The environmental nightmare of the economic miracle: Land abuse and land struggles in Taiwan

Abstract

This is an article about gut feelings: The kind of gut feeling you get when you step out of an elegant wood-paneled coffee shop in Taipei, where you have sipped a dense European brew at U.S. $6.00 for a small cup, and are assaulted by a whirl of grit and trash in the humid eddies of air, the noxious fumes of motorcycles, and the growl and honk of nearby traffic. The mounting nausea you feel when you cannot avoid eyeing slop spilled from restaurant pails left for pickup by pig farms, mounds of used styrofoam bowls and drink cartons, mangy dogs rooting in the corner garbage heaps awaiting early morning collection, and scraps of rotting wood and rusting metal from long-abandoned carts. The unease you feel when you seek escape from the congested city center and find debris from construction sites egregiously scattered in supposedly scenic spots, and industrial and household waste piled up on every otherwise open piece of land, whether vacant lot or graveyard knoll. The choke and dry cough that becomes habitual after a few days of too many hours in stop-and-go city traffic, evenings of endless banquets with chain smokers, and nights in which the smoke of chemical emissions from faraway factories—venting illegally but with impunity under cover of darkness—seeps into your apartment, where you thought you were safe with your cool tiled floors and humming air conditioners.     

Intimate Partner Violence Control Scale: Development and Initial Testing

Although control has long been considered central to understanding intimate partner violence (IPV), there continues to be a notable lack of validated scales measuring control (e.g., Strauchler et al. Journal of Family Violence, 19(6), 339–354, 2004). The purpose of this study was to develop and empirically validate a brief assessment tool, the Intimate Partner Violence Control Scale (IPVCS), designed to measure control in the context of IPV. Data from a sample of male undergraduate and graduate students (n = 436) were used to examine the scale’s properties. After reviewing theoretical conceptualizations and measurement issues of control, psychometric properties of the IPVCS and results of exploratory hypotheses tests are presented. The availability of a brief and reliable measure of control offers a tool for professionals in the judicial system, for IPV victims’ advocates, and for human services workers in practice settings to adequately assess for control and fills a gap in this area of research and practice.     

Intimacy development in middle adolescence: Its relationship to gender and family cohesion and adaptability

The relationships of family cohesion and adaptability to adolescent intimacy development were explored by administering the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales survey and the Fundamental Interpersonal Relationship Orientation — Behavioral Version survey to 207 middle adolescents (70 males and 137 females) from a small midwestern high school. The adolescents' perceptions of family adaptability correlated with the amount of responsibility the teens expressed in their relationships, while cohesion correlated with companionship and affection in their relationships; however, females' scores were related to cohesion, while males' scores were related to satisfaction with cohesion in their families. The study suggests that family cohesion and adaptability differentially influence intimacy development based on the adolescent's gender.Received Ph.D. in marital and family therapy from Purdue University. Research interests include family influences on adolescent development and family issues related to incarceration.Received Ed.D. in human development from Boston University. Research interests include major life transitions (e.g., adolescence, middle adulthood).     

Sex,power, and dependency: The politics of adolescent sexuality

This study examines the social psychological determinants of adolescent sexual activity. Drawing on power-dependency theory within a social exchange framework, a conceptual model of adolescent sexuality is developed and tested using survey data on 288 teenagers. It is hypothesized that attributes of power (confidence with members of the opposite sex, popularity, opposite-sex friends, and egalitarian gender role attitudes) would indirectly decrease sexual activity (participation in unwanted sex and the extent of intimate sexual behaviors) through their negative effect on dependence (discomfort with physical appearance, the need for self-disclosure and closeness, the need for physical gratification in sex and the need for emotional gratification in sex). The findings indicate that the model is a good predictor of the sexual activity of adolescent males for whom dependency is an important determinant of sexual behavior. When the model is estimated separately for the Black and white teenagers, distinct patterns are observed for the Black females. Black females' participation in unwanted sex is far below the average for the other subgroups, and the most influential factor in decreasing coercion for Black females is nontraditional gender role attitudes.This research was supported in part by awards from the Phyllis Diness Foundation and the John Fletcher Hurst Fellowship of the American University, and a Drescher research leave provided by the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.Received Ph.D. from The American University in 1989. Research and teaching interests include social psychology, gender, and culture.     

Parental schooling choice: A case study of minnesota

Public support of nonpublic elementary and secondary education has become one of the most controversial issues in American educational policy, with tuition tax credits and deductions subjects of ongoing debate at both the state and federal level. This article presents the results of one of the first empirical investigations of how a tax subsidy for tuition costs actually influences parents' school choices using data from Minnesota, the first state to have a tuition subsidy pass judicial review at all levels. It should be uyseful to policy makers, researchers, adn practitioners who are concerned with how parents make schooling decisions on behalf of their children, and how tax subsidies for educational expenses might affect those choices.