Profiles of Language Brokering Experiences and Contextual Stressors: Implications for Adolescent Outcomes in Mexican Immigrant Families

Adolescents from Mexican immigrant families are often embedded in a challenging social environment and experience multiple contextual stressors, including economic stress, discrimination, and foreigner stress. We consider how the effects of these contextual stressors may be amplified or diminished for adolescents who function as language brokers, interpreting and mediating for their English-limited parents. Using two waves of survey data collected from a sample (N?=?604 at Wave 1; N?=?483 at Wave 2) of Mexican American adolescents with ages ranging from 11 to 15 (M_age?=?12.41, 54% female), four distinct brokering—stress profiles were identified. Latent profile analyses revealed that with moderate levels of contextual stress, adolescents with more positive language brokering experiences (protective group) demonstrated more favorable outcomes than those with neutral language brokering experiences (moderate group) and those who did not involve themselves as frequently in language brokering activities (less-involved group). In contrast, high levels of contextual stress, coupled with more negative language brokering experiences (risk group), produced the least favorable outcomes among adolescents.     

Identity Processes and Coping Strategies in College Students: Short-Term Longitudinal Dynamics and the Role of Personality

Coping strategies and identity processes are hypothesized to influence one another over time. This three-wave longitudinal study (N?=?458; 84.9% women) examined, for the first time, how and to what extent identity processes (i.e., commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration) and coping strategies (i.e., problem solving, social support seeking, and avoidance) predicted one another over time. Cross-lagged analyses indicated that processes of identity exploration seemed especially to be intertwined with different coping strategies over time, suggesting that identity exploration may resemble problem-solving behavior on the pathway to an achieved identity. Commitment processes were found to be influenced by certain coping strategies, although identification with commitment also negatively influenced avoidance coping. These temporal sequences remained significant when controlling for baseline levels of Big Five personality traits. Hence, evidence was obtained for reciprocal pathways indicating that coping strategies and identity processes reinforce one another over time in college students.     

It Takes an Outsider: Extralegislative Organization and Partisanship in the California Assembly, 1849–2006

Why are American politicians “single‐minded seekers of reelection” in some decades and fierce ideological warriors in others? This article argues that the key to understanding the behavior of members inside a legislative chamber is to follow the actions of key figures outside the chamber. These outsiders—activists, interest groups, and party bosses—use their control over party nominations, conditioned on institutional rules, to ensure ideological behavior among officeholders. To understand how vital these outsiders are to legislative partisanship, this article takes advantage of a particular natural experiment: the state of California's experience with cross‐filing (1914–59), under which institutional rules prevented outsiders from influencing party nominations. Under cross‐filing, legislative partisanship collapsed, demonstrating that incumbents tend to prefer nonpartisanship or fake partisanship to actual ideological combat. Partisanship quickly returned once these outsiders could again dominate nominations. Several other historical examples reveal extralegislative actors exerting considerably greater influence over members' voting behavior than intralegislative party institutions did. These results suggest that candidates and legislators are the agents of activists and others who coordinate at the community level to control party nominations.     

Media effects: The influence of local newspaper coverage on municipal police size

This paper explores the influence that local newspaper coverage exerts on the relative size of municipal police agencies. It is hypothesized that the volume of law enforcement news stories affects sworn personnel allocations. Regression results based on 63 large U.S. cities show that media coverage does affect police employment levels. A content analysis of selected newspapers suggests that crime-related stories are prominently featured and tend to portray the police as effective in responding to criminal incidents. Implications for future research concerning media influence and criminal justice policy-making are offered. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Washington, D.C., November 1998. I would like to thank Ruth Peterson, David Jacobs, Randy Hodson, Christopher Browning, Maria Velez, the editor of AJCJ, and three anonymous reviewers for most helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.     

The Wrong Prescription for the Congo

In October 2006, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which experienced possibly the world's deadliest humanitarian catastrophe, held the second of two rounds of the first free presidential elections in 46 years. The culmination of a transitional process funded, designed, and overseen by the West, the elections were supposed to bring stability, accountability, and democracy to a land long devastated by war, poor administration, and authoritarianism. Sadly, this brighter future is unlikely to be reached any time soon, for the transitional process is fatally flawed. A bold approach is needed to reform the DRC's governmental apparatus, the collapse of which not only affects its citizens, but also destabilizes states throughout the continent and provides a haven for terrorists, arms traffickers, and criminal networks.