Who's Welcome and Who's Not? Opposition towards Immigration in the Nordic Countries, 2002–2014

This article demonstrates the analytical advantages of studying not only the degree to which people oppose immigration in a country, but also the character of their opposition. Using Latent Class Analysis and data from the European Social Survey, Nordic patterns and trends are examined with the aim of identifying different kinds of immigration attitudes and how they develop in different national contexts. The Nordic countries are interesting to compare as, while they are similar in many respects, they also diverge significantly from each other in areas theoretically considered important to the formation of attitudes towards immigration. Studying the character of immigration opposition reveals five different types of immigration attitudes. These are differently distributed between the Nordic countries as well as over time, and include nativist opposition (opposition only towards immigrants of ethnic/racial groups other than that of the majority population) and economic opposition (opposition that entails a separation between immigrants considered to be an economic resource and an economic burden). By demonstrating how immigration opposition in the Nordic countries varies not only in degree but also in character, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of immigration opposition as well as of how different attitudinal profiles evolve under different contextual circumstances.     

The everyday peace project: an innovative approach to peace pedagogy

A critical task for peace pedagogy is to challenge views of peace as primarily responses to declared war. Crisis-based politics tend to focus on exceptional situations and fail to capture the entire spectrum of violence. Premised on the idea that peace cannot be understood in isolation of larger structural problems, this paper proposes the concept of ‘everyday peace’ as a framework for peace education. Drawing from a pedagogical initiative, we examine how students engage with the concept of everyday peace and present our findings in three related domains: (1) definition of everyday peace, (2) application of everyday peace principles and (3) role of collaboration in everyday peace approaches. Our analysis underscored two important themes in participants’ definitions of everyday peace: (1) peace as a value-based praxis and (2) individual-level and systemic components of everyday peace. Applying these principles to a violent event in the local community, participant responses emphasized compassion, cultures of peace and the need to draw reflexive, meaningful connections between local and global contexts. The participants also outlined the synergistic role of collaboration in everyday peacebuilding. We discuss our findings in relation to extant research and consider implications of an everyday peace framework for holistic peace education.     

The Peer Context and the Development of the Perpetration of Adolescent Dating Violence

The peer context is a central focus in research on adolescent risk behaviors but few studies have investigated the role of the peer context in the perpetration of adolescent dating violence. This longitudinal study examined between-subjects and within-person contemporaneous and lagged effects of peer attributes, measured with social network analyses, on trajectories of dating violence perpetration and determined if effects varied by grade and/or sex of the adolescent. Data are from adolescents who participated in a five-wave panel study beginning when they were in 7 through 9th grade and ending when they were in 10 through 12th grade (n = 3,412); half were male, 40.5 % were white, 49.9 % were black and 10.4 % were of another race/ethnicity. Significant between-subjects effects indicate that adolescents who typically have friends who use dating violence, and girls who are typically high in social status, are at increased risk for using dating violence throughout adolescence. Adolescents who typically have high quality friendships and girls who typically have friends with pro-social beliefs are at decreased risk for using dating violence throughout adolescence. Significant within-person contemporaneous effects indicate that both boys and girls reported lower levels of dating violence than usual at times when they had more friends with pro-social beliefs, and reported higher levels of dating violence than usual at times when they had higher social status. None of the lagged effects were significant and none of the effects varied across grade. These findings suggest that the peer context plays an important role in the development of the perpetration of adolescent dating violence.     

Bidirectional Associations Between Valued Activities and Adolescent Positive Adjustment in a Longitudinal Study: Positive Mood as a Mediator

Although activity involvement has been linked to positive youth development, the value that adolescents place on these activities (i.e., how much they enjoy the activities, find them important, and spend time on them) has received less attention. The purpose of the present study was to examine the bidirectional longitudinal association between engagement in valued activities and adolescent positive adjustment (optimism, purpose in life, and self-esteem), as well as investigate a possible underlying mechanism for this link. High school students (N = 2,270, 48.7 % female) from Ontario, Canada completed questionnaires annually in grades 10, 11, and 12. Auto-regressive cross-lagged path analyses were conducted over time, controlling for gender, parental education, and academic grades. Greater engagement in valued activities predicted higher optimism, purpose, and self-esteem over time. Importantly, the results did not support an alternate hypothesis of selection effects, in that adolescents who were better adjusted were not more likely than their peers to engage in valued activities over time. We also found that the longitudinal associations between valued activities and positive adjustment may be due partly to an underlying effect of increased positive mood. Thus, engagement in valued activities appears to be important for adolescent positive adjustment, and may help to foster thriving. Communities, educators, and parents should actively support and encourage adolescents to develop valued activities, and seek to ensure that there are ample opportunities and resources available for them to do so.     

Understanding third‐party advertising: An analysis of the 2004, 2006 and 2008 Canadian elections

For approximately two decades, the federal regulation for third‐party election spending was the focus of repeated constitutional debate. However, with the 2004 Supreme Court decision in Harper v. Canada, a relative level of policy stability has been established. This stability permits us to evaluate the performance of spending limits according to the principles of the egalitarian model on which it is based. Using an original data set compiled from third‐party election advertising reports from the 2004, 2006 and 2008 federal elections, this article offers the first empirical analysis of this important election policy. A number of observations can be offered. First, third parties are not spending large amounts relative to spending limits. Second, despite legislative changes in 2006 banning all federal party contributions except those from individuals, there appears little strategic action by third parties in spending “around” contribution limits. During this three‐election cycle, third parties quite simply did not spend significant amounts. Current third‐party spending limits therefore appear to be situated comfortably within the expectations of the egalitarian model, though why third parties of all types spend so little remains in question.