The pleasures of youth: Parent and peer compliance toward discretionary time

In the past, research into an adolescent's leisure time has almost exclusively focused on furnishing a record or checklist of activities. This investigation evaluates attitudinal dimensions of leisure, peer identification, and parental accommodation as it relates to patterns of leisure present in an affluent adolescent subculture. Two factors emerged from the attitudinal study, representing achievement and egalitarian dispositions. Patterns of peer and parental compliance were measured against these dispositions. Parental and peer influences were found to affect the outcome of an adolescent's attitudes. Differences between sexes and between early and late adolescence were also discovered to influence levels of compliance with parents and peers, thereby affecting an adolescent's leisure attitudes.Received Ph.D. in sociology from State University of New York at Buffalo, where he specialized in the study of leisure and recreation. Currently, as a research sociologist, pursues studies in attitudes toward wilderness among youth and investigates patterns of association in leisure and outdoor recreation. A monograph on the adolescent and leisure is planned which will have a cross-cultural and comparative perspective.Received Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt University. Current interests include the study of relationships between religious attitudes and drug usage among adolescents and is currently completing a monograph on serpenthandling religions.     

Governmentality and the War on Terror: FBI Project Carnivore and the Diffusion of Disciplinary Power

Social control capabilities have increased significantly over the past several decades, particularly because of an increased utilization of technologically advanced surveillance methods. Following the tragic events of September 11,2001, U.S. Congress and the present Administration have granted law enforcement considerable new powers in the enforcement and prevention of terrorism-related crime. Collectively labeled under the heading of the so-called war on terror , the scope of such laws, policies and directives are challenged by civil rights organizations and numerous legislators for lack of definitional precision, arbitrary application of sanctions, and violation of privacy laws. One of federal law enforcements surveillance tools is Project Carnivore, a Justice Department Internet surveillance program that is administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to access information flowing to and from a central processing unit on a network connection. While, theoretically relying on Michel Foucaults theory of discipline and governmentality, as well as related insights in the social control literature, this paper examines Project Carnivore relative to the larger context of state rationality and related privacy issues.     

Toward a Victimology of State Crime

State crimes have been studied by criminologists for nearly three decades. While far from stagnant, research and theory in this area of criminology have not developed at the pace one may have expected a decade ago. In an attempt to rejuvenate the study of state crime, we first identify and review the various types of victims and victimizers of state crime identified in the criminological literature. By employing a previously created typology of state crime, we discuss how individuals and groups of individuals can be identified as state crime victims in both domestic and international contexts. We then highlight the common themes involved in the victimizations, and offer six inductively generated propositions intended to facilitate future developments in the victimology of state crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Religious Characteristics and the Death Penalty

Using one mock trial scenario, this study investigated whether religious and demographic factors were related to death penalty attitudes and sentencing verdicts. Those who favored the death penalty differed from those who had doubts about the penalty in gender, affiliation, fundamentalism, evangelism, literal Biblical interpretism, beliefs about God’s attitudes toward murders, and perceptions of how their religious groups felt about the death penalty. These relationships generally held after mock jurors were death qualified. Gender, fundamentalism, literal interpretism, beliefs about God’s death penalty position, and perceptions of how one’s religious group felt about the death penalty predicted death penalty sentencing verdicts. Future research could determine whether using peremptory challenges to exclude potential jurors based on religion can help lawyers choose a more favorable jury. The present research was supported by the National Science Foundation award number 0351811, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the American Psychology-Law Society, and the University of Nebraska Law-Psychology Program. This research was presented at the 2006 conference of the American Psychology-Law Society. The authors are grateful for the research assistance of Nick Fanning and Beth Herschlag and for the helpful comments from Brian Bornstein, Rich Wiener, Bob Schopp, Dick Dienstbier, and several anonymous reviewers.     

Success on Their Own Terms: Youths' Perspectives on Successful Foster Care

Foster care is an integral component of the child welfare system. However, little is known about factors germane to conceptualizing successful foster care. This study utilized Concept Mapping (CM) to delineate a conceptual domain for what success in foster care means from the perspective of those most impacted: foster youth. CM couples multi-dimensional scaling with hierarchical cluster analyses to form factors relevant to an area of study. Pictorial representations of the data were generated using the Concept Systems software. Results indicate that youth conceptualize success based on several distinct domains. The final analyses yielded a multi-cluster solution, or Concept Map.     

Judicial Specialization and Ideological Decision Making in the US Courts of Appeals

We investigate the influence of subject matter expertise, opinion specialization, and judicial experience on the role of ideology in decision making in the courts of appeals in a generalized, as opposed to specialized, setting. We find that subject matter experts and opinion specialists are significantly more likely to engage in ideological decision making than their nonspecialist counterparts and that opinion specialization is a particularly potent factor in ideological decision making. Further, increased judicial experience has no effect on the conditional use of ideology. We discuss the potentially wide‐ranging implications of our findings for both theory and policy.     

The FDA and genetic testing: improper tools for a difficult problem

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently issued draft guidance on how it intends to regulate laboratory-developed tests, including genetic tests. This article argues that genetic tests differ from traditional targets of FDA regulation in both product as well as industry landscape, and that the FDA''s traditional tools are ill-suited for regulating this space. While existing regulatory gaps do create risks in genetic testing, the regulatory burden of the FDA''s proposal introduces new risks for both test providers and patients that may offset the benefits. Incremental expansion of current oversight outside of the FDA can mitigate many of the risks necessitating increased oversight while avoiding the creation of new ones that could undermine this industry.