The effect of line‐up administrator blindness on the recording of eyewitness identification decisions

Purpose. Line‐up administrators’ expectations have been shown to influence eyewitnesses’ identification decisions. Expectations may also influence administrators’ willingness to record witnesses’ decisions as positive identifications. Methods. Single‐ and double‐blind participant administrators presented a line‐up to a confederate witness, who identified either the suspect or a filler. Results. A hierarchical log‐linear analysis revealed an interaction effect of blindness and witness choice on participants’ recording of the identification: Single‐blind administrators were more likely to record the confederate's choice as a positive identification when the witness chose the suspect (vs. a filler), whereas double‐blind administrators’ records were not influenced by the witness's choice. An interaction between blindness and witness choice also emerged for participant administrators’ witness evaluations. Single‐blind administrators rated confederates who chose a filler as significantly less credible than those who chose a suspect; double‐blind administrators’ ratings were consistent across photo selection. Conclusions. Blindness influenced line‐up administrators’ record of line‐up outcomes. These results add to the growing body of research supporting the use of double‐blind line‐up administration.     

Supply response reconsidered: Cocoa in Western Nigeria, 1909–44

This essay uses time‐series data on cocoa plantings in Western Nigeria to re‐examine some popular conclusions about the price responsiveness of farmers in underdeveloped economies. Annual variations in the rate of planting were found to be more closely related to farmers’ income from cocoa sales than to current price. Qualitative evidence suggests that longer‐term trends in cocoa plantings were also influenced by changing opportunity costs and by the institutional structure of rural factor markets. These results cast some doubt on commonly accepted capital stock adjustment models of investment in tree crops, which assume that farmers rely heavily on forecasting future price trends when deciding how much to plant. Given the uncertainty of future crop prices, it seems more likely that farmers plant more trees when they can afford to do so, so long as opportunity costs are not prohibitive.     

On the Success of AmeriCorps Programs in Strengthening Communities: Evidence from Florida

In 1993 President Clinton signed into law the National and Community Service Trust Act, the centerpiece of which was a new national service initiative—AmeriCorps. The overall purpose of AmeriCorps was to promote community building through volunteer service. AmeriCorps was one high-profile program established in part to highlight government-nonprofit partnerships and their capacity to improve communities and service delivery to the most vulnerable in communities—poor children, frail elderly, and teenagers who are at risk of dropping out of school or getting into serious juvenile delinquency problems. AmeriCorps' programs nationally work to achieve three goals—Getting Things Done, Member Development, and Strengthening Communities. Few of the studies on AmeriCorps have explicitly studied their impact on community strengthening. This article reports on a two-year study of twenty two AmeriCorps programs in Florida from 1997–2000, emphasizing their objectives and success in community strengthening. Program results are limited. The programs increased the number of volunteers delivering their services and developed one or more community partner organizations at each site. Nearly all of the program staff and community partners believed that the AmeriCorps programs positively influenced the community's self-help capacity to some extent. However, data indicating broader community strengthening impacts were hard to find and difficult to track. Reasons for this relatively modest impact on broader community strengthening goals are articulated based on surveys, interviews, and site visits.     

Comment on Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel's “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification"—Gentrification resurgent?

Abstract

Gentrification is a procyclical process by which certain inner‐city neighborhoods are revitalized to meet the demands of professional households. It is confined to cities with substantial central business district office growth and with housing markets characterized by substantial suburb‐to‐inner city filtering. The process remains limited in scale, and available data do not permit a judgment as to whether changes in mortgage lending have changed the nature of the process.     

Reviews

Laszlo Csaba (ed.), Privatisation, Liberalisation and Destruction (Recreating the Market in Central and Eastern Europe). Aldershot and Brookfield, NY: Dartmouth Publishing Company Ltd, 1994.

Iliana Zloch‐Christy, Eastern Europe in a Time of Change: Economic and Political Dimensions. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, xvii + 143 pp.

J. Michael Waller, Secret Empire. The KGB in Russia Today. Oxford: Westview, 1994 x + 390 pp., £42.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

James M. Goldgeier, Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, x + 169 pp., £29.00.

Vladimir Andrle, A Social History of Twentieth‐Century Russia. London: Edward Arnold, 1994, xi + 289 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.

Graeme Gill, The Collapse of a Single‐Party System: The Disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, xi + 255 pp., $35.00 h/b, $14.95 p/b.

John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, xxiii + 481 pp.     

Life after death: preservation of the immortal seed

In today's brave new world, women who suffer the loss of their husband or lover can call upon medical science to create a souvenir baby. The rights of the decedent over his genetic material and the rights of the child who is created therefrom are the subject of an evolving legal process. This Essay examines legal, moral and ethical issues which arise from post-mortem artificial insemination. It discusses the attendant conflicts of procreative rights, finality of probate, psychological issues, international law, and recent cases. Ultimately, comprehensive legislation must be enacted to address these issues.     

Bias and Overconfidence in Parametric Models of Interactive Processes*

We assess the ability of logit, probit and numerous other parametric models to test a hypothesis that two variables interact in influencing the probability that some event will occur [Pr(Y)] in what we believe is a very common situation: when one's theory is insufficiently strong to dictate a specific functional form for the data generating process. Using Monte Carlo analysis, we find that many models yield overconfident inferences by generating 95% confidence intervals for estimates of the strength of interaction that are far too narrow, but that some logit and probit models produce approximately accurate intervals. Yet all models we study generate point estimates for the strength of interaction with large enough average error to often distort substantive conclusions. We propose an approach to make the most effective use of logit and probit in the situation of specification uncertainty, but argue that nonparametric models may ultimately prove to be superior.     

Expanding the scope and content of morality policy research: lessons from Moral Foundations Theory

Scholars have not precisely defined morality policy, and Smith (Policy Stud J 30(3):379–395, 2002) urged an empirical taxonomy be used to identify those policies. We argue that Moral Foundations Theory offers a methodology for empirically identifying issues with moral content. We inventory 15 issues in parliamentary studies of “conscience” voting, 14 morality policies in western democracies compiled by Studlar (in: Mooney (ed) The public clash of private values: the politics of morality policy, Chatham House Publishers, New York, 2001), and then survey MFT empirical studies to identify 22 issues with moral content. Based on this universe of 37 issues, three journals are content analyzed to determine the coverage given them and to outline productive lines for future research.     

Policy Design and Achieving Social Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Social Enterprise Policy

This article compares American, British, and Korean social enterprise policies to explore how government policy design shapes social enterprises and how “social benefit” and “public value” are defined. A social enterprise is defined as the legally structured organizational pursuit of blending social purpose and economic profit through business activities, and examples from each country are presented. Applying Bozeman's publicness theory, the authors demonstrate the wide range of roles that governments play in shaping social enterprises' ownership, funding, and control across the three countries using regulations, subsidies, and procurement policies. These roles may affect the impact of social enterprises in society. The case studies show that the U.S. approach to social enterprise policy is heavily market oriented, while the United Kingdom is in the middle of the market-to-publicness continuum, and South Korea is much closer to the publicness (government-dominated) end of the continuum.