Defending Victims of Bullying in Early Adolescence: A Multilevel Analysis

Adolescents’ defending behaviors in school bullying situations is likely determined by individual characteristics, social status variables, and classroom/school contextual factors operating simultaneously in the peer ecology. However, there is little research on defending behavior that utilizes this multilevel approach. This study investigated how students’ willingness to defend victims of bullying was affected by feelings of empathy, perceived popularity, and classroom-level perceived prosocial norms. Participants were 1373 adolescents (40% girls, Mage: 14?yrs) from 54 classrooms in six middle schools in South Korea. These youth reported on their feelings of empathy and how prosocial they perceived their classmates to be. Peer-ratings and peer nominations were used to estimate defending behaviors and which students were perceived as popular. Multilevel analyses showed that participants were more likely to defend victims when they had greater empathy and perceived popularity and when classroom-level prosocial norms were higher. The findings have implications for interventions to reduce school bullying and for studying defending behavior in multiple cultural contexts.     

Can the best interests of young people be met in residential care? An Ireland case study

The search for factors essential to the achievement of congruence in residential youth care services in Ireland led to the discovery of five critical success factors, each of which affects all three organizational levels of such services. These critical factors included: needs-led, not regulation-driven, care; senior managers with workforce responsibility require domain expertise; shared vision and purpose across three organizational levels; practice-led planning and service development; and bureaucratic policies and practices that are congruent with corporate parenting obligations to provide developmental care that serves each child's best interests.     

Citizens' Juries and Deliberative Democracy

In the face of widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary democratic practice, there has been a growing interest in theories of deliberative democracy. However theorists have often failed to sufficiently address the question of institutional design. This paper argues that recent experiments with citizens' juries should be of interest to deliberative democrats. The practice of citizens' juries is considered in light of three deliberative democratic criteria: inclusivity, deliberation and citizenship. It is argued that citizens' juries offer important insights into how democratic deliberation could be institutionalized in contemporary political decision-making processes.     

Self-Awareness of Political Knowledge

Political Behavior - Despite widespread concern over false beliefs about politically-relevant facts, little is known about how strongly Americans believe their answers to poll questions. I propose...     

Constructing loyalism: politics,communications and peace in Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process has provided the space for the emergence of an articulate loyalist politics which has had implications for the traditionally obstructive and negative representations of unionist discourse. During talk and negotiations which led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, leaders of the Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party (both political wings of loyalist paramilitary groupings) voiced positions which assisted the possibilities for building constitutional change based along more moderate lines than those associated with dominant unionism. However, have the news media been receptive to such articulations and, if not, what problems have they created for the communication of loyalist positions? By considering such questions, this article explores the development of loyalism and loyalist communications in the early years of peace in Northern Ireland.     

Allocating resources among AIDS research strategies

One of the central questions facing policy-makers is how to allocate limited federal funds among alternative AIDS research strategies. A rational answer requires judgments about both the prospects of scientific progress and the societal value of research outcomes. Using a decision-analytic approach, this paper examines the marginal returns from additional funding of basic biology, epidemiology and mathematical modeling, vaccine development and testing, treatment development and testing, and behavioral and social science. A survey of a recent Institute of Medicine Committee on AIDS was conducted to elicit scientific judgments on the prospects for scientific progress in each of the five areas. The scientists were quite capable of transcending their disciplinary orientation as reflected in the dominant sentiment in favor of more behavioral and social science research. A comparison of the actual FY 1987 AIDS research budget with the budgets recommended by the scientific experts also suggests that basic biological research deserves greater emphasis.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the form of a grant to the Health Science Policy Working Group of the Harvard Division on Health Policy, Research and Education.