Who Toes the Party Line? Cues, Values, and Individual Differences

This article explores individual differences in citizens’ reliance on cues and values in political thinking. It uses experimental evidence to identify which citizens are likely to engage in heuristic processing and which citizens are likely to engage in systematic processing in developing opinions about a novel issue. The evidence suggests that political awareness crisply distinguishes between heuristic and systematic processors. The less politically aware rely on party cues and not on an issue-relevant value. As political awareness increases, reliance on party cues drops and reliance on an issue-relevant value rises. Need for cognition fails to yield clear results. The results suggest two routes to opinion formation: heuristic processing and systematic processing. Political awareness, not need for cognition, predicts which route citizens will take.     

‘The Worst Job in the World’: Reform,Revolution, and the Secret Rebellion in Florida's Cane Fields

Governments around the world are embracing guestworkers as a flexible labor force. The untold story of 1960s-era strike wave among Caribbean sugarcane cutters in Florida shows how the longest-running US guestworker program – the H2 Program – has functioned. The program, which began in 1942 and continues today, provided Florida's sugarcane industry with its sole source of harvest field labor, and became all the more important in the 1960s as the Cuban Revolution and the embargo that followed it caused Florida's industry to expand exponentially. Expropriated Cuban sugar moguls adopted the labor practices pioneered by the US Sugar Company, importing mostly Jamaican peasant farmers as temporary workers and deporting those who refused to accept their terms. Federal efforts to mitigate growers' exploitative practices only encouraged worse labor abuses. Cane cutters defended themselves with frequent strikes but deportations made insurgency's gains ephemeral.

‘No ebery ting wha got sugar a sweet’.

Jamaican proverb 1 1. Frank Cundall 1924 Cundall, Cundall. 1924. Jamaica in 1924: A Handbook for Visitors and Intending Settlers with Some Account of the Colony's History, Kingston, Jamaica: The Institute of Jamaica.  [Google Scholar]: 56].      

At the Nexus of Observational and Experimental Research: Theory,Specification, and Analysis of Experiments with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

Experimentalists are increasingly examining heterogeneous treatment effects, in which observed individual-level characteristics are hypothesized to moderate an experimental treatment effect. Such work places researchers at the nexus of experimental and observational approaches. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical and statistical issues that can arise in testing such hypotheses. We note that inclusion of an observed (as opposed to randomly-assigned) moderator introduces the possibility of confounds that are commonplace in observational data analysis but too-easily ignored in experimental data analysis. We simulate several different data generating processes that include heterogeneous treatment effects, and we discuss the implications of various statistical models. We aim to provide researchers who examine heterogeneous treatment effects with background and advice that enable them to identify where common issues may arise and to develop research designs and implement statistical tests that will mitigate them.     

Book Reviews

Gerda Lerner. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Eleanor Flexner. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Biography. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1972.

Two Great Lives, and One Lesser Life

Eleanor Flexner. Mary Wollstonecraft. New York : Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972.

Noel B. Gerston. Daughter of Earth and Water. New York : William Morrow and Co., 1973.     

Conceptualizing nursing research with offenders: another look at vulnerability

In this article, vulnerability is examined as it applies to the conduct of nursing research with offenders. As a group, offenders present with a multitude of acute and chronic physical and mental health care needs; they are subject to discrimination, stigmatization, and marginalization; and as such, they often experience dual, multiple, or overlapping vulnerabilities. As research participants, they are especially vulnerable to coercion, as a direct consequence of their dependency status within the correctional system. Embracing a research agenda that focuses on offenders as a vulnerable population is fraught with ambiguities not generally encountered in other settings. The ethical conduct of research with vulnerable populations reflects a contemporary research problem that requires ongoing discourse within the nursing community and the health care community at large.