Explaining the Spread of Ethnosectarian Conflict: Syria's Civil War and the Resurgence of Kurdish Militancy in Turkey

Ethnic civil wars tend to spread to adjacent countries, yet the processes whereby diffusion takes place remain obscure. Quantitative studies point to a wide range of factors and dynamics that drive ethnosectarian conflicts across international borders with no consensus regarding the causal potency of these variables or the ways in which they interact with one another. Surveying the most influential theories that have been advanced so far clarifies the logic of disparate arguments and offers hypotheses that can be tested against particular cases. The civil war in Syria represents one notable instance in which fighting along ethnosectarian lines provoked a revival of political violence in a neighboring state, the Turkish Republic. Applying existing theories to this empirical case clarifies promising directions for future research.     

Students' perceptions of parents' and teachers' qualities of interpersonal relations

A sample of 561 predominantly white, midwestem high school students, grades 10–12, rated both a parent and a teacher on the Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory. Students were assigned randomly to rate a teacher in either a required subject or an elective subject and either their mother or their father. Sex cleavage was found in 12th-grade students who rated samegender teachers higher on warmth than they rated opposite-gender teachers. Evidence for developmental differences came from 11th and 12th graders who reported greater warmth from their parents than did 10th graders. Twelfth graders also perceived greater empathy from parents than did 10th graders. Eleventh-and 12th-grade students also perceived greater warmth from parents than from teachers. Overall, girls perceived greater genuineness from parents and teachers than did boys. Finally, students who lived with the parent they rated perceived greater warmth and congruence from that parent than did students who lived apart from their parent.This article was based on the first author's dissertation.Received Ph.D. from Kansas State University.Received Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Major research interests are writing processes and academic studyingReceived Ph.D. in Counselor Education from University of Wyoming.     

Epidemiology of homicide-suicide events: Oklahoma, 1994-2001

In Oklahoma, all nonnatural deaths must be reported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (ME), whose trained investigators report cause of death using a centralized, statewide, standardized reporting system. The purpose of this study was to determine temporal trends of Oklahoma homicide-suicide events and characterize the epidemiology of these events. By reviewing all ME reports of homicides and suicides from 1994 through 2001, we identified 73 homicide-suicide events resulting in 73 suicides and 89 homicides. Suicidal perpetrators of homicide-suicide events were most often white men aged >or=30 years who killed a current or ex-spouse or intimate partner. Homicide victims tended to be younger women the same race as their killer. Firearms were the predominant method of death in both homicides and suicides, with handguns used most frequently. Divorce/estrangement was the main contributing factor to these events, and the most common relationship type was possessive. The existence of a statewide, centralized, and computerized ME system and the ability to access the detailed information in the ME narratives were critical to identifying homicide-suicide events and obtaining the type of detailed information necessary to fully investigate these events.