Organized Activity Involvement among Urban Youth: Understanding Family- and Neighborhood- Level Characteristics as Predictors of Involvement

Research examining factors that predict youth’s involvement in organized activities is very limited, despite associations with positive outcomes. Using data from 1043 youth (49% female; 46.4% Hispanic, 35.4% African American, 14.0% Caucasian, and 4.2% other) from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, this study examined how characteristics of parents (supervision, warmth) and neighborhoods (perceived neighborhood safety and collective efficacy) predict patterns of adolescents’ involvement in organized activities concurrently (i.e., intensity) and longitudinally (i.e., type and breadth). Parental supervision predicted adolescents’ participation in organized activities across multiple waves. Neighborhood violence was positively associated with concurrent participation in organized activities after controlling for socioeconomic status (SES), whereas higher neighborhood collective efficacy predicted greater breadth in organized activity participation across time. These findings have important implications regarding how to attract and sustain organized activity participation for low-income, urban youth.     

Modification of Housing Mobility Experimental Effects on Delinquency and Educational Problems: Middle Adolescence as a Sensitive Period

Residential mobility is one documented stressor contributing to higher delinquency and worse educational outcomes. Sensitive period life course models suggest that certain developmental stages make individuals more susceptible to the effects of an exposure, like residential mobility, on outcomes. However, most prior research is observational, and has not examined heterogeneity across age or gender that may inform sensitive periods, even though it may have important implications for the etiology of adolescent development. Moreover, there are important translational implications for identifying the groups most vulnerable to residential mobility to inform how to buffer adverse effects of moving. In this study, low-income families were randomized to residential mobility out of public housing into lower poverty neighborhoods using a rental subsidy voucher (“experimental voucher condition”), and were compared to control families remaining in public housing. The sample was comprised of 2829 youth (51% female; 62% Non-Hispanic Black, 31% Hispanic, 7% other race). At baseline, youth ranged from 5 to 16 years old. This study hypothesized that random assignment to the housing voucher condition would generate harmful effects on delinquency and educational problems, compared to the control group, among boys who were older at baseline. The results confirmed this hypothesis: random assignment to the experimental voucher condition generating residential mobility caused higher delinquency among boys who were 13–16 years old at baseline, compared to same-age, in-place public housing controls. However, residential mobility did not affect delinquency among girls regardless of age, or among boys who were 5–12 years old at baseline. The pattern of results for educational problems was similar but weaker. Families with teenage boys are particularly vulnerable to residential transitions. Incorporating additional supports into housing programs may help low-income, urban families to successfully transition to lower poverty neighborhoods.     

Shades of Privilege: The Relationship Between Skin Color and Political Attitudes Among White Americans

Shifting racial dynamics in the U.S. have heightened the salience of White racial identity, and a sense that Whites’ social status and resources are no longer secure. At the same time, the growing size of non-White populations has also renewed attention to skin color-based stratification and the potential blurring of racial boundaries. We theorize that Whites with darker skin will be motivated to protect the boundaries of Whiteness due to the loss of status they would face from blurring racial boundaries. Consistent with growing evidence of skin color’s importance for Whites, we demonstrate that darker-skinned Whites—measured via a light-reflectance spectrophotometer—identify more strongly with their White racial identity and are more likely to hold conservative political views on racialized issues than lighter-skinned Whites. Together, these findings offer new insights into the evolving meaning of race and color in American politics.

     

Gender,General Strain Theory,Negative Emotions,and Disordered Eating

Much of the prior work on General Strain Theory (GST) has focused on how strain and negative emotions interrelate to produce criminal—especially violent—activity. Very little research has extended GST to examine other types of non-criminal, negative behavior, such as self-harming behaviors associated with disordered eating, a traditionally female-specific self-directed outcome. Using a sample of 338 young adults (54% female, 95% white), this article applies GST to disordered eating by examining how strain and negative emotions relate to this particular outcome across gender. Findings indicate that two types of strain measures predict depressive symptoms among males and females, that inequitable strainful experiences relate to disordered eating among females but not males, that depressive symptoms but not anger increase disordered eating for both males and females, and that membership in Greek organizations (sororities or fraternities) is associated with disordered eating but only for males. Implications for theory and directions for future research are highlighted.     

Involvement in Internet Aggression During Early Adolescence

The current study examined concurrent and longitudinal predictors of early adolescents’ involvement in Internet aggression. Cross-sectional results (N = 330; 57% female) showed that the likelihood of reporting Internet aggression was higher among youth who spent more time using Internet-based technologies to communicate with friends and who were themselves targets of Internet aggression. Offline relational aggression and beliefs supportive of relational and physical aggression also predicted concurrent involvement in Internet aggression. We used longitudinal data (N = 150; 51% female) to distinguish between youth who were aggressive in traditional contexts only (i.e., school) from those who were aggressive both online and offline. These results indicated that youth who were aggressive both online and offline were older at the initial assessment, were targets of Internet aggression, and held beliefs more supportive of relational aggression than youth who were aggressive offline only. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Inside the Cartel Party: Party Organisation in Government and Opposition

This article assesses the internal dynamics of the cartel party model. It argues that a party's endeavour to increase its societal reach by opening membership boundaries while keeping candidate selection local (two tendencies ascribed to this model), and the general need to maintain party unity, are difficult to reconcile. Therefore a fully fledged cartel party is organisationally vulnerable, which reinforces its resort to selective benefits (i.e. political appointments, patronage) whenever in government to satisfy organisational demands, a trigger intensifying party–state relations which is usually overlooked. Further, the dominant view of the ascendancy of parties' 'public face' needs to be qualified: the Irish Fianna Fáil, with its permeable boundaries and local candidate selection, reflects the cartel party model without a cartel at the party system level. Majoritarian dynamics have forced Fianna Fáil repeatedly into opposition which reveals the following: Fianna Fáil as a cartel party can afford to neglect its infrastructure on the ground as long as it is controlling government resources. In opposition its leadership initiates reforms to reinvigorate the party's infrastructure since it is pressed to generate organisational support through other means than distributing benefits.     

Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: The Impact of Middle-Class Moral Panic on the British Government's Response to the Sub-prime Crisis

This article focuses on the discursive construction in Britain of a middle-class moral panic occasioned by the distress caused to self-styled 'responsible mortgage borrowers' by falling house prices. In the context of the move towards asset-based welfare the sub-prime crisis manifested itself most obviously in the popular consciousness as a threat to housing market wealth. The Labour government used the political space opened up by the narrative of middle-class moral panic in order to protect banks' balance sheets from the consequences of their own failed investments in mortgage-backed securities. The ensuing arrangements immunised banks from the implications of market self-regulation in the first-phase response to the sub-prime crisis while simultaneously allowing them to continue to impose the experience of market self-regulation on their customers. An increasingly asymmetric approach to banking regulation has arisen analogous to that which Karl Polanyi associated with the contradictory co-existence of market and non-market forms.     

Intragroup Contact and Anxiety Among Ethnic Minority Adolescents: Considering Ethnic Identity and School Diversity Transitions

Everyday interactions with same-racial/ethnic others may confer positive benefits for adolescents, but the meaning of these interactions are likely influenced by individual differences and larger structural contexts. This study examined the situation-level association between contact with same-ethnic others and anxiety symptoms among a diverse sample of 306 racial/ethnic minority adolescents (Mage = 14 years; 66 % female), based on (1) individual differences in ethnic identity centrality and (2) developmental histories of transitions in diversity between elementary, middle, and high school. The results indicated that at the level of the situation, when adolescents interacted with more same-ethnic others, they reported fewer anxiety symptoms. Further, for adolescents who had experienced a transition in school diversity, the positive benefits of contact with same-ethnic others was only conferred for those who felt that their ethnicity was very important to them. The importance of examining individual differences within larger developmental histories to understand the everyday experiences of ethnic minority adolescents are discussed.     

Environmental Security and New Middle Powers: The Case of South Korea

This article considers the role of new middle powers in the climate change debate. We focus on the issue of “green growth.” We argue that new middle powers such as South Korea are increasingly proactive in promoting this green growth agenda and, as a result, challenging conventional realist and liberal approaches and expectations to new middle powers. This diplomacy is aiming to bridge states, great and small, by leading to strategic breakthroughs in the current climate change negotiation deadlock. The article discusses South Korea’s green growth initiative and identifies how this initiative affects South Korea’s middle power role in the global environmental debate with respect to its inclusion in the Environment Integrity Group and its initiative the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).