Factors Affecting Recognition of Senior Citizens in a Silver Alert

The current study investigated the recognition of faces of senior citizens in the context of a Silver Alert. Literature on face recognition and eyewitness identification has consistently found recognition failure due to factors such as Own-Age Bias, the Other-Race Effect, and Own-Gender Bias. Participants viewed a video of people in a naturalistic setting, a park. The target, an elderly woman, wore either typical clothing or atypical clothing (nightgown), was not present or was not present but replaced with a different senior. We measured accuracy, confidence, reaction time, and Prediction-of-Knowing in relation to type of clothing worn by the target as well as age, race, and gender of participants. We hypothesized that recognition of the target senior would be low but would be higher when the woman appeared in a nightgown (matching the stereotype of an individual with dementia) as compared to typical clothing. We did not find age, race, and gender effects on target recognition. We offer possible explanations for both significant and non-significant results as they apply to the unique population of missing elderly adults.     

Confronting Government After Welfare Reform: Moralists, Reformers, and Narratives of (Ir)responsibility at Administrative Fair Hearings

Almost 40 years ago, the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) , provided welfare participants with a potentially potent tool for challenging the government welfare bureaucracy by requiring pre-termination hearings before welfare benefits were discontinued or reduced. In 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) , the rights talk of Kelly was officially replaced with the discourse of individual responsibility. Using observational data of administrative hearings and interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study explores how fair hearings have been affected by this official reconceptualization of rights. I find that hearings are not a panacea for challenging the more punitive aspects of welfare reform, but nor are they devoid of the possibility of justice. While hearings can replicate in style and substance the inequities, rigid adherence to rules, and moral judgments that characterize welfare relationships under the PRWORA, they can also be used as a mechanism for creating counternarratives to the dominant discourse about welfare. This study identifies two types of judges—moralist judges and reformer judges—and examines how their differing approaches determine which narrative emerges in the hearing room.     

Differential Voter Turnout in a Post-Communist Muslim Society: The Case of the Kyrgyz Republic

Borrowing the dominant theoretical frameworks of studies of voter turnout in the developed world, this paper tests the applicability of these frameworks to a transitional democracy in a Muslim society. Using logistic regression, we estimate an individual’s likelihood of voting in Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections. We find that traditional rural networks, rather than networks of voluntary associations, play the central role in the mobilization of voters. In addition, turnout is affected by long-standing cultural cleavages based on religion and ethnicity, and by education, occupation, and trust in government. Our findings suggest that the political behavior of the people of the Kyrgyz Republic is supportive of democracy, in spite of elite-level obstacles to a successful transition.     

When civil engagement is part of the problem: Flawed anti-corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine

In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anti-corruptionism. In this article, we challenge this dominant assumption. Instead, we show that, under certain conditions, an engaged non-governmental community may, in fact, undermine the fight against corruption. Using the data from forty interviews with anti-corruption practitioners in Ukraine and Russia, as well as primary documentary sources, we present two models of anti-corruptionism whereby active civil engagement produces suboptimal outcomes. One is faux collaboration, defined as a façade of cooperation between the state and civil society, which hides the reality of one-sided reforms. The other model is that of non-collaborative co-presence, whereby the governance role is shared by the government and non-governmental activists without compromise-based solutions. In both cases, civil engagement helps perpetuate abuses of power and subvert such long-term goals of anti-corruption reforms as democratization and effective governance.     

Sweat or No Sweat: Foreign Workers in the Garment Industry in Malaysia

In the last decade factory owners, in response to brand-name Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) parameters, have joined associations that verify (through a monitoring and audit system) that management does not exploit labour. There have been no reports of violations of codes of conduct concerning Malaysian workers but for foreign workers on contract there are certain areas that have been reported. These areas, including trade union membership, the withholding of workers' passports and unsuitable accommodation, generally escape notice because auditors who monitor factory compliance do not question the terms of contracts as long as they comply with national labour standards. This paper is based on research with foreign workers in Malaysia and argues that despite the success of the anti-sweatshop movement in a global context, the neo-liberal state in Malaysia continues to place certain restrictions on transnational labour migrants which breach garment industry codes of conduct. Available evidence does not support the assumption that CSR practices provide sufficient protection for both citizen and foreign workers on contract in the garment industry.     

PROGRAMS FOR PROMOTING PARENTING OF RESIDENTIAL PARENTS: Moving From Efficacy to Effectiveness

This article reviews prevention programs that target primary residential parents as change agents for improving children's postdivorce adjustment. First, we review parental risk and protective factors for children from divorced families, including parenting quality, parental mental health problems, interparental conflict, and contact with the nonresidential parent. Following a discussion of brief informational interventions, we describe the findings of evaluations of three multisession, skill-building interventions for divorced parents. Impressive evidence is presented that parenting is a modifiable protective factor and that improving parenting leads to improvements in children's postdivorce adjustment. We then discuss, in greater detail, the New Beginnings Program, which we highlight because it has shown repeated, immediate effects on children's mental health outcomes as well as long-term effects on a wide array of other meaningful outcomes, such as diagnosis of mental disorder in the past year, externalizing problems, alcohol and drug use, and academic performance. Also, mediational analyses have shown that program-induced changes in parenting accounted for changes in mental health outcomes. The remainder of the article describes a research and action agenda that is needed to successfully implement the New Beginnings Program in domestic relations courts.     

Does everyday corruption affect how Russians view their political leadership?

Do Russians’ personal experiences with corruption influence how they evaluate their political leaders and, if so, in what direction? In addressing this question, we focus specifically on small-scale corruption that arises when Russians encounter employees of service provision organizations. We analyze survey data gathered in the summer of 2015 from Russia to trace the links between personal corrupt behavior and political attitudes. We show that participation in everyday corruption lowers a person’s support for the political regime, both as a bivariate relationship and in a multivariate model with controls. Being involved in corrupt transactions reduces support for the regime through two indirect mechanisms: by making the political leadership’s performance seem worse and by heightening perceptions that corruption is widespread among the country’s leaders. We find no support for arguments in the literature that bribery and other forms of bureaucratic corruption help citizens pursue their needs in the face of inefficient state institutions and less developed economies. In Russia, those who frequently encounter corruption are less, not more, happy with the regime.     

The dynamite charge

When juries report they are deadlocked, judges may deliver a supplemental instruction known as thedynamite charge which urges jurors to reexamine their views in an effort to reach a unamimous verdict. To examine the impact of this instruction, 72 mock jurors were led to believe they were participating in a controlled deliberation by voting and passing notes. Subjects were randomly assigned to the majority or minority faction of a 3-to-1 split. After the third round of deliberation, half the subjects received the dynamite charge, half did not. Results provided support for the hypothesis that the dynamite charge causes jurors in the minority to feel coerced and to change their votes and encourages those in the majority to exert increasing amounts of social pressure. These findings are discussed for their practical implications, limitations, and directions for further research.We would like to thank Rebecca Buchanan and Craig Gangi for their role as experimenters in a pilot study.