Can White Guilt Motivate Action? The Role of Civic Beliefs

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Limited research has investigated factors that shape White youth’s civic action aimed at social change. Investigating the relation between Whiteness and...     

Results of the 2018 Rapid DNA Maturity Assessment

Three commercially available integrated rapid DNA instruments were tested as a part of a rapid DNA maturity assessment in July of 2018. The assessment was conducted with sets of blinded single-source reference samples provided to participants for testing on the individual rapid platforms within their laboratories. The data were returned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for review and analysis. Both FBI-defined automated review (Rapid DNA Analysis) and manual review (Modified Rapid DNA Analysis) of the datasets were conducted to assess the success of genotyping the 20 Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) core STR loci and full profiles generated by the instruments. Genotype results from the multiple platforms, participating laboratories, and STR typing chemistries were combined into a single analysis. The Rapid DNA Analysis resulted in a success rate of 80% for full profiles (85% for the 20 CODIS core loci) with automated analysis. Modified Rapid DNA Analysis resulted in a success rate of 90% for both the CODIS 20 core loci and full profiles (all attempted loci per chemistry). An analysis of the peak height ratios demonstrated that 95% of all heterozygous alleles were above 59% heterozygote balance. For base-pair sizing precision, the precision was below the standard 0.5 bp deviation for both the ANDE 6C System and the RapidHIT 200.     

Conceptualizing consultation approaches: identifying combinations of consultation tools and analyzing their implications for stakeholder diversity

Policy Sciences - Contemporary governance is increasingly characterized by the consultation of different types of stakeholders, such as interest groups representing economic and citizen interests,...     

A Liberal Marxism? Mutual Care,Global Humanity and Minimum Utopia

This article surveys The Norman Geras Reader: ‘What’s There is There’, a recent collection of the work of Norman Geras, edited by Eve Garrard and Ben Cohen. The article explores the relevance of Geras’s attempted reconciliation between liberalism and Marxism to some of the key issues confronting the contemporary left: foreign policy and the failures of humanitarian intervention and non-intervention; internationalism and the necessity for solidarity across borders in an age of nationalist populism; left approaches to totalitarianism and antisemitism; the possibilities and limitations of alternatives to and critiques of liberal capitalism; and the reinvigoration of utopian imaginaries and the futures they promise. It suggests that important lessons for the left can be unpicked from the contested legacy of the ‘decent leftism’ Geras represents, where reapplied in the wake of new political and diplomatic challenges.     

The Contribution of Community and Family Contexts to African American Young Adults’ Romantic Relationship Health: A Prospective Analysis

Accumulating evidence suggests that African American men and women experience unique challenges in developing and maintaining stable, satisfying romantic relationships. Extant studies have linked relationship quality among African American couples to contemporaneous risk factors such as economic hardship and racial discrimination. Little research, however, has examined the contextual and intrapersonal processes in late childhood and adolescence that influence romantic relationship health among African American adults. We investigated competence-promoting parenting practices and exposure to community-related stressors in late childhood, and negative relational schemas in adolescence, as predictors of young adult romantic relationship health. Participants were 318 African American young adults (59.4 % female) who had provided data at four time points from ages 10–22 years. Structural equation modeling indicated that exposure to community-related stressors and low levels of competence-promoting parenting contributed to negative relational schemas, which were proximal predictors of young adult relationship health. Relational schemas mediated the associations of competence-promoting parenting practices and exposure to community stressors in late childhood with romantic relationship health during young adulthood. Results suggest that enhancing caregiving practices, limiting youths’ exposure to community stressors, and modifying relational schemas are important processes to be targeted for interventions designed to enhance African American adults’ romantic relationships.     

Teen Motherhood and Pregnancy Prototypes: The Role of Social Context in Changing Young African American Mothers’ Risk Images and Contraceptive Expectations

Despite the declining rate of teen pregnancies in the United States, academic and public health experts have expressed concern over the still relatively high rate of rapid repeat pregnancies among adolescents, particularly among minority youth. Using a sample of over 300 African American female adolescents, the current study used insights from the prototype/willingness model of adolescent risk behavior to explore this risk. More specifically, it assessed the relationship between entry into unwed motherhood during mid-to-late adolescence and changes in prototypes of unmarried pregnant teens. Further, it explored the extent to which these changing prototypes accounted for young mothers’ later contraceptive expectations. We tested the possibility that social images were affected not only by personal experience (the birth of a child) but also by the family and community context in which this experience took place. The findings show that the early entrance into teen motherhood was associated with a shift toward more favorable prototypes of unwed pregnant teens, but that this was only the case for young mothers in disadvantaged contexts. Given this, prototype changes helped to explain the link between teen motherhood and contraceptive expectations only for those in disadvantaged contexts. We discuss these findings in terms of their practical and theoretical implications.     

Explaining Policy Stability and Change in Swiss Health Care Reforms

The article investigates recent health reforms and reform attempts in Switzerland. A substantial reform, the revision of the health insurance law in 1994, is followed by a long period of refused reform proposals and incremental change. In order to explain policy change and policy stability in health policies, we apply veto‐player theory to partisan and parliamentary debates on reform proposals of the health insurance from the end of the 1980s until today. Shifts in ideological positions of parties, especially with regard to the objective of solidarity, allowed for a new win‐set in the 1990s that was at the base of the law revision. Since then, the win‐set is empty as parties did not change their preferences. New and substantial reforms will only be possible, it is concluded, if the pivot player, the Christian‐democratic party, changes its ideological positions to a significant extent.