Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy最新文献

To explore predictors of variations in White parents’ racial socialization messages, we collected data on racial socialization practices, attributions for racial inequalities, and views about White privilege from White parents of White children between the ages of 10 and 14 (N = 194). After controlling for education and political ideology, endorsement of external attributions for racial inequality was related to sending more frequent messages about awareness of racism and White privilege, whereas endorsement of internal attributions was related to sending more frequent messages about colorblindness and preparation for bias. Further, beliefs about White privilege were associated with socialization regarding awareness of racism and acknowledgment of White privilege and negatively related to colorblind and preparation for bias messages. Results highlight the ways in which White parents’ racial socialization approaches reflect underlying views of race and racism.

Across the last 150 years, global CO₂ emissions have grown at an increasing, exponential pace. Based on the well-documented tendency to underestimate such exponential growth, we hypothesize and test in three studies (total N = 1796, including one nationally representative US sample) that people would fail to understand the historical, exponential growth of global CO₂ emissions. However, we also show that providing a simple rule of thumb can serve as an effective educational boost that helps overcome this biased perception. Participants who were provided with the heuristic that historically, global CO₂ emissions have doubled every thirty years provided highly accurate estimates of past emission levels. Compared to participants who relied on intuition, those who applied this doubling heuristic avoided common errors in understanding the current state of the climate change threat and made more realistic expectations of the future consequences of uninterrupted growth. Together, these studies show that overcoming the exponential growth bias helps people form more accurate perceptions of historic CO₂ emissions growth and understand the difficulty of curbing future emissions.

The dominant narrative in much of the world is that public safety is provided by policing, evidenced by supportive rhetoric from institutional forces including politicians, media, and large budget allocations in all levels of government. Alongside a long history of police violence, especially against Black, Brown, poor, and other marginalized people, many social movements reject the idea that policing provides safety and seek other methods for community wellness. The present study utilizes critical narrative analysis (CNA) to describe how marginalized residents of a small city in Iowa construct their understanding of personal and community safety. Their stories and the dialectic exchange during interviews illustrated several counternarratives and moments of conscientization for participants and researchers where safety was deconstructed and understood outside the power of recycled institutional narratives. Participants rejected popular notions of safety such as police, and instead embraced safety through robust relationships, community resources, and forms of self-knowledge such as mental health. We analyzed their interviews as efforts to be humanly recognized within violent white supremacist structures, and their stories help to radicalize popular messages about safety. We highlight their world-making abilities as they craft their own networks of community and safety outside of the state and police.

Although perceived discrimination has been found to diminish self-esteem, the mechanism of such effect and potential protective factors demands further study. Grit has been suggested to moderate the effect of risk factors affecting Chinese left-behind children, but few studies have considered that being left behind might diminish the family and social conditions needed for nurturing grit, and therefore grit might mediate the effect of being left behind and perceived discrimination upon self-esteem. With the questionnaire data collected from 974 Chinese rural children among whom 517 were left-behind children, the present study shows that perseverance of effort mediates the effect of being left behind upon self-esteem. Moreover, within the subsample of left-behind children, perceived discrimination was found to mediate the effect of time length of being left behind on self-esteem, while a chain mediation effect was found where perceived discrimination and consistency of interest mediated the effect of the time length of being left behind on self-esteem. Findings suggest that for left-behind children, while the adverse social conditions reflected by perceived discrimination affects self-esteem by diminishing consistency of interest, the absence of adequate parental regulation more directly affects perseverance of effort and therefore affects self-esteem. Further research directions about practices and interventions targeting at protecting self-esteem through fostering grit are discussed.

In this study, we test a clashing narrative approach to conflict, which argues that political conflict is based on opposing narratives that negate one another. We focus on the role of two master narratives central to political schism in the United States. The first is the American dream narrative, which posits that anyone who works hard can become successful in the United States. The opposing narrative, the systemic racism narrative, argues that the United States is a racist country where minorities are systemically held back. A survey study of 189 participants demonstrated that these two master narratives predict support for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump or Joe Biden above and beyond more traditional ideological dispositions such as right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. In a follow-up experiment (n = 157), we examined how the Trump's administration policies of increased surveillance and policing of Latino immigrants crossing the border influenced White and Latinx participants’ agreement with the narrative of the American dream and the United States as a systemically racist country. Findings suggest that when confronted with news clips of immigrant death at the border, Latinx participants, compared to White participants, increased their endorsement of the American dream narrative. Conversely, White participants, increased their endorsement of the United States as a systemically racist country compared to Latinx participants. The results of this study help us understand support for the Republican party among Latinx voters.

Veganism and anarchism are burgeoning worldwide, yet very few studies have examined the psychological characteristics of people belonging to these two anti-oppression groups. The present study investigated whether vegans and anarchists, on the one hand, and activists and non-activists belonging to these two groups, on the other hand, exhibit distinct personality profiles. To this end, a sample of 180 adults who self-identify as vegans or anarchists completed an online socio-demographic questionnaire, the HEXACO Personality Inventory, and the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen. A discriminant function analysis showed that anarchists are more likely than vegans to self-identify as belonging to a gender other than female or male, or to identify with no gender at all. Further, the proportion of men was larger in the anarchist group than in the vegan group. In terms of personality traits, vegans scored higher on the Conscientiousness, Emotionality, and Honesty–Humility dimensions than anarchists did. Anarchists scored higher than vegans on Openness to Experience and Psychopathy. Activists and non-activists were not distinguished based on gender or personality traits. While the dynamics of power and oppression toward humans and toward animals share common factors, the present results suggest that veganism and anarchism attract anti-oppression advocates with distinct personality profiles.

US Federal legislation mandates the treatment of underaged youth induced to sell themselves for commercial sex as victims and not criminal offenders of prostitution laws. Nonetheless, state prosecutors often take action in juvenile court against these youth. This study explored the impact of negative moral emotions, victim blame, and victim believability on public judgments of child sex trafficking victims under varying case facts. We presented an online scenario involving a trafficking case to 682 participants and manipulated youth sex, trafficker sex, vulnerability background, and prior arrest history to determine how emotions, victim blame, and believability mediate child sex trafficking decisions. Two different paths emerged depending on the youth's sex. Participants reported greater victim responsibility and greater negative moral emotions towards a male youth trafficked by a female when he had a prior commercial sex arrest, which in turn predicted a lower certainty of recommending social services over legal consequences. With the same facts, participants reported lower believability for a female youth when she had a prior commercial sex arrest, which in turn predicted a lower certainty of recommending social services over legal consequences. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the findings for practice and theory.

Federal Title IX policy requires institutions of higher education (IHEs) to prevent and respond to sexual misconduct. Based on 23 in-depth interviews, this study explores California Title IX coordinator experiences at a critical policy juncture—the recension of the Obama-era guidance and the implementation of the Trump administration Title IX rules and regulations—to understand how they responded to, implemented, or resisted federal mandates. Most California Title IX officers reported that the recension of Obama guidelines had limited impact on their daily operations because they lived in a state with more progressive social policy. Participants singled out California case law, state statues, the California Education Code and university system mandates as protective legislation to ensure survivors’ rights. By contrast, the new Title IX regulations that became law in August 2020 were perceived as more consequential. The tight implementation time frame, combined with the complicated and unfunded policy directives, imposed heavy burdens on their administrative offices. Title IX officers foresaw implementation consequences to campus safety, survivors’ willingness to report, and to the credibility of the Title IX office. Taken together, their experiences lend support to progressive state legislative action, restorative justice approaches and for a survivor bill of rights as important counterpoints to federal Title IX policy.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, liberal feminism has garnered the spotlight on equal rights for women. However, what factors contribute to men and women developing liberal feminist ideologies? This is important to understand as this ideology is predictive of support for political and social policies that are currently under debate in the United States. In this survey study (149 heterosexual men and 233 heterosexual women) we examined attitudinal and ideological variables that underlie liberal feminist ideology. The results of this study indicate that heterosexual men scored significantly lower on liberal feminist ideology and significantly higher on traditional attitudes toward women, hostile and benevolent sexism, gender-specific justification, rape myths, and conservative political affiliation compared to heterosexual women. Furthermore, traditional attitudes toward women, hostile and benevolent sexism, gender-specific justification, rape myths, political leanings, and gender accounted for almost 70% of the variance in liberal feminist ideology. Participant gender did not moderate the regression analyses, suggesting that men and women are influenced similarly in determining what attitudes predict liberal feminist ideologies. Implications for support for public policy are addressed.

This paper draws on a subsample (N = 851) of respondents to ITA.LI—Italian Lives—a recently established panel study on a probability sample of individuals aged 16+ living in Italy—to track changes in the affective (positive and negative emotions such as energy and sadness) and cognitive (life satisfaction) components of well-being during different COVID-19 policy phases, classified according to the severity of key government responses.

An event-study design is employed, which uses mixed-effects ordered logistic models to investigate the change in SWB scores. Given the nested nature of the data, multilevel modeling is chosen as the most appropriate method of analysis.

The results reveal the levels of affective and cognitive well-being were significantly lower during the lockdown period than before the pandemic outbreak potentially reflecting both the direct effects of the confinement and other potential sources of distress, such as trends in infection rates and related media alarm. Once the lockdown was lifted, there was no evidence of an immediate and general improvement in well-being. In the following policy phase, with the lifting of most containment measures, there were significant signs of full recovery concerning energy, but the scores for the other well-being components remained relatively lower than those observed before the onset of COVID-19.