Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation .     

Character Strengths Among Youth

Four hundred and fiftynine students from 20 different high school classrooms in Michigan participated in focus group discussions about the character strengths included in the Values in Action Classification. Students were interested in the subject of good character and able to discuss with candor and sophistication instances of each strength. They were especially drawn to the positive traits of leadership, practical intelligence, wisdom, social intelligence, love of learning, spirituality, and the capacity to love and be loved. Students believed that strengths were largely acquired rather than innate and that these strengths developed through ongoing life experience as opposed to formal instruction. They cited an almost complete lack of contemporary role models exemplifying different strengths of character. Implications of these findings for the quantitative assessment of positive traits were discussed, as were implications for designing character education programs for adolescents. We suggest that peers can be an especially important force in encouraging the development and display of good character among youth.     

Shifting Boundaries of Membership: The politicisation of free movement as a challenge for EU citizenship

This article discusses freedom of movement under the lens of shifting boundaries of membership and traces the tension between the political and the economic rationale of European integration. It first reflects on the normativity of free movement and links it to the foundations of modern democratic citizenship. Subsequently, it discusses the role of free movement in the construction of EU citizenship and argues that the genesis in market integration casts a long shadow which hinders EU citizenship's potential to fully display the logic of political and social equality. Under current conditions of huge wealth discrepancies between member states, the prevailing form of horizontal integration necessarily brings about a tension between mobility and solidarity, which in turn creates a barrier for further developing EU citizenship. It is concluded that strengthening an intra‐European dimension of solidarity is needed in order to substantiate the right to move as an equal European citizenship right.     

Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

Women Friends (or ‘Quakers’) were largely absent from the debates on the position of women in Britain in the 1830s-50s. But a significant group of women Quakers emerged at the forefront of organisations formed in the 1860s to campaign for Women's rights, participation in which was still by no means a norm among their co-religionists. A notable presence among them was a group of women Friends, identified here as the Bright circle, linked by kinship, religion and radical politics. This article analyses the relationship between public and private lives among the Bright circle, especially in terms of the strength of the political networks on which they were able to draw. It examines the church culture of Friends in general, the domestic culture of this circle in particular, and the basis of its networks in domestic life. It concludes that the values and activities on which this network was built illustrate the way in which personal and public lives may overlap, so that the women among this circle were able to sustain identities that were authoritative, and simultaneously family-centred, outward-looking and publiclyminded.     

Ethnic Cultural Features in Organized Activities: Relations to Latino Adolescents’ Activity Experiences and Parental Involvement

Cultural responsiveness is a key aspect of the quality of organized activities, yet has rarely been examined. Based on developmental theories and a theoretical framework for culturally responsive activities, the current study investigated the prevalence and correlates of two ethnic cultural features (i.e., ethnic cultural content & ethnic cultural respect) in organized activities. Using data from 154 Latino adolescents (M_age?=?12.36, SD?=?.53; 59% Female) and parents, we examined associations between adolescent perceptions of both ethnic cultural features and their activity experiences; and associations between parent perceptions of both ethnic cultural features and parental involvement in the activity. Latino adolescents and parents in general perceived lower than average ethnic cultural content and moderate to high ethnic cultural respect in the reported activity. Both adolescents and parents were more likely to perceive ethnic cultural content and respect in activities where Latino youth were the numerical ethnic majority than in activities where Latino youth were the numerical ethnic minority. Latino adolescents’ perceptions of ethnic cultural respect were associated with more positive activity experiences, whereas their perceptions of ethnic cultural content were associated with more negative feelings. Latino parents’ perceptions of ethnic cultural content predicted higher involvement. To design culturally responsive activities, ethnic cultural features should be incorporated in a thoughtful, meaningful way that reflects both adolescents’ and parents’ perspectives.     

Youth Participation in Organized and Informal Sports Activities Across Childhood and Adolescence: Exploring the Relationships of Motivational Beliefs,Developmental Stage and Gender

Involvement in physically active pursuits, such as sports, contributes to achieving and maintaining good emotional and physical health. The central goal of this article was to examine the longitudinal relationships between participation (i.e., time spent in the activities) in organized and informal sports contexts and motivational beliefs, and factors that might impact these relationships, such as developmental stage and gender. The data for the current study were drawn from the childhood and beyond longitudinal study, which utilized a cohort sequential design with data collected on three cohorts across four waves. The current study sample included 986 European American youth (51 % female), who t were mostly from working- and middle-class families. Self-report questionnaires were used to collect data from the youth about their participation in sports and their motivational beliefs (i.e., value and perceptions of competence) about this activity. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships between participation and motivational beliefs across childhood and adolescence. The results provide some support for a model of reciprocal relationships between participation and motivational beliefs in organized and informal sports activities. These relationships between participation and motivational beliefs did not vary significantly based on developmental stage or by gender. Overall, the findings suggest that participation in organized and informal sports contexts may be fostered by supporting the development of positive motivational beliefs about the activities across developmental periods.     

Beyond Participation: The Association Between School Extracurricular Activities and Involvement in Violence Across Generations of Immigration

Participation in extracurricular activities is purported to protect the broad spectrum of youth from a host of behavioral risks. Yet, empirical research on the extent to which this assumption holds for involvement in violence by immigrant youth is limited. Thus, using data for 13,236 (51.8% female) adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study explores how the relationship between extracurricular activities and youth violence varies by type of extracurricular activity profile (sports alone, non-sports alone, and a combination of sports and non-sports) and by generations of immigration (first, second, and third-plus). The sample is composed of 9.3% (n = 1,233) first-generation youth, 15.7% (n = 2,080) second generation, and 74.9% (n = 9,923) third-plus generation. The results reveal that adolescents from the third-plus generation (i.e., non-immigrant youth) who participate in non-sports alone or sports plus non-sports have lower odds of involvement in violence than adolescents from the same generation who do not participate in extracurricular activities. However, for first- and second-generation adolescents, participation in extracurricular activities is associated with higher rather than lower odds of violence compared to their non-participating counterparts. These findings challenge the viewpoint that participation in mainstream extracurricular activities as afforded by US schools is equally beneficial for all youth. They also call for additional research that explores why immigrant youth are less likely than non-immigrant youth to gain violence-reducing benefits when they participate in extracurricular activities.