Profiles of Language Brokering Experiences and Contextual Stressors: Implications for Adolescent Outcomes in Mexican Immigrant Families

Adolescents from Mexican immigrant families are often embedded in a challenging social environment and experience multiple contextual stressors, including economic stress, discrimination, and foreigner stress. We consider how the effects of these contextual stressors may be amplified or diminished for adolescents who function as language brokers, interpreting and mediating for their English-limited parents. Using two waves of survey data collected from a sample (N?=?604 at Wave 1; N?=?483 at Wave 2) of Mexican American adolescents with ages ranging from 11 to 15 (M_age?=?12.41, 54% female), four distinct brokering—stress profiles were identified. Latent profile analyses revealed that with moderate levels of contextual stress, adolescents with more positive language brokering experiences (protective group) demonstrated more favorable outcomes than those with neutral language brokering experiences (moderate group) and those who did not involve themselves as frequently in language brokering activities (less-involved group). In contrast, high levels of contextual stress, coupled with more negative language brokering experiences (risk group), produced the least favorable outcomes among adolescents.     

Identity Processes and Coping Strategies in College Students: Short-Term Longitudinal Dynamics and the Role of Personality

Coping strategies and identity processes are hypothesized to influence one another over time. This three-wave longitudinal study (N?=?458; 84.9% women) examined, for the first time, how and to what extent identity processes (i.e., commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration) and coping strategies (i.e., problem solving, social support seeking, and avoidance) predicted one another over time. Cross-lagged analyses indicated that processes of identity exploration seemed especially to be intertwined with different coping strategies over time, suggesting that identity exploration may resemble problem-solving behavior on the pathway to an achieved identity. Commitment processes were found to be influenced by certain coping strategies, although identification with commitment also negatively influenced avoidance coping. These temporal sequences remained significant when controlling for baseline levels of Big Five personality traits. Hence, evidence was obtained for reciprocal pathways indicating that coping strategies and identity processes reinforce one another over time in college students.     

Promoting State-of-the-Art Methods in Public Management Research

The field of public management is methodologically underdeveloped as compared to other disciplines. In order to derive the fullest benefits of methodological advancements, the field needs to invest in discussing and deliberating over the state of the art in methodological advances. Using state-of-the-art methods helps to produce knowledge that is useful for scholars and practitioners. This symposium aims to add to and improve the methodological toolkit available to public management scholars. We distinguish three categories that could strengthen the methodological toolkit: underutilized methods (such as ethnography), innovations in current methods (such as the synthetic control method for comparative case studies), and novel methods (such as natural language processing for content analysis). We hope that this symposium encourages scholars to seek for novel and improved methods to produce research that lives up to scientific scrutiny and is valuable for practitioners.     

Measuring Innovativeness of Public Organizations: Using Natural Language Processing Techniques in Computer-Aided Textual Analysis

We propose a new method for measuring innovativeness in the public sector using natural language processing techniques. Our approach extends traditional content analysis techniques by combining insights from linguistic theory and recent developments in computational techniques. We develop and employ phrase-level data dictionaries (using both noun phrases and verb phrases) from organizational documents. We use letters to the board of education from a sample of New Jersey school districts to develop measures of innovativeness—one measure is based on expert assessments and the other is inductively derived. We perform rigorous tests of content validity, external validity, and predictive validity on these measures. We conclude with a discussion of implications of this new measurement approach and its potential applications to other public management contexts.     

It Takes an Outsider: Extralegislative Organization and Partisanship in the California Assembly, 1849–2006

Why are American politicians “single‐minded seekers of reelection” in some decades and fierce ideological warriors in others? This article argues that the key to understanding the behavior of members inside a legislative chamber is to follow the actions of key figures outside the chamber. These outsiders—activists, interest groups, and party bosses—use their control over party nominations, conditioned on institutional rules, to ensure ideological behavior among officeholders. To understand how vital these outsiders are to legislative partisanship, this article takes advantage of a particular natural experiment: the state of California's experience with cross‐filing (1914–59), under which institutional rules prevented outsiders from influencing party nominations. Under cross‐filing, legislative partisanship collapsed, demonstrating that incumbents tend to prefer nonpartisanship or fake partisanship to actual ideological combat. Partisanship quickly returned once these outsiders could again dominate nominations. Several other historical examples reveal extralegislative actors exerting considerably greater influence over members' voting behavior than intralegislative party institutions did. These results suggest that candidates and legislators are the agents of activists and others who coordinate at the community level to control party nominations.