Differences in physical activity between black and white girls living in rural and urban areas

This study examined the relationship of race and rural/urban setting to physical, behavioral, psychosocial, and environmental factors associated with physical activity. Subjects included 1,668 eighth-grade girls from 31 middle schools: 933 from urban settings, and 735 from rural settings. Forty-six percent of urban girls and 59% of rural girls were Black. One-way and two-way ANOVAs with school as a covariate were used to analyze the data. Results indicated that most differences were associated with race rather than setting. Black girls were less active than White girls, reporting significantly fewer 30-minute blocks of both vigorous and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Black girls also spent more time watching television, and had higher BMIs and greater prevalence of overweight than White girls. However, enjoyment of physical education and family involvement in physical activity were greater among Black girls titan White girls. Rural White girls and urban Black girls had more favorable attitudes toward physical activity. Access to sports equipment, perceived safety of neighborhood, and physical activity self-efficacy were higher in White girls than Black girls.

Review: "Measuring and evaluating sustainability : ethics in sustainability indexes" by Sarah E. Fredericks, New York, Routledge, Routledge Studies in Sustainable Development, 2014

The concept of ‘sustainability’ has been pushed to the forefront of policy-making and politics as the world wakes up to the impacts of climate change and the effects of the rapid urbanisation and modern urban lifestyles (Yigitcanlar and Teriman 2014). Climate change and fossil fuel-based energy policy have emerged as the biggest challenges for our planet, threatening both built and natural systems with long-term consequences. However, the threats are not limited to the impacts of climate change and unsustainable energy system only – e.g., impacts of rapid urbanisation, socioeconomic crises and governance hiccups are just to name a few (Yigitcanlar 2010a). Along with these challenges, successfully coping with the enormous transformations that our cities, societies and the environment have been going through during the last few decades, and their...

Survival models of community tenure and length of hospital stay for the seriously mentally ill : a 10-year perspective

Objective: To examine the effects of personal and community characteristics, specifically race and rurality, on lengths of state psychiatric hospital and community stays using maximum likelihood survival analysis with a special emphasis on change over a ten year period of time. Data Sources: We used the administrative data of the Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation, and Substance Abuse Services (DMHMRSAS) from 1982-1991 and the Area Resources File (ARF). Given these two sources, we constructed a history file for each individual who entered the state psychiatric system over the ten year period. Histories included demographic, treatment, and community characteristics. Study Design: We used a longitudinal, population-based design with maximum likelihood estimation of survival models. We presented a random effects model with unobserved heterogeneity that was independent of observed covariates. The key dependent variables were lengths of inpatient stay and subsequent length of community stay. Explanatory variables measured personal, diagnostic, and community characteristics, as well as controls for calendar time. Data Collection: This study used secondary, administrative, and health planning data. Principal Findings: African-American clients leave the community more quickly than whites. After controlling for other characteristics, however, race does not affect hospital length of stay. Rurality does not affect length of community stays once other personal and community characteristics are controlled for. However, people from rural areas have longer hospital stays even after controlling for personal and community characteristics. The effects of time are significantly smaller than expected. Diagnostic composition effects and a decrease in the rate of first inpatient admissions explain part of this reduced impact of time. We also find strong evidence for the existence of unobserved heterogeneity in both types of stays and adjust for this in our final models. Conclusions: Our results show that information on client characteristics available from inpatient stay records is useful in predicting not only the length of inpatient stay but also the length of the subsequent community stay. This information can be used to target increased discharge planning for those at risk of more rapid readmission to inpatient care. Correlation across observed and unobserved factors affecting length of stay has significant effects on the measurement of relationships between individual factors and lengths of stay. Thus, it is important to control for both observed and unobserved factors in estimation.

Intersectionality, rural criminology, and re-imaging the boundaries of critical criminology

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands – feminist, cultural and green – has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

Investigating the interplay between transport, land use and the environment : a review of the literature

Integration of land use and transport decisions to achieve sustainable travel behavior has been considered an integral element for sustainable urban development. However, before the popularity of urban sustainability concept, land use and transport interaction had been scrutinized as strictly separate entities in the urban planning and development domains. Fortunately today the concept of sustainability has been pushed to the forefront of policy-making and politics as the world wakes up to the impacts of climate change and the effects of the rapid urbanization and modern urban lifestyles. The paper therefore aims to highlight the importance of the interplay between transport, land use and the environment. This review paper provides evidence from the literature including the Transport, Land Use and the Environment Special Issue contributions and global best practice cases to showcase new empirical approaches and investigations from different parts of the world that contribute to the wealth of knowledge in exploring the interplay between transport, land use and the environment thoroughly.

New pleasures and old dangers: reinventing male sex work

Understandings of male sex workers (MSWs) shift with technological, conceptual, and social changes. Research has historically constructed MSWs as psychologically unstable, desperate, or destitute victims and their clients as socially deviant perverts. These perceptions, however, are no longer supported by contemporary research and changing societal perceptions of the sex industry, challenging how we understand and describe “escorts.” The changing understandings of sexuality and the increasing power of the Internet are both important forces behind recent changes in the structure and organization of MSWs. The growth in the visibility and reach of escorts has created opportunities to form an occupational account of MSWs that better accounts for the dynamic and diverse nature of the MSW experience in the early 21st century. Recent changes in the structure and organization of male sex work have provided visibility to the increasingly diverse geographical distribution of MSW, the commodification of race and racialized desire, new populations of heterosexual men and women as clients, and the successful dissemination of safer sexual messages to MSWs through online channels. This article provides a broad overview of the literature on MSWs, concentrating its focus on studies that have emerged over the past 20 years and identifying areas for future research.

Subduing power : Indigenous sovereignty matters

The concept of ‘power’ can refer to the institutionalised and embodied capacity and right to dominate through a variety of means including ideology, politics, science, religion, class, race, gender and sexuality. Early feminist theorising within the West, for example, conceptualised the structure and nature of power as being connected to male domination and authority within society. Marxists, alternately, argue it is the ruling class that holds power and exercises it as owners of the means of production. In a general sense, we can say that as feminists have tied power to patriarchy and Marxists’ definitions of power have been connected to capitalism. The essays in this section, though, are less concerned with such totalising conceptualisations of power than they are with processes of interpellation or subject creation within dominant or dominating discursive spaces.1 Not power as such, but its many workings and apparatuses.

Emotional expressions preferentially elicit implicit evaluations of faces also varying in race or age

Both facial cues of group membership (race, age, and sex) and emotional expressions can elicit implicit evaluations to guide subsequent social behavior. There is, however, little research addressing whether group membership cues or emotional expressions are more influential in the formation of implicit evaluations of faces when both cues are simultaneously present. The current study aimed to determine this. Emotional expressions but not race or age cues elicited implicit evaluations in a series of affective priming tasks with emotional Caucasian and African faces (Experiments 1 and 2) and young and old faces (Experiment 3). Spontaneous evaluations of group membership cues of race and age only occurred when those cues were task relevant, suggesting the preferential influence of emotional expressions in the formation of implicit evaluations of others when cues of race or age are not salient. Implications for implicit prejudice, face perception, and person construal are discussed.

The National Curriculum and history school textbooks in Australia and the Russian Federation

This chapter analyses recent policy reforms in the national history curriculum in both Australia and the Russian Federation. It analyses those emphases in the national curriculum in history that depict new representations and historiography and the ways in which this is foregrounded in History school textbooks. In doing so, it considers the debates about what version of the nation’s past are deemed significant, and what should be transmitted to future generations of citizens. In this discussion of national history curricula, consideration is made of the curriculum’s officially defined status as an instrument in the process of ideological transformation, and nation-building. The chapter also examines how history textbooks are implicit in this process, in terms of reproducing and representing what content is selected and emphasised in a national history curriculum.

Stakeholder pressures on corporate climate change-related accountability and disclosures: Australian evidence

This study investigates stakeholder pressures on corporate climate change-related accountability and disclosure practices in Australia. While existing scholarship investigates stakeholder pressures on companies to discharge their broader accountability through general social and environmental disclosures, there is a lack of research investigating whether and how stakeholder pressures emerge to influence accountability and disclosure practices related to climate change. We surveyed various stakeholder groups to understand their concerns about climate change-related corporate accountability and disclosure practices. We present three primary findings: first, while NGOs and the media have some influence, institutional investors and government bodies (regulators) are perceived to be the most powerful stakeholders in generating climate change-related concern and coercive pressure on corporations to be accountable. Second, corporate climate change-related disclosures, as documented through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), are positively associated with such perceived coercive pressures. Lastly, we find a positive correlation between the level of media attention to climate change and Australian corporate responses to the CDP. Our results indicate that corporations will not disclose climate change information until pressured by non-financial stakeholders. This suggests a larger role for non-financial actors than previously theorized, with several policy implications.

Environment, political economies and livelihood change

Between the national and household factors, community or “meso-level” changes in political economy and livelihoods in southwestern Bangladesh illustrate that in order to understand the impacts on people and nations of climate change-related environmental changes – changes that are expected to include rising sea level, saline inundation, and increased likelihood and intensity of cyclones in Bangladesh – we need to understand the dynamics of the built and natural environment and the political economies these sustain. Meso-level political economies affect the sources of income and livelihood available in distressed environmental conditions, and therefore influence how well the people in them can adapt to changing environmental conditions. In this study we have seen the underlying political economies whose dynamics, and not slow onset environmental changes or disastrous environmental events, are pushing Bangladeshis to incorporate migration strategies into their livelihood strategies.