Search

Policy PointsThe historic 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization decision has created a new public policy landscape in the United States that will restrict access to legal and safe abortion for a significant proportion of the population.Policies restricting access to abortion bring with them significant threats and harms to health by delaying or denying essential evidence‐based medical care and increasing the risks for adverse maternal and infant outcomes, including death.Restrictive abortion policies will increase the number of children born into and living in poverty, increase the number of families experiencing serious financial instability and hardship, increase racial inequities in socioeconomic security, and put significant additional pressure on under‐resourced social welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse around the bridging the gap debate is seen to a unique sub-set of the social sciences in the United States as applied to a unique American approach to security. This article looks beyond US National Security and the practices of the discipline of political science at US universities to address, and expand on, some specific ideas in Michael Desch's volume The Cult of the Irrelevant. We offer that an integrative assessment of how scholarly work can best inform security policies and practices requires more critical examination in four domains: consideration of how different disciplines frame key issues and speak to each other; understanding the dynamics of the policy marketplace; assessments to alternate ways to frame security and national security; and requirements to critical challenge the privilege academics have awarded themselves as the purveyors (and gatekeepers) of 'knowledge' and the 'truth'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personality trait of openness has been shown to contribute to a person's ability to function effectively. Additionally, scholars have suggested that openness to experience and foreign language experience were related to music preference. Extending from earlier scholarship, this study examined the relationship between openness to experience and the various types of musical and language experiences reported by undergraduate music majors in Turkey and the United States. Participants (N = 380) were surveyed using the Openness to Experience domain of the NEO-PI-R and an author-designed survey with questions about participants' musical backgrounds and interests, foreign language abilities, age, and sex. Results showed that U.S. students rated significantly higher in four of the five dimensions of the Openness domain than their Turkish counterparts (Wilks'λ =.57; F (5, 374) = 55.37, p <.001). Factor analysis results showed that (a) experiences in foreign languages, (b) listening to Turkish traditional, pop, and folk music, and (c) listening to American (pop and folk) and Western classical music cumulatively explained 68.49% of the variance in openness. Correlation analyses suggested that listening to Western classical, American folk, and American pop music was associated with higher openness scores, and listening to Turkish traditional, folk, and pop music was associated with lower openness scores. Additionally, the number of foreign languages participants studied correlated with four of the dimensions. Results suggest that both groups could benefit from increased, broader, and deeper exposure to different musical genres from diverse cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if half of the people in the jury pool for a capital case are unqualified to sit--and the lawyers are not accurately identifying and removing them? And what if the lawyers are actually identifying the wrong people as unqualified and removing them instead? This appears to be the case. The Constitution prohibits jurors who will always (or never) vote to impose the death penalty. As developed in this Article, the existing social science suggests that 5-30% of potential jurors may be automatic death penalty (ADP) voters and between 2-34% may be automatic life sentence (ALS) voters. Further, lawyers are not accurately identifying them. Researchers have surveyed jurors who sat in capital cases and found that a stunning 14-57% were ADP voters, while 2-7% were ALS voters. Meanwhile, qualified venirepersons are being tossed out. Researchers have found that 60-65% of those classified as ALS could vote for death in some circumstances, and at trial, this would result in the exclusion of life-leaning venirepersons. The high rate of improperly included ADP voters along with the high rate of improperly excluded lifeleaning voters stacks the jury pool against the defendant. This unfair and unreliable process calls into question whether the death penalty is constitutional as applied. What can we do about it? This Article draws on the social sciences to show that there are two likely sources for this inaccuracy. First, potential jurors make it through the selection process because lawyers ask questions that invoke social desirability bias. This means that the potential jurors answer in ways that will portray themselves in the best possible light, even if that answer does not reflect what they really feel. Next, the lawyers fail to define "capital murder" when questioning potential jurors. The lawyers do not specify that "capital murder," in most jurisdictions, is willful, deliberate, premeditated murder. Potential jurors who are ADP may be thinking, "Well, I would vote for life if the defendant didn't mean to kill the victim; or the killing was an accident; or was in self-defense; or the defendant was adequately provoked; or the defendant was insane." They think they can vote for life in some circumstances--but under those circumstances, the defendant would not be death-eligible. This Article then provides suggestions for addressing these two sources of error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]