Do Police Body-Worn Cameras Reduce Citizen Fatalities? Results of a Country-Wide Natural Experiment

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - This study assesses the effects of body-worn cameras (BWCs) on rates of fatalities arising from police-citizen encounters. While existing experimental research...     

Population problems: Recent developments and their impact

The twenty-first century will differ from the twentieth century in population, economics, the environment and culture. In this article, Joel E. Cohen, Professor of Populations and Head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, examines 10 differences between the last century and the next, and the degree to which global population problems will interact with the economy, the environment and culture. Cohen argues that there is almost nothing inevitable about any human trends for the twenty-first century. Each trend is a result of many choices, both individual and collective, that will have to be made by our generation and our children's generation.     

Beyond personal vote incentives: Dividing the vote in preferential electoral systems

Comparative studies of preferential electoral systems have paid much attention to the incentives for personalized instead of party-centered campaigns, but they have largely ignored how some of these systems allow “allocation errors” and so create incentives for parties to “manage” the vote and intraparty campaigns. We discuss how the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) and single transferable vote (STV) systems create these incentives, and we illustrate the degree to which they affect actual electoral results across seven preferential electoral systems. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences in the vote inequality among incumbent cohorts (members of the same party and district), indicating the strong influence of vote division incentives over candidate-centered electoral environments. The results also have important implications for comparative research on legislative turnover and the incumbency advantage.     

Corporate Volunteerism,the Experience of Self-Integrity,and Organizational Commitment: Evidence from the Field

We examined the relationship between the motives underlying employees’ participation in corporate-sponsored volunteerism and their organizational commitment. In both a pilot study and in the main study, employees’ motivation to volunteer based on the desire to express personally meaningful values (also known as the values function of volunteerism) was positively related to their organizational commitment. Additional findings from the main study helped to explain why this was so: being motivated by the values function of volunteerism was positively related to how much participants experienced self-integrity in the workplace, which in turn was positively related to their organizational commitment. That is, experiencing self-integrity in the workplace mediated the relationship between how much employees were motivated by the values function and their organizational commitment. The results of subsidiary analyses provided further evidence that corporate volunteerism was positively related to organizational commitment, and that the experience of self-integrity mediated this relationship. Implications for both the corporate volunteerism and functions of volunteerism literatures are discussed, as are practical implications and suggestions for future research.     

Harsh Discipline and Child Problem Behaviors: The Roles of Positive Parenting and Gender

This study examined harsh verbal and physical discipline and child problem behaviors in a community sample of 2,582 parents and their fifth and sixth grade children. Participants were recruited from pediatric practices, and both parents and children completed questionnaire packets. The findings indicated that boys received more harsh verbal and physical discipline than girls, with fathers utilizing more harsh physical discipline with boys than did mothers. Both types of harsh discipline were associated with child behavior problems uniquely after positive parenting was taken into account. Child gender did not moderate the findings, but one dimension of positive parenting (i.e., parental warmth) served to buffer children from the detrimental influences of harsh physical discipline. The implications of the findings for intervention programs are discussed. This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.