What Is “Successful” Resettlement? Refugee Narratives From Regional New South Wales in Australia

This paper explores how people from refugee backgrounds experienced regional resettlement in New South Wales, Australia, by focusing on their narratives of determinants of “successful” resettlement. Semi-structured interviews with nine refugee participants in 2016 revealed challenges in relation to employment, social networks and relationships, and support services. While such challenges are consistent with research in metropolitan cities, there were limitations unique to the regional context. Resettlement policies have contradictory elements inherent to their design that can be detrimental to what refugees consider as successful resettlement. This has particular implications for more recent schemes like the Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV).     

Eggs on Ice: Imaginaries of Eggs and Cryopreservation in Denmark

While Denmark is widely known as a global exporter of cryopreserved sperm, Danish women’s eggs face a very different fate. This paper combines legal and rhetorical analyses with the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. In establishing the genealogy of the sociotechnical imaginaries that shaped Danish regulation of the cryopreservation of eggs, we analyse the relevant Acts, Bills, preparatory work, and readings in Parliament, along with the concurrent public and ethical debates that over time relaxed the legal limit for the cryopreservation of eggs to the current five years and today continue to ignite discussions on elective egg freezing. We rely on welfare-state perspectives to discuss why reproduction, in the Danish context, is seen as a legitimate and appropriate sphere to regulate, and we turn to feminist theorizing to discuss the gendered implications captured in the sociotechnical imaginaries of the “Moral State”, “technologies to be tamed”, “the nuclear family”, and “technology as equality and hope”. We end by discussing how an interdisciplinary approach enriches our understanding of the legal, cultural, and political entanglements related to putting eggs on ice.     

Volunteer care workers: A case for challenging resource theories on volunteering

This paper challenges prevailing theories on volunteering which explain participation in volunteer work by the high capital resources of individuals (resource theories). Using care theory and focusing on volunteers working with the frail elderly, the sick and the dying, we ask whether resource theory is a suitable theoretical framework for this particular kind of unpaid work. With a 2012 Danish population survey, we find that care volunteering attracts lower-resourced individuals who are predominantly female. We use this finding to argue that resource theory is unhelpful in explaining this particular form of volunteering and to call for more theory development.     

Invited Commentary: Why Body Image is Important to Adolescent Development

Although the majority of adolescents report body dissatisfaction and the consequences of body image concerns are developmentally significant, most research addressing body image has been conducted by clinicians. Developmental scientists are in a unique position to contribute to body image research given their understanding of the intrapersonal (e.g., pubertal development) and interpersonal (e.g., family relationships) factors that affect the development of body image. The adolescent years provide a particularly good example of the developmental nature of body image because a myriad of “normal” developmental factors (e.g., peer relationships) coalesce to shape adolescents’ body image. This commentary will summarize some of the significant body image research—focusing on adolescence—in the hope that it will encourage developmental psychologists to recognize the central role body image plays in development and address this topic in future research.     

“If you Build it with them,they will come”: What makes a supermarket intervention successful in a food desert?

Using 71 planned supermarket interventions in food deserts, this study assesses the interplay between regional geography, management models, policy drivers, financing, and timing. We find that community engagement and cooperative management models are important factors to opening and sustaining a new store, contributing to subsequent improvements in the foodscape, built environment, and diet‐related health. Findings show that none of the nonprofit or community‐driven stores have closed whereas nearly half of the commercial‐driven and one third of government‐driven cases resulted in canceled plans or closed stores. Our research suggests community engagement is a critical component of effective policies for healthy food access. Future studies may wish to include measurements of community engagement with their case studies to better situate explanatory findings.     

Re-Writing The Myth Of Motherhood: Short Stories by Okamoto Kanoko and Hirabayashi Taiko

The Varkari Sampradya, a 700-hundred-year-old philosophical movement in India's west-central state of Maharashtra, has been increasingly lauded by conservative forces in the state as a standard bearer of Hindu and ethnic Marathi tradition. More appropriately, the movement should be understood as a key site of identity contestation and widely ranging social criticism. In this essay, the author recounts his field experiences of the Varkari Sampradya and his observations of its massive annual pilgrimage in light of current and historical struggles to control signification of the movement's public meaning.     

The Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Changes in Neighborhood Crime Rates

Objectives

This study investigated the extent to which immigrant concentration is associated with reductions in neighborhood crime rates in the City of Los Angeles.

Methods

A potential outcomes model using two-stage least squares regression was estimated, where immigrant concentration levels in 1990 were used as an instrumental variable to predict immigrant concentration levels in 2000. The instrumental variables design was used to reduce selection bias in estimating the effect of immigrant concentration on changes in official crime rates between 2000 and 2005 for census tracts in the City of Los Angeles, holding constant other demographic variables and area-level fixed effects. Non-parametric smoothers were also employed in a two-stage least squares regression model to control for the potential influence of heterogeneity in immigrant concentration on changes in crime rates.

Results

The results indicate that greater predicted concentrations of immigrants in neighborhoods are linked to significant reductions in crime. The results are robust to a number of different model specifications.

Conclusions

The findings challenge traditional ecological perspectives that link immigrant settlement to higher rates of crime. Immigration settlement patterns appear to be associated with reducing the social burden of crime. Study conclusions are limited by the potential for omitted variables that may bias the observed relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood crime rates, and the use of only official crime data which may under report crimes committed against immigrants. Understanding whether immigrant concentration is an important dynamic of changing neighborhood patterns of crime outside Los Angeles will require replication with data from other U.S. cities.     

“Strength at Home” Group Intervention for Military Populations Engaging in Intimate Partner Violence: Pilot Findings

In this brief report, we present information on the Strength at Home intervention to treat male active duty or military veteran perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) as well as preliminary pilot study findings. Strength at Home is a 12-session cognitive-behavioral group intervention developed by the authors that is based on a social information processing model of IPV perpetration. Six men referred to two intervention groups and five collateral female partners participated in this pilot study. Findings indicated large reductions for most indices of physical and psychological IPV from pre-treatment to 6-month follow-up. These initial results are promising though the small sample size and other study limitations preclude our ability to draw firm conclusions.