Adolescent room culture: Studying media in the context of everyday life

For the past several years, the authors have been investigating adolescent room culture in order to learn more about the relationship between teens and the media. The bedroom, they have found, is an important haven for most teenagers, a private, personal space often decorated to reflect teens' emerging sense of themselves and where they fit in the larger culture. Teens listen to music, read magazines, watch television, do homework, and consider the events of the day in their rooms. They appropriate and transform media messages and images to help them make sense of their lives. By looking closely at how teens draw from the media as they construct their identities and personal worlds, the authors have come to see adolescent media use as a dialectical process played out through everyday practices. Their Adolescents' Media Practice Model highlights the connections between adolescents' identities and media selection, interaction, and application.An earlier draft was presented at the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in San Diego, California, February 1994.Received M.S. in television-radio from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Research focus is on the relationship between the media and public health.Received Ph.D. in mass communication from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research focus is on adolescent health and mass media.     

Absolute and relative support among citizen-voters for local law enforcement agencies: Correlates with selected dimensions of political ideology

During the last twenty years numerous studies have been published regarding public support for local law enforcement agencies. These studies have typically focused on three determinants of support-the social status of the citizen, citizen fear or actual victimization of crime, and the nature or frequency of citizen-police contacts. This somewhat exploratory research evaluates the impact of political ideology upon citizen support for law enforcement agencies. The thrust of the investigation builds upon much more limited considerations of ideology in earlier studies. An assessment and comparison of support according to absolute/diffuse measures and relative/specific measures of citizen-voter support are presented. Political ideology is defined in the context of contemporary liberal-conservative perspectives and operationalized according to nominal (self-identification)and issue-oriented techniques.     

INTERGOVERNMENTAL IMPACTS ON POLICY VARIATIONS WITHIN STATES: EFFECTS OF LOCAL DISCRETION ON GENERAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS

Variation in state policy outputs is often a function of the level of inter governmental involvement in policy decisions by the federal government. This study examines comparable impacts of intergovernmental involvement by states on variations of welfare policy outputs within the states. The analysis of the effects of state-level involvement on General Assistance payments indicates that state delegation of policy discretion in this program leads to significantly higher levels of variation of policy effects within states.