns in Oklahoma. We defined three theoretical orientations--replacement theory, community influence theory, and terror management theory--that motivate a general expectation of birth increases, with different predictions emerging from time and geographic considerations. We used two different empirical methodologies. First, we fitted dummy-variable regression models to monthly birth data from 1990 to 1999 in metropolitan counties. We used birth counts to frame the problem and general fertility rates to address the problem formally. These analyses were organized within two design structures: a control-group interrupted time-series design and a difference-in-differences design. In these analyses, Oklahoma County showed an interpretable, consistent, and significant increase in births. Second, we used graphical smoothing models to display these effects visually. In combination, these methods provide compelling support for a fertility response to the Oklahoma City bombing. Certain parts of each theory helped us organize and understand the pattern of results.     

Association between serum levels of testosterone and biomarkers of subclinical atherosclerosis

Objective: To investigate the association between serum levels of testosterone and biomarkers of subclinical atherosclerosis based on data from 119 middle-aged men of the general population.

Methods: Testosterone, Apolipoprotein A-1 (ApoA-1), Apolipoprotein B (ApoB), Apolipoprotein B-to-Apolipoprotein A-1 ratio (ApoB-to-ApoA-1), high-sensitive C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and fibrinogen levels were measured. Data were also gathered based on age, BMI, waist circumference, smoking, alcohol consumption, and family history of cardiovascular diseases. Men were classified into two groups based on testosterone levels: hypogonadal (testosterone ≤12?nmol/L) and eugonadal men (testosterone >12?nmol/L).

Results: When compared to eugonadal, the hypogonadal men were significantly older (56?years vs. 55?years, p?=?.03), had greater BMI (28?kg/cm² vs. 26?kg/cm², p?=?.01), and higher waist circumference (104?cm vs. 100?cm, p?=?.01). Moreover, ApoB, ApoB-to-ApoA-1 ratio, and hsCRP were significantly higher in hypogonadal men compared to eugonadal men (1.1?g/L vs. 1.0?g/L, p?=?.03), (0.8 vs. 0.7, p?=?.03), (3.3?mg/L vs. 2.0?mg/L, p?=?.01), respectively. On the other hand, ApoA-1 and fibrinogen levels did not differ significantly between groups (p?>?.05). In an adjusted multivariate regression analysis model, only ApoB showed a significant negative association with testosterone levels (β?=??0.01; 95% CI?=??0.02, ?1.50; p?=?.04).

Conclusion: Testosterone levels showed an inverse relation to ApoB, a biomarker implicated in subclinical atherosclerosis. These findings support the hypothesis that low testosterone levels play a role in atherosclerosis.     

Trust,Power and Safety in the Social Work Supervisory Relationship: Results from Australian Research

Social work, as a discipline, places considerable importance on the provision of supervision, promoting it as a key process supporting critical reflection and practice improvement. A supervision relationship built on trust has the potential to provide a safe context within which practice issues can be explored. This article reports on an Australian study of social work supervision and the ways in which a trusting supervision relationship supports safe practice and critical reflection. A context of trust within the supervisory relationship is found to promote safe practice, providing the basis for what supervisees felt was satisfying supervision. Within a trusted and supportive supervisory relationship participants wanted and valued challenge which was seen to promote professional growth and positive client outcomes. Whether this occurs, however, depended on how power was exercised and how safe they felt in the supervisory relationship. The research argues the need for social work to reclaim supervision through a revitalised commitment to advancing supervision practice, research, and research-based policies.