The Role of “Very Important” Nonparental Adults in Adolescent Development

Two hundred one adolescents of diverse ethnic backgrounds (mean age = 16.7 years) reported whether they considered any adult other than their parents to be a very important person (VIP) in their lives, and described various attributes of the VIP and their relationship with this individual. Perceived VIP characteristics—especially perceived involvement of the VIP in behavior that is uniformly illegal (e.g., theft) or illegal for adolescents (e.g., alcohol use)— were robust predictors of boys' self-reported misconduct and had modest links with their level of self-reported depressive symptomatology. In contrast, VIP attributes showed their strongest linkages to girls' depressive symptoms, with perceived VIP warmth and acceptance related to a lower incidence of depressed mood. Regression analyses indicated that these VIP attributes contributed uniquely to the explanation of misconduct and depressive symptoms even when analogous parental and friend attributes were included in the models. In view of the findings of this exploratory study, several future research directions are suggested, including research on the mechanisms through which VIP effects may be transmitted.     

Self-Efficacy,Religiosity, and Crime: Profiles of African American Youth in Urban Housing Communities

Youth reporting independently elevated levels of religiosity and self-efficacy tend to abstain from externalizing behavior. However, little is known about the ways in which religiosity and self-efficacy interrelate to impact youth externalizing. Drawing from a sample of African American youth from public housing communities (N = 236), we use latent profile analysis to identify subtypes of youth based on self-reported religiosity and self-efficacy and, in turn, examine links with crime. Compared to youth in other subgroups, those classified as both highly religious and highly self-efficacious reported less involvement in minor and severe delinquency, but not violence.     

What Does Credibility Look like? Tweets and Walls in U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Visual Storytelling

This study considers the social media visual messaging of four candidates in the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential primary campaign. The analysis is guided by symbolic convergence theory, its method of fantasy theme analysis, and visual rhetoric theory. Using a schema of visual attributes, this study analyzes a rhetorical strategy of candidates' campaigns: the pictorial “public diary” found on their official Facebook and Twitter pages. It reveals how the credibility character traits of trustworthiness and expertise appear in the candidates' visual narratives, what messages dominate, and how candidates differ in succeeding or failing to visually communicate credibility. This study has important implications for how political management can use images in crafting and assessing messaging strategies in a competitive environment.     

Computer‐Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text

The (unheralded) first step in many applications of automated text analysis involves selecting keywords to choose documents from a large text corpus for further study. Although all substantive results depend on this choice, researchers usually pick keywords in ad hoc ways that are far from optimal and usually biased. Most seem to think that keyword selection is easy, since they do Google searches every day, but we demonstrate that humans perform exceedingly poorly at this basic task. We offer a better approach, one that also can help with following conversations where participants rapidly innovate language to evade authorities, seek political advantage, or express creativity; generic web searching; eDiscovery; look‐alike modeling; industry and intelligence analysis; and sentiment and topic analysis. We develop a computer‐assisted (as opposed to fully automated or human‐only) statistical approach that suggests keywords from available text without needing structured data as inputs. This framing poses the statistical problem in a new way, which leads to a widely applicable algorithm. Our specific approach is based on training classifiers, extracting information from (rather than correcting) their mistakes, and summarizing results with easy‐to‐understand Boolean search strings. We illustrate how the technique works with analyses of English texts about the Boston Marathon bombings, Chinese social media posts designed to evade censorship, and others.     

Mapping giant honey bee nests in Palawan,Philippines through a transdisciplinary approach

This article reports on a study that uses participatory mapping with indigenous Tagbanua honey hunters and gatherers to understand the spatial distribution of giant honey bees in a community forest in Palawan, Philippines. Through the use of global positioning system devices, digital cameras, and a solar home system as an electricity source, local collaborators mapped 31 bee nests from April to June 2015. This study provides a replicable long-term participatory methodology and promotes participatory learning and mutual knowledge creation. By combining applied sustainability research with local stakeholder participation, the article suggests that novel knowledge and solutions can aid sustainable rural development.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.     

Melancholia in Vita Sackville-West’s Hogarth Press Novels

Author Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) has been understood as an author who celebrates in both prose and verse the institution of the English country estate, in part because of her personal attachment to her family’s Kentish house, Knole. The four popular novels that Vita Sackville-West published with the Hogarth Press during the early 1930s—The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), Family History (1932), and The Dark Island (1934)—are no exception, save for their particular focus on the agnatic inheritance of both aristocratic title and estate along with the female subject’s exclusion from that system. While the first pair of novels entertain the possibility of mediated success in obtaining the loved object, either the estate itself or an effective substitute, the latter works become melancholically resigned to the restrictions that effectively disinherit the aristocratic eldest daughter. This escalating melancholia, often Freudian in its narrative presentation, directs the novels’ successive focus less toward the act of mourning the loss of the country house, of some version of Knole either real or imagined, and more to the vexing inability to both acknowledge the disinheritance and mourn the loss. In fact, the melancholic dynamic threatens to erase each of Sackville-West’s protagonists, and as her novels detail the advancing impact of this disinheritance, the female characters face literal extinction. Thus, the celebratory stance so often attributed to Sackville-West is, in these works, a far more critical and essentially abject perspective that demands compensation.