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In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school's response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government's control over refugee students and their families. In schools, the students are kept out of certain school spaces, marginalized in remedial courses, and denied academic opportunities and integrated support services. Using empirical data, we demonstrate how the restriction of the students' movement in and around schools is embedded within the larger limitations embedded in coloniality and assimilation. We situate our analysis within the tensions and interactions between coloniality, assimilation, and neoliberalism as articulated in studies within anthropology and sociology, migration studies, critical refugee studies, and cultural studies. We conclude with a call for the decolonization of education and offer a practical starting point in refugee education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Based on single cross-sectional data, prior research finds evidence of “transportation assimilation” among U.S. immigrants: the length of stay in the U.S. is negatively correlated with public transit use. This paper revisits this question by using repeated cross-sectional data, and examines the trend of transportation assimilation over time. Methods and results: Using 1980, 1990, 2000 1% census and 2010 (1%) American Community Survey, I examine the relationship between the length of stay in the U.S. and public transit ridership among immigrants. I first run regressions separately in four data sets: I regress public transit ridership on the length of stay, controlling for other individual and geographic variables. I then compare the magnitudes of the relationship in four regressions. To study how the rate of transportation assimilation changes over time, I pool the data set and regress public transit ridership on the length of stay and its interactions with year dummies to compare the coefficients across surveys. Results confirm the conclusion of transportation assimilation: as the length of stay in the U.S. increases, an immigrant’s public transit use decreases. However, the repeated cross-section analysis suggests the assimilation rate has been decreasing in the past few decades. Conclusions: This paper finds evidence of transportation assimilation: immigrants become less likely to ride public transit as the length of stay in the U.S. increases. The assimilation rate, however, has been decreasing over time. This paper finds that the rate of public transit ridership among new immigrants upon arrival, the geographic distribution of immigrants, and the changing demographics of the U.S. immigrants play roles in affecting the trend of transportation assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the annual meeting of the society of scientific study of religion at Vista International Hotel Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This year's theme of religious marginality encourages participants to go beyond core beliefs and practices of members of mainline churches to the expressions of interest or disinterest in religion that are less common religious experience, mixed intermarriage, unclear interpreting "don't know" responses to questions on belief, nonestablishment (religion among street people), or rejections of religion atheism and apostasy. List of topics related to this year's theme would include, denominational switching and conversion, sources of membership change in the mainline churches, apostates and returnees, new nones (apostates) vs. stable nones with no prior ties, inter-religious marriage and religion of children, divorce, religious socialization of children, religiosity and the life cycle, Inter-racial marriage and religion and the Black Church.

Many US biomedical PhD programs receive more applications for admissions than they can accept each year, necessitating a selective admissions process. Typical selection criteria include standardized test scores, undergraduate grade point average, letters of recommendation, a resume and/or personal statement highlighting relevant research or professional experience, and feedback from interviews with training faculty. Admissions decisions are often founded on assumptions that these application components correlate with research success in graduate school, but these assumptions have not been rigorously tested. We sought to determine if any application components were predictive of student productivity measured by first-author student publications and time to degree completion. We collected productivity metrics for graduate students who entered the umbrella first-year biomedical PhD program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2008–2010 and analyzed components of their admissions applications. We found no correlations of test scores, grades, amount of previous research experience, or faculty interview ratings with high or low productivity among those applicants who were admitted and chose to matriculate at UNC. In contrast, ratings from recommendation letter writers were significantly stronger for students who published multiple first-author papers in graduate school than for those who published no first-author papers during the same timeframe. We conclude that the most commonly used standardized test (the general GRE) is a particularly ineffective predictive tool, but that qualitative assessments by previous mentors are more likely to identify students who will succeed in biomedical graduate research. Based on these results, we conclude that admissions committees should avoid over-reliance on any single component of the application and de-emphasize metrics that are minimally predictive of student productivity. We recommend continual tracking of desired training outcomes combined with retrospective analysis of admissions practices to guide both application requirements and holistic application review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing critical global health issues, such as antimicrobial resistance, infectious disease outbreaks, and natural disasters, requires strong coordination and management across sectors. The One Health approach is the integrative effort of multiple sectors working to attain optimal health for people, animals, and the environment, and is increasingly recognized by experts as a means to address complex challenges. However, practical application of the One Health approach has been challenging. The One Health Systems Mapping and Analysis Resource Toolkit (OH-SMART) introduced in this paper was designed using a multistage prototyping process to support systematic improvement in multi-sectoral coordination and collaboration to better address complex health concerns through an operational, stepwise, and practical One Health approach. To date, OH-SMART has been used to strengthen One Health systems in 17 countries and has been deployed to revise emergency response frameworks, improve antimicrobial resistance national action plans and create multi agency infectious disease collaboration protocols. OH-SMART has proven to be user friendly, robust, and capable of fostering multi-sectoral collaboration and complex system-wide problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are public officials more responsive to requests from affluent or poor constituents? A growing body of evidence suggests that lawmakers are more responsive to the rich when they craft policy. However, some scholars theorize that officials also exhibit a corresponding bias in favor of the poor when they handle casework, essentially giving policy to the rich and services to the poor. In this paper, we test this casework prediction using four experiments in which confederates sent simple requests to state or local officials. In each, our confederates’ reported social classes were randomly assigned and signaled with a brief introductory statement mentioning the sender’s occupation or economic situation. Across our samples, we find precisely-estimated null effects of social class biases: the officials we studied were equally likely to respond regardless of the constituent’s class. These findings raise doubts about whether casework is really a class-biased process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to produce timely and accurate flu forecasts in the United States can significantly impact public health. Augmenting forecasts with internet data has shown promise for improving forecast accuracy and timeliness in controlled settings, but results in practice are less convincing, as models augmented with internet data have not consistently outperformed models without internet data. In this paper, we perform a controlled experiment, taking into account data backfill, to improve clarity on the benefits and limitations of augmenting an already good flu forecasting model with internet-based nowcasts. Our results show that a good flu forecasting model can benefit from the augmentation of internet-based nowcasts in practice for all considered public health-relevant forecasting targets. The degree of forecast improvement due to nowcasting, however, is uneven across forecasting targets, with short-term forecasting targets seeing the largest improvements and seasonal targets such as the peak timing and intensity seeing relatively marginal improvements. The uneven forecasting improvements across targets hold even when “perfect” nowcasts are used. These findings suggest that further improvements to flu forecasting, particularly seasonal targets, will need to derive from other, non-nowcasting approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fish consumption in Mexico is considered low (around 12 kg per person per year) and non-homogeneously distributed across the country. One of the reasons for this situation is the scarcity of wholesale selling sites. In this context, the Mercado del Mar (MM), located in Guadalajara city, Jalisco, is the second biggest wholesale fish market in Mexico, with a distribution of about 500 tons per day and a variety of about 350 different species of fish. In this paper, we argue that MM has accumulated social capital, which is formed from two main resources: buyer and seller relationships, and reputation. Specifically, the MM manages a broad and intensive interaction among business actors and the already achieved reputation allows the MM to adapt to market changes. To validate our hypotheses, an empirical study was conducted in 2015 by means of interviews to fish wholesalers in the MM and a sample of their suppliers and buyers. For simplicity we have only considered fresh water fish. We have followed snow-ball sampling as the survey strategy. Results show that the MM has responded to fish market dynamics organizing a complex network of buyers and suppliers whose relationships can be explained in the form of strong and weak ties. At the same time, reputation has been the central resource to build this social capital and also gives place to market transactions. Additionally, the strategic position of Guadalajara city and the well-connected routes have facilitated fish bulking and distribution in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Heroin use in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. The objective of this paper is to estimate the annual societal cost of heroin use disorder in the United States in 2015 US dollars. Methods: An analytic model was created that included incarceration and crime; treatment for heroin use disorder; chronic infectious diseases (HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and Tuberculosis) and their treatments; treatment of neonatal abstinence syndrome; lost productivity; and death by heroin overdose. Results: Using literature-based estimates to populate the model, the cost of heroin use disorder was estimated to be $51.2 billion in 2015 US dollars ($50,799 per heroin user). One-way sensitivity analyses showed that overall cost estimates were sensitive to the number of heroin users, cost of HCV treatment, and cost of incarcerating heroin users. Conclusion: The annual cost of heroin use disorder to society in the United States emphasizes the need for sustained investment in healthcare and non-healthcare related strategies that reduce the likelihood of abuse and provide care and support for users to overcome the disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Economic inequality in the United States is extreme, but little is known about the national origin of affluent households. Households in the top one percent by total wealth own vastly disproportionate quantities of household assets and have correspondingly high levels of economic, social, and political influence. The overrepresentation of white natives (i.e., those born in the U.S.) among high-wealth households is well-documented, but changing migration dynamics suggest that a growing portion of top households may be immigrants. Methods: Because no single survey dataset contains top wealth holders and data about country of origin, this paper uses two publicly-available data sets: the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Multiple imputation is used to impute country of birth from the SIPP into the SCF. Descriptive statistics are used to demonstrate reliability of the method, to estimate the prevalence of immigrants among top wealth holders, and to document patterns of asset ownership among affluent immigrants. Results: Significant numbers of top wealth holders who are usually classified as white natives may be immigrants. Many top wealth holders appear to be European and Canadian immigrants, and increasing numbers of top wealth holders are likely from Asia and Latin America as well. Results suggest that of those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants, .5% are from Mexico or Cuban, and 1.7% are from Asia (especially Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and India). Ownership of key assets varies considerably across affluent immigrant groups. Conclusion: Although the percentage of top wealth holders who are immigrants is relatively small, these percentages represent large numbers of households with considerable resources and corresponding social and political influence. Evidence that the propensity to allocate wealth to real and financial assets varies across immigrant groups suggests that wealth ownership is more global than previous research suggests and that immigrant groups are likely to become more prevalent in top wealth positions in the U.S. As the representation of immigrants in top wealth positions grows, their economic, social, and political influence is likely to increase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Scientific research on the banking crisis 2007–08 has answered many important questions according to generally accepted methodological standards. However, there remains at least one outstanding question that has not been answered with methodological accuracy: What caused the severe USA banking crisis 2007–08? To address this question the paper uses a counterfactual definition of ‘cause,’ distinguishes between separable and non-separable causes, and employs a well-posed methodology for the causation analysis of singular events. In addition, first causes and preponderant causes are distinguished. The main result of this paper is that the preponderant causes of the banking crisis 2007–08 were securitization and ignorance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper introduces a bibliometric, citation network-based method for assessing the social validation of novel research, and applies this method to the development of high-throughput toxicology research at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Social validation refers to the acceptance of novel research methods by a relevant scientific community; it is formally independent of the technical validation of methods, and is frequently studied in history, philosophy, and social studies of science using qualitative methods. The quantitative methods introduced here find that high-throughput toxicology methods are spread throughout a large and well-connected research community, which suggests high social validation. Further assessment of social validation involving mixed qualitative and quantitative methods are discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to estimate peer influence in video gaming time among adolescents. Using a nationally representative sample of the U.S. school-aged adolescents in 2009–2010, we estimate a structural model that accounts for the potential biases in the estimate of the peer effect. Our peer group is exogenously assigned and includes one year older adolescents in the same school grade as the respondent. The peer measure is based on peers’ own reports of video gaming time. We find that an additional one hour of playing video games per week by older grade-mates results in .47 hours increase in video gaming time by male responders. We do not find significant peer effect among female responders. Effective policies aimed at influencing the time that adolescents spend video gaming should take these findings into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on coupled networks, taking node load, capacity and load redistribution between two networks into consideration, we propose functionally identical coupled networks, which consist of two networks connected by interlinks. Functionally identical coupled networks are derived from the power grid of the United States, which consists of many independent grids. Many power transmission lines are planned to interconnect those grids and, therefore, the study of the robustness of functionally identical coupled networks becomes important. In this paper, we find that functionally identical coupled networks are more robust than single networks under random attack. By studying the effect of the broadness and average degree of the degree distribution on the robustness of the network, we find that a broader degree distribution and a higher average degree increase the robustness of functionally identical coupled networks under random failure. And SF-SF (two coupled scale-free networks) is more robust than ER-ER (two coupled random networks) or SF-ER (coupled random network and scale-free network). This research is useful to construct robust functionally identical coupled networks such as two cooperative power grids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Charles Tilly's relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a 'historicist.' The 'search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,' he argued, was a 'waste of time' and had 'utterly failed.' Tilly's approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on 'historical individuals' rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly's program of 'relational realism' resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism's argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly's ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a 'chart' that defines academic time in terms of units of before-after relationships. The paper shows how students 'reuse' these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic work to specific futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to explain how the American strategy regarding Iraq has broken up the social fabric and led to a state of disorder, which the American administration has failed to address after six months since the fall of Baghdad. This paper also underscores multiple discriminations against Iraqi women from the re-emerging tribal and religious parochialisms, which the occupation forces and the Iraqi Governing Council tolerate, thus encouraging the atmosphere of atavistic recidivism that is prevalent in neighboring Gulf States. Further, the policies pursued by successive United States administrations, have been cynically pragmatic and devoid of any humanitarian impulse or consciousness, trapping the Iraqi people between dictatorship and privation.

In 1945 Davis and Moore, following an earlier formulation by Davis, proposed a functional theory of stratification that was intended to account for what they contended was the "universal necessity" for social inequality in any social order. Beginning with an article by Tumin in 1953, the Davis-Moore theory elicited regular analysis, commentary, criticism, and debate through the 1970s. Although professional work on the theory has largely ceased since the late 1980s, the Davis-Moore theory remains perhaps the single most widely cited paper in American introductory sociology and stratification textbooks and constitutes "required reading" in hundreds, if not thousands, of undergraduate and graduate courses throughout the United States. The present paper traces the history of the debate and attempts to explain the theory's longevity and vitality in the face of what has amounted to largely negative assessments by other sociologists over the preceding fifty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1885 and 1930, as sociology was becoming an academic discipline, sociology was also being practiced intelligently, innovatively, and self-consciously outside the academy in the social settlements that grew up in America's major cities. In this paper, we first define and give a brief overview of the settlement movement in America; second, we show how the settlement workers were sociologists in their self-definition and action and in their relations with other sociologists; third, in the body of the paper, we describe the sociology done by the settlements in terms of the empirical research they undertook and the theory they created. Our argument is that settlement sociologists produced empirical studies that were both substantively significant and methodologically pioneering; that they did so in terms of a coherent social theory unique in its focus on "the neighborly relation"; and that both their research and theory were part of a critical, reflexive, and activist sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial distribution of income shapes the structure and organisation of cities and its understanding has broad societal implications. Despite an abundant literature, many issues remain unclear. In particular, all definitions of segregation are implicitely tied to a single indicator, usually rely on an ambiguous definition of income classes, without any consensus on how to define neighbourhoods and to deal with the polycentric organization of large cities. In this paper, we address all these questions within a unique conceptual framework. We avoid the challenge of providing a direct definition of segregation and instead start from a definition of what segregation is not. This naturally leads to the measure of representation that is able to identify locations where categories are over- or underrepresented. From there, we provide a new measure of exposure that discriminates between situations where categories co-locate or repel one another. We then use this feature to provide an unambiguous, parameter-free method to find meaningful breaks in the income distribution, thus defining classes. Applied to the 2014 American Community Survey, we find 3 emerging classes—low, middle and higher income—out of the original 16 income categories. The higher-income households are proportionally more present in larger cities, while lower-income households are not, invalidating the idea of an increased social polarisation. Finally, using the density—and not the distance to a center which is meaningless in polycentric cities—we find that the richer class is overrepresented in high density zones, especially for larger cities. This suggests that density is a relevant factor for understanding the income structure of cities and might explain some of the differences observed between US and European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies with a focus on the interrelationships among health information seeking behavior (HISB), and health status or use of preventive health measures for U.S. adults both with and without a high school diploma. Key results of ordinal and binary logistic regression analyses indicated that, after controlling for demographic factors, (1) adults with a high school diploma use more text-based health information sources while adults without a high school diploma use more oral sources, (2) using the Internet as a source of health information is more strongly related to reporting excellent/very good health status than having a high school diploma, (3) those without a high school diploma who use the Internet report the largest increase in health status over any other health information source, and (4) for those with learning disability or vision problem, a high facility in reading English is an important predictor of whether the Internet is used as a health information source. The Internet appears to play a key role in both enhancing health status and enabling use of preventive measures for those with and without a high school diploma; although, individuals without a high school diploma who use the Internet for health information derive substantial benefit in health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon insights from the social movement literature as well as leadership experience in a successful social movement organization, this paper suggests aspects of a framework for integrating traditional and contemporary approaches. The case history of JUST (Johnstowners United to Stop another Tragedy) is used to illustrate the interaction of grievances and structures in the career of a social movement organization. In addition to helping fill a lacuna in the literature on the internal dynamics of such organizations, this analysis also demonstrates the importance of the nature of the grievance as well as the target group's structural entrenchment. The paper focuses upon a relatively anomalous case for U.S. social movement organizations: an SMO which was successful despite displacement goals. The final section of the paper includes a summary diagram of the factors involved in JUSTs successful protest effort as well as broader generalizations suggesting the conditions under which grievances or infrastructures are more salient in explaining social movement phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the "other" within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the "other," and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the interpretive dynamics of official inquiries. Beginning with an ideal-typical sketch of congressional investigations, the discussion traces a portrayal of public problems by a committee of the House of Representatives. This leads to the analysis of a hearing in which committee factions struggled to define an Air Force administrator as a "whistleblower" or a "renegade." The hearing is understood as a "certification ceremony" that rhetorically transformed staff, discoveries into allegedly definitive evidence, it is concluded that the paper's conceptual approach can be applied to diverse inquiries that combine documentary research with interrogation of witnesses to generate authoritative findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a review of comparable degree productivity among several social and behavioral sciences, this paper concludes that sociology was uniquely affected by forces that lowered both the production of B.A.'s, M.A.'s, and Ph.D.'s and the quality of its graduate students. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, sociology suffered drastic declines in student numbers and quality. The increased careerism among students apparently accounts for a substantial portion of this decline, but through a very concrete mechanism: the expansion of business programs. The paper suggests that perhaps an absence of a serious commitment to teaching scientific sociology accounts for the loss of quality, since applied sciences have fared much better than has sociology. The recent ASA Task Force recommendations for curriculum redesign are reviewed, and a call is issued for revitalizing the scientific component of undergraduate sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is taken from Chapter 6 of the publication A Lucky Journey: The Sociological Enterprise, 1931-1980, which reflects on the progress of the American Sociological Review (ASR) as a publication from 1958 to 1960. The local editorial staff of the publication began with a contingent of ten scholars. These ten scholars included representatives of various sub-fields in sociology and of related discipline as well as specialists on Soviet Russia, Africa, India and Japan. Most of the day-to-day labor on the Review was done by editorial secretary Betty Vogel, Michael Olmsted, and their nominal boss. Michael Olmsted was more than a first-rate book review editor, he evaluated papers in his special fields with sagacity and designed an attractive cover to replace what had long been the dismal front of the publication. Solicitation of papers by prominent sociologists helped to upgrade ASR as a scholarly journal. Another change was the introduction of a division of the Review on the Profession which included not merely the obituaries or communications pertaining to the sociological guild, but both solicited submitted articles on the occupation itself. This innovation, according to the author, was consistent with his own growing interest in the sociology of sociology.

This paper focuses on the early stages of a social movement--the development of a militant faculty union. It is a socio-historical analysts of the major internal and external factors and the interaction between them that determined the course of the movement's development. Although the analysts is limited to one state university system, the structural and procedural characteristics are relevant to other universities faced with collective bargaining choices.
This research examines a faculty union as an insurgent group. An insurgent group is a movement organization which attempts to bring about structural change by thrusting new interests into the decision-making process (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977). The paper will analyze the key issues and events that enabled a small, rag-tag army to march into legitimate power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas past wolf management in the United States was restricted to recovery, managers must now contend with publicly contentious post-recovery issues including regulated hunting seasons. Understanding stakeholder concerns associated with hunting can inform stakeholder engagement, communication, and policy development and evaluation. Social identity theory (SIT) has been used to understand how groups interact, why they conflict, and how collaboration may be achieved. Applying SIT to stakeholder conflicts about wolf hunting may help delineate groups according to their concern about, support for or opposition to the policy choice of hunting wolves. Our objective was to assess concerns about hunting as a tool to resolve conflict in Michigan, using SIT as a framework. We used a mixed-modal sampling approach (e.g., paper, Internet) with wolf hunting-related public meeting participants in March 2013. Survey questions focused on 12 concerns previously identified as associated with hunting as a management tool to resolve conflict. Respondents (n  =  666) cared greatly about wolves but were divided over hunting wolves. Wolf conflicts, use of science in policy decisions, and maintaining a wolf population were the highest ranked concerns. Principle components analysis reduced concerns into three factors that explained 50.7% of total variance; concerns crystallized over justifications for hunting. General linear models revealed a lack of geographic influence on care, fear and support for hunting related to wolves. These findings challenge assumptions about regional differences and suggest a strong role for social identity in driving dichotomized public perceptions in wildlife management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People in different subgroups age at different rates. Surveys containing biomarkers can be used to assess these subgroup differences. We illustrate this using hand-grip strength to produce an easily interpretable, physical-based measure that allows us to compare characteristic-based ages across educational subgroups in the United States. Hand-grip strength has been shown to be a good predictor of future mortality and morbidity, and therefore a useful indicator of population aging. Data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) were used. Two education subgroups were distinguished, those with less than a high school diploma and those with more education. Regressions on hand-grip strength were run for each sex and race using age and education, their interactions and other covariates as independent variables. Ages of identical mean hand-grip strength across education groups were compared for people in the age range 60 to 80. The hand-grip strength of 65 year old white males with less education was the equivalent to that of 69.6 (68.2, 70.9) year old white men with more education, indicating that the more educated men had aged more slowly. This is a constant characteristic age, as defined in the Sanderson and Scherbov article “The characteristics approach to the measurement of population aging” published 2013 in Population and Development Review. Sixty-five year old white females with less education had the same average hand-grip strength as 69.4 (68.2, 70.7) year old white women with more education. African-American women at ages 60 and 65 with more education also aged more slowly than their less educated counterparts. African American men with more education aged at about the same rate as those with less education. This paper expands the toolkit of those interested in population aging by showing how survey data can be used to measure the differential extent of aging across subpopulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the American presence in two journals of the Bucharest School of Sociology, as well as the information provided in these journals with regard to the American sociological models and their evolution. The data reviewed demonstrate not only a strong academic connection, but also an active cooperation and consistent exchange of academic knowledge between the two countries. The paper builds on a quantitative study of the full archives of the two journals - Arhiva pentru Ştiinţa şi Reforma Socială (Archive for Science and Social Reform) and Sociologie Romanească (Romanian Sociology); its final part is dedicated to the Romanian monographic activity of the U.S. sociologist Ph. Mosely. The conclusion is that the development of the Romanian school of sociology was in line not only with what was happening in the greatest schools of sociology in Europe, but also with the theoretical developments of the American sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of ecosystem services (ES) has recently become a key reference for international environmental policies (broadly including forest policy, agro-environmental measures, conservation policies, etc.) This concept has been developed gradually in scientific circles in the course of the 1990s. It acquired international recognition with a varied public (policy makers, private sector, NGOs, etc.) during the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a global environmental assessment. Since 2005, this notion is experiencing strong growth in different fields such as biodiversity, domestic policies (forestry, agriculture, water, etc.), global change, etc. Our paper is based on the exploratory assumption that the MA process, by organizing the relationship between various networks of scientists and policymakers, has played a key role in the launching and wide dissemination of the ES concept at different scales: international level, domestic policies, local public action mechanisms... It also emphasizes the decisive role played by actors involved in or related to the scientific field in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recently developed hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models, inferential questions arise: How can one assess or judge the significance of estimates of individual cohort and period effects in such models? And how does one assess the overall statistical significance of the cohort and/or the period effects? Beyond statistical significance is the question of substantive significance. This paper addresses these questions. In the context of empirical applications of linear and generalized linear mixed-model specifications of HAPC models using data on verbal test scores and voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections, respectively, we describe a two-step approach and a set of guidelines for assessing statistical significance. The guidelines include assessments of patterns of effects and statistical tests both for the effects of individual cohorts and time periods as well as for entire sets of cohorts and periods. The empirical applications show strong evidence that trends in verbal test scores are primarily cohort driven, while voter turnout is primarily a period phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives: To extend existing research on the US health disadvantage relative to Europe by studying the relationships of disability with age from midlife to old age in the US and four European regions (England/Northern and Western Europe/Southern Europe/Eastern Europe) including their wealth-related differences, using a flexible statistical approach to model the age-functions. Methods: We used data from three studies on aging, with nationally representative samples of adults aged 50 to 85 from 15 countries (N = 48225): the US-American Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Outcomes were mobility limitations and limitations in instrumental activities of daily living. We applied fractional polynomials of age to determine best fitting functional forms for age on disability in each region, while controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and important risk factors (hypertension, diabetes, obesity, smoking, physical inactivity). Results: Findings showed high levels of disability in the US with small age-related changes between 50 and 85. Levels of disability were generally lower in Eastern Europe, followed by England and Southern Europe and lowest in Northern and Western Europe. In these latter countries age-related increases of disability, though, were steeper than in the US, especially in Eastern and Southern Europe. For all countries and at all ages, disability levels were higher among adults with low wealth compared to those with high wealth, with largest wealth-related differences among those in early old age in the USA. Conclusions: This paper illustrates considerable variations of disability and its relationship with age. It supports the hypothesis that less developed social policies and more pronounced socioeconomic inequalities are related to higher levels of disability and an earlier onset of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objectives of this paper are to predict life years lost associated with obesity-related diseases (ORDs) for U.S. non-smoking adults, and to examine the relationship between those ORDs and mortality. Data from the National Health Interview Survey, 1997–2000, were used. We employed mixed proportional hazard models to estimate the association between those ORDs and mortality and used simulations to project life years lost associated with the ORDs. We found that obesity-attributable comorbidities are associated with large decreases in life years and increases in mortality rates. The life years lost associated with ORDs is more marked for younger adults than older adults, for blacks than whites, for males than females, and for the more obese than the less obese. Using U.S. non-smoking adults aged 40 to 49 years as an example to illustrate percentage of the life years lost associated with ORDs, we found that the mean life years lost associated with ORDs for U.S. non-smoking black males aged 40 to 49 years with a body mass index above 40 kg/m2 was 5.43 years, which translates to a 7.5% reduction in total life years. White males of the same age range and same degree of obesity lost 5.23 life years on average – a 6.8% reduction in total life years, followed by black females (5.04 years, a 6.5% reduction in life years), and white females (4.7 years, a 5.8% reduction in life years). Overall, ORDs increased chances of dying and lessened life years by 0.2 to 11.7 years depending on gender, race, BMI classification, and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted long-standing questions about energy exploration and its social and environmental implications. Sociologists studying environmental disasters have documented the social impacts resulting from these events and dissatisfaction with government and industry responses. In this paper, we use data from a survey conducted during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to examine how Louisiana and Florida residents'' social backgrounds, experiences with the spill, and trust in information sources predict their perceptions of governmental and BP response efforts. We find that direct personal impacts and compensation strongly influence the evaluations of responding organizations. Age and place of residence also predict such assessments. Finally, levels of confidence in television news and BP as sources of information appear to shape Gulf Coast residents'' opinions about the work of organizations responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The study of the popularization of science sheds light on how particular ethnic and religious communities engage with science. To gain a properly nuanced view, this study must extend to include nonscientific journals that address those communities. The Menorah Journal, an influential English-language American Jewish publication, serves as a case in point. The Menorah Journal 's use of evolutionary sociology in articles during its peak from 1915 to 1929 reveals that the American culture of scientific inquiry forms the backdrop to the Menorah Journal's push to construct a Jewish American identity based not upon religion or nationalism, but upon ethnicity. In the pages of the Menorah Journal, prominent intellectuals drew upon neo-Darwinism, orthogenesis, and neo-Lamarckism to address the challenges facing Judaism in America from an empirical, positivist vantage point, and to articulate an approach towards an American Jewish cultural renaissance. This paper situates the Journal within the context of contemporary American cultural reactions to progressivism, Deweyan pragmatism, neo-Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian evolutionism, and the social sciences, and presents case-studies that offer a detailed analysis of articles by Mordecai Kaplan, Leon Simon, Kaufmann Kohler, Simon Dubnow, and Isaac Baer Berkson. Evolutionary sociology, it will be seen, is a key element in the Menorah Journal's efforts to foster a Jewish cultural renaissance. Analyzing how the Menorah Journal deployed evolutionary sociology thus offers a fresh perspective from which to explore issues of Americanization, identity, and cultural vitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African Americans' struggles for education in the United States have been immense and the scholarship on their achievements has been growing. This article examines the lives of Carter G. Woodson, W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier, and their relationships and contributions to the development of Afrocentricity. The discussion highlights the work of these three intellectual giants, and how they helped to advance research on Africa and the experiences of people of African descent. It explores Woodson and Du Bois respectively as fathers of Black History and Militant Journalism, and Frazier as the Son of the Crisis. The findings elucidate the complexities and struggles surrounding these scholars' worldviews, and ensuing antagonisms arising from their education and the resulting social dynamics of racism and color prejudice in the United States and around the globe. Responding to social, political and institutional racism, Woodson and Du Bois emphasized the centrality of Africa and African liberation in their work. However, Frazier appeared to remain in an intellectual crisis because his emerging perspectives on Africa and people of African descent was budding in the context of Black pathology theorizing. Nevertheless, the paper argues that collectively the lives of these three scholars illustrate Afrocentricity and the Black intellectual tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a residual methods approach to identifying social mobility across race/ethnic categories. In traditional demographic accounting models, population growth is limited to changes in natural increase and migration. Other sources of population change are absorbed by the model residual and can be estimated only indirectly. While these residual estimates have been used to illuminate a number of elusive demographic processes, there has been little effort to incorporate shifts in racial identification into formal accounts of population change. In light of growing evidence that a number of Americans view race/ethnic identities as a personal choice, not as a fixed characteristic, mobility across racial categories may play important roles in the growth of race/ethnic subpopulations and changes to the composition of the United States. To examine this potential, we derive a reduced-form population balancing equation that treats fertility and international migration as given and estimates survival from period life table data. After subtracting out national increase and net international migration and adjusting for changes in racial measurement and census coverage, we argue that the remaining error of closure provides a reasonable estimate of net interracial mobility among the native born. Using recent U.S. Census and ACS microdata, we illustrate the impact that identity shifts may have had on the growth of race/ethnic subpopulations in the past quarter century. Findings suggest a small drift from the non-Hispanic white population into race/ethnic minority groups, though the pattern varies by age and between time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes gendered social identity in Japan and the United States, countries with comparable postindustrial economic systems but distinct cultural traditions. Using national surveys (1995), we find gender differences in value orientations to be neither systematic nor consistent. They often disappeared after controlling for demographic and human-capital variables, though not so often for Japan. Other variables proved more important predictors of values than gender, although in different ways in Japan and the United States. We conclude by reassessing the use of the term gender in social research and the cultural meaning of gender relations by addressing the feminist concerns with issues of gender location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a difference between the social capital developed in faith-based and secular poverty-to-work programs? Comparative field research investigating five faith-based and secular poverty-to-work programs in southeastern America finds that values expressed by a secular non-profit organization and two faith-based programs correspond with more activities that develop social capital than the programs run by a for-profit organization and a reinvented government agency. In all the programs this social capital is both 'bridging,' by crossing barriers of race, gender, and class, and 'bonding' by tying participants and staff into at least a temporary supportive community. The programs see that this social capital is effective in supporting low-income persons through the transition to full-time employment. In addition, the faith-based programs seek to extend the social capital by developing long-term ties between clients and local religious congregations. This paper also specifies how social capital is developed in these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores article production by the entire population of US undergraduate sociology departments. The available literature suggests that undergraduate programs publish little, that this is concentrated among relatively few mainly liberal arts-departments, and that publication rates are increasing. We argue There are reason* to expect that social economic presence, reward policies, student quality, and faculty quality, si/e. and workload will affect productivity. Tracing publication of articles across the 1990s. few undergraduate departments are represented in 30 journals deemed important on the bases of reputation and citation rates Liberal arts schools do not predominate Ceteris paribus, public schools outpublished private schools Publication rates have not increased. Social economic presence, and student and faculty quality affect publishing, but salary, tenure structure, and workload do not Finally, faculty size suppresses per capita publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether and to what extent the field of the sociology of deviance is "dead," relevant to sociology generally, or intellectually vital, and, if it is less vital than it once was, how and why it declined in vigor, and what might be done to return it to its glory days. It also addresses the implications of the election of 2004 for the field of deviance studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using articles drawn from the years 1996-1999, this paper updates and expands Jack Niemonen's 1997 TAS analysis of the articles dealing with race and ethnicity in the four core sociology journals. We found a greater rate of publication and several new substantive areas incorporating race and ethnicity, but many of the patterns Niemonen identified remain in place. These articles are highly quantitative, rely heavily on U.S. Census categories, tend to explain racial and ethnic phenomenon as by-products of broader social forces (such as class-based stratification), and subsume these analyses under the headings of alternative subfields. Niemonen used these findings to offer a powerful critique of the status of race and ethnicity in sociology, the under-development of the racial and ethnic relations "problematic," and its marginalization within the discipline as a whole. To reassess these interpretations and conclusions, we examined the relationships between methodology and substance, and compared the main sample with a subset of more specialized articles focused on race and ethnicity. We found a close connection between quantitative methods and the use of Census definitions of race and ethnicity, but surprisingly few differences between the race and ethnic subset and the more inclusive main sample appeared. These findings allow us to offer support and some important qualifications to Niemonen's original conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown growing shares of employment in the social economy (or non-profit sector) both in the European Union and in the United States. In the EU, there seems to be growing hopes that the social economy will be capable of contributing to local progress on the unemployment issue in crisis regions. This paper analyses employment in certain entrepreneurial forms, usually considered belonging to the social economy, in Sweden during the 1990s. The results show considerable regional differences of employment in the social economy, but also that its share of the labor market is very limited. The effect of social-economic organizations on employment, therefore, is probably mainly indirect in as much as they function as platforms for cooperation between firms or else as embryos for enterprises by strengthening local entrepreneurship and helping to nurture a deposit of social capital which has visible effects on private business and jobs. However, these effects need more detailed examinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses holy New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrowfocus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes religious socialization as it relates to schooling success. propose and test a multilevel model of involvement in church activities as providing integration and motivation toward schooling success among metropolitan U.S. public high school sophomores. Results indicate that respondents' participation in church activities is related to heightened educational expectations, and that these more intensely religious students score higher on standardized math/reading tests; even while controlling for variables that often show religious effects to be spurious. The hypothesis that church involvement's effect varies by ecological context - it being a better predictor for students in poorer neighborhoods than average or wealthy neighborhoods - was not supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents Paul Kay's reaction to several comments on his paper which appeared in a previous issue of The American Sociologist, which addressed the nonacademic employment among doctor of philosophy degree holders in the U.S. On the whole, according to Kay, there seems to be agreement among the commenters (a) that social science generally is facing an oversupply of doctor of philosophy degree holders and (b) that there is substantial adherence in some quarters to the claim that the glut can be alleviated by expanding nonacademic employment. Similarly, although some commenters express doubt regarding the degree to which what Kay describes for anthropology applies to sociology, most state or assume that the current employment situations of the two disciplines are essentially the same. That is, the consensus of the comments is that his argument is either right for both disciplines or wrong for both disciplines, but probably not right for one and wrong for the other. Several commenters are worried by the lack of statistical report. Kay admits that his paper presented no statistics. According to him, reliable data in this area are hard to come by especially on the demand side.

How will sociology fare in the twenty-first century? We love what we do. The problem seems to be in communicating the value of what we do to lay people outside the discipline. Sociology's future in part will be dependent upon its practitioners demonstrating its utility in the marketplace of everyday life, assessment and decision making. This paper offers a twenty-year perspective of one sociology department's work in a rural Appalachian region. While providing a brief overview of a series of initiatives, it explains in depth our involvement and contributions to a community-based health project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to demonstrate with the help of empirical data that U.S. social science is parochial and that its relations with disciplines overseas are better suggested by dependency theory than by the collegiate mutuality of the concept of the international scientific community. The adverse effects upon the periphery are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]