Stressors, coping resources and strategies, and police stress in South Korea

The present article extends prior research to identify the predictors of police stress from work place problems, the resources available through social support, different strategies for coping with stress, and conditions unique to policing in South Korea. The unique conditions are perceived public perception of police and attitudes towards women working outside of the home. Seven hundred officers were asked to participate in the research, and 686 did participate (96 percent response rate). Almost half of the variance in stress could be explained. Reports of being ridiculed and “set up” in dangerous situations, and to a lesser extent, lack of support from superiors and perceived disrespect from the public, were salient predictors of stress. Coping strategies did not moderate the associations between stressors and stress. Findings were interpreted in relation to collectivist culture and possible points of intervention.     

Symposium on Implementing Public Policy: Learning from Theory and Practice

The initiative for this symposium issue arose out of a series of five ESRC seminars called 'Implementing Public Policy: Learning from Each Other'. The aim of the seminars was to revitalize interest amongst public policy researchers about implementation studies, to advance the development of ideas about public policy implementation and to assess the relevance of academic models of public policy implementation to those who deliver public services.     

Sense of Belonging Among High School Students Representing 4 Ethnic Groups

The authors investigated the dimensions and mechanisms of belonging relevant to motivation and achievement among high school students representing 4 ethnic groups. Using survey data from 9th to 12th grade students (N = 5,494) attending 7 ethnically-diverse high schools, structural equation modeling was employed to explore, independently for each ethnic group, the relationships between students’ perceptions of their belonging (encompassing relationships with teachers and peers, extracurricular involvement, and perceived ethnic-based discrimination), motivation (efficacy beliefs and valuing school activities), and academic success. All 4 measures of belonging were significant for European-American and Latino students. However, friendship nominations were not significant for all groups, suggesting potential variability in perspectives across ethnic groups. The strength of the structural model postulating belonging as a mediator, including statistically significant indirect paths, supported the hypothesis that the belonging construct accounted for much of the relationship between student motivation and success across groups.Beverly Faircloth is a doctoral candidate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the developmental and motivational processes that support adolescent school engagement in ethnically diverse settings.Jill Hamm is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. Her research interests are adolescents’ peer relations in ethnically diverse schools and classrooms.     

Gambling, substance use, and other problem behaviors among youth: A test of general deviance models

Understanding the relationships between youthful gambling, substance use, and other problem behaviors is of interest to researchers studying deviance and to policymakers developing improved prevention strategies. This study used first-order and second-order factor models to test the hypothesis that gambling, alcohol misuse, other drug use, and delinquency were manifestations of a single general deviance construct. Respondents were seventeen to twenty-one year-old youth who were interviewed in two separate general population studies. Contrary to the hypothesis, the second-order model with a single deviance construct did not fit as well as a model specifying only correlations among all first-order factors. A single latent variable representing general deviant behavior did not explain deviance as well as distinct types of problem behaviors. This was true for overall samples and for gender-specific subgroups. Thus, while problem behaviors were related, there also must be uncorrelated antecedents predicting distinct types of youthful problem behaviors.     

Gender mainstreaming and the framing of women's rights in Europe: The contribution of the Council of Europe

Drawing on published materials from the Committee of Ministers, Assembly and expert working groups of the Council of Europe, this paper investigates the distinctive contribution made to the framing of women's rights over the last two decades by this regional organisation, which recent studies of the `Europeanisation' of public policies have largely neglected. Elements of congruence are identified between the major mobilising themes of second wave feminism and the Council's emphasis on protecting individual rights, and its sensitivity to the incompleteness and shortcomings of `actually existing' democratic institutions and practices. The relative openness of its agenda-setting processes is also underlined. The Council's flag ship policies for women are shown to have centred since the mid-1980s on a `politics of presence' frame and the (contested) concept of `parity democracy', and the tensions between these and the more recent turn to gender mainstreaming are explored. But the paper also points to the Council's role in diffusing into the E.U. governance arena women's claims to equal participation and presence in the policy process, and notes recent French and U.K. legislation as testifying to the continuing salience of these claims at the national level.     

A Model of Learned Implementation

The majority of the literature concerning the implementation of public policy assumes that public managers can carry out new policy initiatives regardless of the behavioural, cognitive or technical demands that the introduction of such policies may make upon them. There has been a tendency to assume that managers actually have the detailed technical knowledge by which to enact such new policies. The paper proposes that in effect, public managers have to learn a range of often new and detailed techniques in order to implement what are often ambiguous policy directives. Drawing on data gathered from the introduction of capital investment appraisal in the British National Health Service, a model of Learned Implementation is presented that describes one way in which public managers can learn to enact new policy initiatives. Using a mix of six organizational processes and variables, the model demonstrates how learning occurs and is used to solve the problems that are inherent in the introduction of new policy initiatives. The model further describes how the managers routinize these solutions into job tasks and procedures and hence a policy initiative is operationalized. The paper concludes with a discussion about the difficulties of predicting the operational consequences of new policy initiatives and raises questions about knowledge, ability and capability in the implementation of public policy.     

Review Symposium: Interdisciplinary Readings of Ari Z. Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation—Introduction

Bryen, Ari Z. 2013 . Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation . Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 376. $75.00 cloth; $75.00 eBook.