Examining Youth and Program Predictors of Engagement in Out-of-School Time Programs

Prior research suggests that youths’ engagement in out-of-school time programs may be a crucial factor linking program participation to positive outcomes during adolescence. Guided by the theoretical concept of flow and by stage-environment fit theory, the present study explored correlates of engagement in youth programs. Engagement was conceptualized as the extent to which youth found the program activities enjoyable, interesting, and challenging. The current study examined how program content, monetary incentives, and youth demographic characteristics were linked to youth engagement among a sample of primarily low-income middle and high school youth attending 30 out-of-school programs (n = 435, 51 % female). Results from multilevel models suggested that program content and staff quality were strongly associated with youth engagement. Youth who reported learning new skills, learning about college, and learning about jobs through activities in the program were more engaged, as were youth who found the staff caring and competent. Results demonstrated that the link between learning content for the future and engagement was stronger for older youth than younger youth. In addition, there was a trend suggesting that providing a monetary incentive was associated negatively with youth engagement. Taken as a whole, these findings have important implications for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers interested in understanding the characteristics of out-of-school time programs that engage older youth.     

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and ‘socio-psychological’ sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: “attribute-based” judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants’ desirability based on individual characteristics—human capital, race, language ability, and so on—and “categorical” judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries’ individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants’ attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.     

Madison's View of Federalism in The Federalist

Interpreters of James Madison's treatment of federalism in TheFederalist are divided into two general camps: those who considerhim to have defended federalism with cogency and convictionand those who consider his defense, on account of his concealedantipathy to federalism, to be half-hearted. Although Madisonhad reservations about the Constitution's new structure, threecharges of disingenuousness that have been leveled against himare mistaken. The evidence mainly suggests that he viewed theConstitution as establishing a divided system of government,that he was not particularly confident that future state-federalconflicts would be resolved peacefully, and that, despite hisreservations about the new system, he wanted to see it in operationbefore thinking about how it might be reformed.     

Organizational change in law enforcement

A major problem in identifying and understanding change in law enforcement organizations is in specifying the object of intended change and the process by which change is to be implemented. The study focuses on organizational-structural change in police organizations and examines factors which have influenced the implementation of saturation patrol units, covert surveillance units, and regionalized detective bureaus. The results indicate that factors such as domain consensus, dependence and influence relationships, and perceptions of threat affect both the acceptance and use of these organizational changes.     

Toward a physician payment policy: Evidence from the Economic Stabilization Program

Concern over the rising cost of medical care has focused policy attention on methods of paying physicians. Unfortunately, limits placed on fees paid by public medical care financing programs, Medicare and Medicaid, adversely affect those programs' primary objective: making office-based physicians' services available to the poor and the elderly at affordable prices. This suggests that a second policy instrument, controls on physicians' private charges, may be needed. The Economic Stabilization Program (ESP) provides the only recent U.S. experience with a system which constrained both physicians' private charges and public payments. Using Medicare and Medicaid claims data for a large sample of California physicians, we simulate what physicians' private charges and supplies of services to Medicare assignment and Medicaid patients would have been in the absence of ESP. The simulations suggest that without ESP, private charges would have been higher and the quantities of services provided to poor and elderly patients lower than were actually observed. We believe, therefore, that the ESP experience supports the argument that controls over both public and private fees are needed in order to simultaneously contain costs of and maintain access to physicians' services by Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.The research for this paper was supported by Contract No. 600-76-0054 from the Social Security Administration, USDHEW. We wish to thank our colleagues Judith Feder, John Holahan, William Scanlon, and Judith Wagner for their helpful comments. James Bluck provided excellent research assistance. The findings and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of either The Urban Institute or The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.     

The influence of prior record evidence on juror decision making

Several researchers have investigated the impact of evidence of prior convictions on jurors' decision making. Very little is known about a related issue, the impact of prioracquittal evidence introduced by the prosecution on jurors' decisions. The Supreme Court recently held (Dowling v. U.S., 1990) that the admission of prior acquittal evidence does not unfairly prejudice the defendant. We conducted a simulation study to examine the effects of prior record evidence (prior convictions, prior acquittals, and no prior record) on jurors' decisions. We also manipulated the presence of judicial instructions on the limited use jurors can make of extrinsic acts evidence. Mock jurors were more likely to convict the defendant when they had evidence of a prior conviction than when they had evidence of a prior acquittal or no record evidence. This effect was mediated by attributions about criminal propensity. Judge's limiting instructions were ineffective in guiding jurors' use of prior record evidence.