The role of community in facilitating service utilization

Guided by an integrated theory of parent participation, this study examines the role community characteristics play in influencing a parent's decision to use voluntary child abuse prevention programs. Multiple regression techniques were used to determine if different community characteristics, such as neighborhood distress and the community's ratio of caregivers to those in need of care, predict service utilization levels in a widely available home visiting program. Our findings suggest that certain community characteristics are significant predictors of the extent to which families utilize voluntary family supports over and above the proportion of variance explained by personal characteristics and program experiences. Contrary to our initial assumptions, however, new parents living in the most disorganized communities received more home visits than program participants living in more organized communities. The article concludes with recommendations on how community capacity building might be used to improve participant retention.     

Beyond the “Narrow Data Base”: Another Convenience Sample for Experimental Research

The experimental approach has begun to permeate political science research, increasingly so in the last decade. Laboratory researchers face at least two challenges: determining who to study and how to lure them into the lab. Most experimental studies rely on student samples, yet skeptics often dismiss student samples for lack of external validity. In this article, we propose another convenience sample for laboratory research: campus staff. We report on a randomized experiment to investigate the characteristics of samples drawn from a general local population and from campus staff. We report that campus staff evidence significantly higher response rates, and we find few discernible differences between the two samples. We also investigate the second challenge facing researchers: how to lure subjects into the lab. We use evidence from three focus groups to identify ways of luring this alternative convenience sample into the lab. We analyze the impact of self-interest, social-utility, and neutral appeals on encouraging study participation, and we find that campus staff respond better to a no-nonsense approach compared to a hard-sell that promises potential policy benefits to the community or, and especially, to the self. We conclude that researchers should craft appeals with caution as they capitalize on this heretofore largely untapped reservoir for experimental research: campus employees.

Where Movements Matter: Examining Unintended Consequences of the Pain Management Movement in Medical,Criminal Justice,and Public Health Fields

Social movement scholars have rarely considered professional fields as sites of social movement consequences and have overlooked how social movement consequences traverse field boundaries. This research examines where movements matter by examining unintended consequences across professional fields. Drawing on a case study of the pain management movement, this study asks (1) under what conditions do movements targeting a focal professional field create consequences in adjacent fields; (2) what factors affect how adeptly the adjacent field responds; and (3) how do social movement impacts on adjacent fields affect the focal field? Findings demonstrate how the success of the pain management movement in medicine helped to fuel the opioid epidemic, which detrimentally affected the adjacent fields of criminal justice and public health. These adjacent fields' strategies for curbing spillover, in turn, created a new set of consequences for medicine. Their responses depended on material and moral resources and authority structures that differed significantly across the two adjacent fields. This article concludes with a discussion of factors that may facilitate or deter cross‐field contagion effects and offers suggestions for future research.     

Privacy law as price control

The median Internet user is concerned about digital advertisers collecting personal information. To address these fears, the European Union passed the Privacy Directive to regulate the common business practice of information collection. This paper investigates the potential effects of this regulation, finding that the law is likely to generate several unintended consequences. Economists and legal scholars acknowledge that personal data serves as the “price” for accessing many digital platforms. I extend this logic to argue that if a regulation enables consumers to stop supplying this information, while continuing to consume the site’s content, it is equivalent to a price control. Next, I discuss unintended consequences that this price control may generate: tie-in sales, investment flight, and altered exchange characteristics. Lastly, I conclude that, just as with traditional price controls, the privacy price control may be a way for government officials to enhance their popularity with the citizenry. In short, my analysis suggests that one of the most well-researched policy interests of economics—the theory of price controls—can shed light on one of economists’ newest interests: digital privacy.     

Repoliticising multi-stakeholder standards processes: the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials’ standards and certification scheme

The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) is one of a number of sustainability standards schemes that have been approved by the European Union under its 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED). The RSB scheme is often referred to positively not only because the sustainability standard is considered to exemplify greater rigour than many of the other EU-approved standards in terms of their claims to protect ‘sustainability’, but also because it provides an example of a ‘multi-stakeholder’ model of standards development that is assumed to confer greater legitimacy on the sustainability standards that are produced. In recognising that standards processes are part of wider processes of neoliberalisation, this paper explores the process in which the RSB standard was produced. In doing so it considers how notions of sustainability embodied in the RSB standards were shaped not only by its ‘multi-stakeholder’ process, but also by wider influences that were brought to bear in that process, including the growing spectre of a ‘standards market’ produced by the EU’s approval of different schemes.     

Sex isn’t Gender: Reforming Concepts and Measurements in the Study of Public Opinion

The importance of sex and gender to political behavior is reflected in the volume of work examining gender gaps in public opinion and partisan choice. Despite their centrality, sex and gender are poorly measured in survey research. The principal problem is the conflation of gender with sex in survey research. Consequently, gender is typically treated as a dichotomy, with no response options for androgynous gender identities, or indeed degrees of identification with masculine or feminine identities. We compare a new measure of genuine gender identification with a conventional measure of biological sex to determine whether the practice of using sex as a proxy for gender is sound. Sex is a fair proxy for gender, but for about a quarter of our sample, it is not. Moreover, greater nuance is gained when analyses incorporate a finer-grained measure of gender than is possible by using biological sex as a substitute. We argue that this is simply the start to an important conversation and that more research is needed to ascertain how we might best measure “gender” in the future.     

The alibi‐generation effect: Alibi‐generation experience influences alibi evaluation

Purpose. Post‐conviction DNA exonerations demonstrate a failure of alibis to protect innocent suspects. We contend one reason alibis are not believed is because evaluators underestimate how difficult it is for an innocent person to generate a convincing alibi. We hypothesized that asking evaluators to first generate an alibi of their own would lead evaluators to consider a suspect's alibi as more believable. Methods. Participants (N= 147) were randomly assigned to either evaluate a suspect's alibi before generating their own alibi (evaluate‐first) or generate their own alibi before evaluating the suspect's alibi (generate‐first). Participants provided alibis from either 3 days previous or 30 days previous. In Experiment 2, participants (N= 255) were randomly assigned to either generate‐first, evaluate‐first, or read‐experience (in which they read about alibi‐generation difficulty) conditions. Half the participants were primed to think empathetically with Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) subscales, and half were not. All participants evaluated the believability of the suspect's alibi as well as their own alibis. Results. Across both experiments, participants who generated their own alibi first rated the suspect's alibi as more believable. This alibi‐generation effect overshadowed alibi latency in Experiment 1 and the empathy manipulation in Experiment 2. Conclusions. Alibi‐generation experience seems to change the expectations evaluators have of alibis from criminal suspects. This effect likely emanates from increased awareness that alibis are difficult for innocent people to generate and from the emotional experience of having difficulty generating alibis.     

Conceptualizations of good citizenship and political participation

Theorists have variously defined what it means to be a good citizen. But how do citizensthemselves views their responsibilities? And is there any relationship between a person's view of citizenship and his or her political participation? This paper uses a combination of methods to explore these issues. A Q method study reveals four citizenship perspectives that provide evidence for striking differences in how people define the participatory responsibilities of a good citizen. An exploratory survey analysis finds that the four citizenship perspectives are significantly related to political behavior, even when socioeconomic status and attitudinal variables related to participation are controlled. While adding to our understanding of participation, these findings also underscore the importance of investigating the conceptualizations of citizens to gain more complete understandings of how political systems work.