Digital Commons Network^™

First-Class Versus Pre-Canceled Postage: A Cost/Benefit Analysis, R. Filkins, John C. Allen, Sam Cordes

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

This paper examines the costs and benefits of using first-class postage compared to non-profit, pre-canceled postage in inducing response to a self-administered mail questionnaire. An experiment was conducted with the outgoing postage for the 1998 Nebraska Rural Poll. Twenty-five percent of the outgoing questionnaires were mailed with first-class postage, with the remaining seventy-five percent having non-profit, pre-canceled postage affixed. The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference in response rates between the two groups, there were no differences in demographic characteristics between the two postage groups, and the use of non-profit, pre-canceled postage resulted in substantial cost savings.

Evaluating Measures Of Family History Of Alcoholism: Density Versus Dichotomy, Scott F. Stoltenberg, Sharon A. Mudd, Frederic C. Blow, Elizabeth M. Hill

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Aims: Studies have used myriad measures of family history of alcoholism (FH) making it difficult to compare them directly. Commonly used FH measures partition samples into the well-known positive (FH+) and negative (FH–) dichotomy, although quantitative measures of density potentially provide more information. A standard FH measure would facilitate between-study comparisons. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a quantitative FH measure, called Family History Density (FHD), that has theoretical and practical advantages over currently used measures. Design: Logistic regression equations were estimated for FHD and six commonly used FH measures on alcohol dependence diagnosis and two measures of …

Local Greenhouse Gas Emissions In Southwestern Kansas, Douglas G. Goodin, John A. Harrington, Jr., Gerold I. Holden, Jr., Brian Witcher

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Recent international agreements for controlling emissions of greenhouse gases have focused the attention of both the climate research and policy communities on strategies for reducing the production and emission of these radiatively active substances. Most approaches have adopted a "top down" perspective, where mitigation strategies are framed at the level of national governments. However, emissions occur at local, rather than national scales. We describe a study aimed at documenting greenhouse gas emissions from a local area in the High Plains of southwestern Kansas that is currently undergoing marked economic change and population increase in response to restructuring of the meat …

Female Empowerment: The Influence Of Women Representing Women, Angela High-Pippert, John Comer

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The concept of political empowerment has been applied to ethnic and racial minorities, where it has been shown to positively influence political attitudes and participation. We examine whether political empowerment has the same positive consequences for women. Using data from the 1992 National Election Study and Almanac for American Politics 1990, 1992, and 1994, we explore whether women who are represented by women in Congress are more likely to be interested in and participate in politics, have a greater sense of political efficacy, competence, and trust, and evaluate Congress as an institution more favorably than women represented by men. In …

Nebraska’S Changing Agriculture: Perceptions About The Swine Industry, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes, Eric Jarecki

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

The livestock industry has been restructuring during the past several decades, resulting in fewer and larger farms as well as some vertical integration. One particular livestock sector, hogs, has received much attention in Nebraska during the past year. An increase in the applications for new hog confinement facilities has caused concern for some rural residents. Some are worried about environmental damage, while others are concerned about economic implications for smaller farms. However, supporters of these facilities point to additional jobs and other economic benefits they can bring to a community. Given these issues, how do rural Nebraskans feel about large-scale …

Rural Nebraskans’ Perceptions Of Tax Restructuring And Local Schools, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes, Eric J. Jarecki

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

School finance in Nebraska has been altered dramatically in recent years. School districts have been required to reduce their property tax levy to $1.10 per $100 in valuation this year. In addition, the formula for state aid has been changed. Many schools are scrambling to make changes to reach this levy lid. Some are considering cutting programs, cutting staff or even consolidation to deal with the limited funding. Many of these changes in school funding have resulted from a demand by Nebraskans for lower taxes and controlled government spending. Given these issues, how do rural Nebraskans feel about the current …

Effect Of Risk Perception On Willingness To Pay For Improved Water Quality, Renu Sukharomana, Ray Supalla

Department of Agricultural Economics: Presentations, Working Papers, and Gray Literature

Groundwater quality improvement benefits for Nebraska were estimated using both contingent valuation (CV) and averting expenditures (AE) methods. Willingness to pay (WTP) and averting expenditures were measured based on a mail survey of 4,000 randomly selected Nebraska households that was conducted in mid October 1997. A double-bounded referendum format was used to elicit WTP for water quality improvements. The questionnaire also solicited information on the socioeconomic factors hypothesized to influence WTP and averting expenditures, including: risk perceptions, age, level of education, income, length of stay in Nebraska, source of water supply, opinions regarding who should pay for water quality programs, …

Community Life In Rural Nebraska: Trends And Comparisons, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes, Eric Jarecki

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Nebraska’s rural communities have undergone many changes in recent years. The development of a global economy and pressures to consolidate services and government offices are some of the challenges that rural communities are currently facing. How have these changes affected rural Nebraskans’ perceptions of their communities? Do their perceptions differ by the size of their community, the region in which they live, or by their occupation?

This report details results of 4,196 responses to the 1998 Nebraska Rural Poll, the third annual effort to take the pulse of rural Nebraskans. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their community …

Review Of A New Significance: Re-Envisioning The History Of The American West Edited By Clyde A. Milner Ii, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

Playing off the title of the famous essay by Frederick Jackson Turner, this volume of essays and commentaries is, for the most part, the outgrowth of a 1992 Utah State University conference planned as an opportunity for young scholars, as well as a few older ones, to offer new perspectives on the future directions of Western history a century after Turner delivered his influential words. For this collection of essays, several of them previously published in the Western Historical Quarterly, Clyde Milner provides the usual cogent introductory remarks and excellent editing skills we have come to expect of him. …

Trains Through The Plains The Great Plains Landscape Of Victorian Women Travelers, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly

The young British novelist Iza Hardy, during her travels to America in 1881-83, anticipated the American West as terra incagnitae, a place completely beyond civilization. Like many other British tourists to America in the late nineteenth century, Hardy traveled extensively throughout the East Coast and South, and took a transcontinental journey to the Pacific Coast by train (Fig. O. Out of her American travels Hardy produced Between Two Oceans: Or, Sketches of American Travel (1884) and a book about Florida. Hardy's coverage of the western portion of her American journey followed the transect the railroad did, with chapters of …

Framing The Tourist Gaze Railway Journeys Across Nebraska, 1866-1906, Jean P. Retzinger

Great Plains Quarterly

As the last of the Conestoga wagons crossed the Nebraska plains along the worn and rutted Oregon Trail, the tracks of the Union Pacific were already being laid. Telegraph wires had crossed the continent by 1861; the railroad would follow within the decade. Touted as the latest technology to transform space and time, the railroad was to "bind all portions of our country in one homogeneous organism of political, military, social, commercial and Christian nationality and power."² Trains from the East transported consumer goods and consumers alike to the western territories, traversing in a single hour what once had …

The Role Of Rituals In The Management Of The Dialectical Tension Of “Old” And “New” In Blended Families, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Leslie A. Baxter, Anneliese M. Harper

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In this study we examined how members of step- or blended families interact and develop their families by examining their successful and unsuccessful ritual enactments. Blended families provide a fertile context in which to study ritual adaptiveness and the possible relationship between successful enactment of rituals and their adaptability. Data were in-depth interviews with 53 members of blended families concerning their successful and unsuccessful ritual enactments. A qualitative/interpretive analysis indicated that blended families face an ongoing dialectical opposition between the “old family” and the “new family.” Blended family rituals are important communicative practices that enable blended family members to embrace …

Review Of Writing The Range: Race, Class, And Culture In The Women's West Edited With Introduction By Elizabeth Jameson And Susan Armitage, Angel Kwolek-Folland

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of twenty-nine essays, some previously published, aspires to assemble some of the most important new work on women in the multicultural West and to challenge a monocultural national narrative. The focus on the West assumes that region is a meaningful analytical category. In addition, the editors argue that the dynamic of waves of migration to contested territory could stand as a process common to the nation's entire history. Because of the nature of an essay collection, the latter aspiration is difficult to sustain as a coherent argument. Nonetheless, the collection succeeds as a fairly comprehensive introduction to the …

Analysis Of Social Behavior In Individuals With Social Phobia And Nonanxious Participants Using A Psychobiological Model, Kenneth S. Walters, Debra A. Hope

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This study sought to test hypotheses derived from Trower and Gilbert’s (1989) psychobiological/ethological model of social anxiety. This model purports that social anxiety should be characterized by less social cooperation and dominance and greater submission and escape/avoidance. Individuals with social phobia and nonanxious participants completed a structured social interaction. Behavioral measures related to cooperativeness, dominance, submissiveness, and escape/avoidance were coded by independent observers. Those with social phobia exhibited fewer behaviors of social cooperativeness and dominance than did nonanxious participants. The groups did not differ with regard to submissive and escape/avoidance behaviors. Two dominance behaviors correlated with a self-report measure of …

Rural Nebraskans’ Quality Of Life: Trends And Contributing Factors, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes, Eric J. Jarecki

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Nebraska’s economy and population have shown growth during recent years. Agricultural producers are experiencing change as well with the implementation of a new farm program. How have these changes affected rural Nebraskans at a local level? How do they perceive their quality of life? Do their perceptions differ by the size of their community, the region in which they live or by their occupation?

This report details results of 4,196 responses to the 1998 Nebraska Rural Poll, the third annual effort to take the pulse of rural Nebraskans. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their general well-being and …

Nebraska Network 21 (Nn21)

Nebraska Network 21: Publications

What will Nebraska’s communities, educational institutions, and programs of study look like in the year 2020? What is the ideal vision of food systems and food systems education in Nebraska for the 21st century? With support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and with leadership from the University of Nebraska, a process is in place to discover and create the vision.

Since Nebraska Network 21 is relatively new, questions about the project are the usual case. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions.

Why Should Fathers Father?, Patricia Draper

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The findings about the ways in which components of men's human capital is translated into human capital of offspring are intriguing both for what the findings show about secular trends in fertility, consequences for child accomplishment, and for what they show about the importance of the child's mother in linking the father to the child. It is this issue, the mother as link to child and the nature of the father's relationships with the mother that I make the center of my remarks.

There are several things to keep in mind when we try to grasp the evolutionary big picture …

Instructional Support To A Rural Graduate Population: An Assessment Of Library Services, Mary Cassner, Kate Adams

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

A survey was conducted to assess instructional support by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries to a specialized group of students. Faculty who had taught extended education courses were also surveyed as to the use of library services in support of course delivery to students. Findings provide direction for improving library services to the distant student.

Title And Contents- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SPRING 1998 VOL. 18 NO.2

CONTENTS

LITERATURES OF THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Francis W. Kaye

A CULTURAL DUET: ZITKALA SA AND THE SUN DANCE OPERA P. Jane Hafen

WOMEN WRITING ABOUT FARM WOMEN Becky Faber

GENDERED LANDSCAPES: SYNERGISM OF PLACE AND PERSON IN CANADIAN PRAIRIE DRAMA Anne F. Nothof

THE CORPORATE FARMING DEBATE IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II MIDWEST Jon Lauck

REVIEW ESSAY: HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES Linda Ray Pratt

A review of Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie OLsen and Meridel Le Sueur, and Nora

Ruth Roberts, Three Radical Women …

Review Of Contented Among Strangers: Rural German Speaking Women And Their Families In The Nineteenth- Century Midwest By Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is an important study that joins the growing number of histories of rural American women. Its strengths are many. First, it uncovers the complex and multi-layered worlds of German-speaking immigrants; Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, a professor of German and Foreign Languages, uses her linguistic dexterity to unveil a rich cache of German-language diaries, letters, and memoirs, delivering it to North American readers in finely-crafted English narrative. The work is also remarkably sensitive to German immigrant diversity; although the immigrant groups hail from five Midwest states-Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska-they represent both Dreisziger Germans and "Germans from Russia," religious and …

Review Of Shingwauk's Vision: A History Of Native Residential Schools By J. R. Miller, Jennifer Pettit

Great Plains Quarterly

Historian J. R. Miller takes us on a long awaited journey in Shingwauk's Vision. The study, based on over a decade of research, is the first scholarly comprehensive history of residential schools in Canada from their beginnings to their demise in the 1960s. Miller deserves praise for examining the motivations and experiences of all three of the parties involved-the federal government, the various churches, and the students themselves. Using both government and missionary archives and extensive interviews with former students, Miller reveals not only the policies that shaped the schools, but the internal workings of the institutions as well. …

Women Writing About Farm Women, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly

I spent the first sixteen years of my life on Iowa farms. We lived in rural Adair County, Iowa, in an area that was remote, quietly tucked about halfway between Des Moines and Omaha. All I knew was rural life. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, and most of my uncles and aunts were farmers. The farm determined many elements of my life. We raised much of our own food, butchered our own beef and pork, raised chickens for eggs and meat, milked cows and sold the cream, wore clothes that defined our tasks such as overalls and …

Gendered Landscapes Synergism Of Place And Person In Canadian Prairie Drama, Anne F. Nothof

Great Plains Quarterly

In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Mirage, Sharon Pollock's Generations, and Connie Gault's Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with …

Review Of Better Red: The Writing And Resistance Of Tillie Olsen And Meridel Le Sueur By Constance Coiner & Three Radical Women Writers: Class And Gender In Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, And Josephine Herbst By Nora Ruth Roberts, Linda Ray Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly

HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES

"Writing about living subjects, especially those with whom one feels political and personal solidarity, is a touchy, even painful business," begins Constance Coiner in the introduction to her book on Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Contemporary directions in scholarship have recognized that interaction and opened up the personal voice in the scholarly study. Putting aside the dream of disinterestedness, the scholar herself may become part of the subject. The traditions of an objective scholarship are especially hard to fulfill, even to honor, when the research is done in cooperation with a living author who …

Campus Racial Climate Policies: The View From The Bottom Up, Michelle Hughes, Rick Anderson, Julie Harms Cannon, Eduardo Perez, Helen A. Moore

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

We review the debates over campus multicultural goals from the perspective of university officials and again from the perspective of the policy target: students. We then assess a sample of student policy opinions and the role of campus experiences and diverse racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds in shaping those opinions. Often descriptive, this provides insights on working with diverse student populations. We focus our research on students because student voices are often unheard in education. Administrators are assumed to “know better” because of their years of campus experience or professional training.

Gender-Based Pay Gaps: Methodological And Policy Issues In University Salary Studies, Myra Marx Ferree, Julia Mcquillan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Methodology is often a point of contention in gender-based salary studies. Although this debate seems at first to be merely about technical issues, it also has an important conceptual dimension. We argue that there are two competing implicit conceptions of discrimination, one institutional and the other individual, that underlie many such debates. We first contrast the preferred methodologies advanced by each side, the policy capturing approach and the flagging approach, and explore the theoretical meaning of their statistical models. We then describe a practical application of both methodological approaches in one specific salary inequity study. In conclusion, we reflect on …

Index- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

Index pp. 361-368 (8 pages)

Review Of Unionizing The1ungles: Labor And Community In The Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry Edited By Shelton Stromquist And Marvin Bergman, Laura Lacasa

Great Plains Quarterly

Hacking through meatpacking's mass production jungle, historians Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman gather nine essays addressing twentieth-century Midwestern unionization and its impact on industrial and social relations within and beyond factory walls.

The work details the historical struggles inherent to the meatpacking labor movement. Racial, gender, and ideological differences, compounded by guarantees that all workers benefit equally from union membership, have been the most serious traditional obstacles to uniting employees. Wilson Warren's essay, for instance, argues that whites in the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) declined initiating anti-discrimination programs after World War II intentionally to limit African American advancement.

From Loving To Romer: Homosexual Marriage And Moral Discernment, Richard F. Duncan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The dual-gender marriage requirement does not treat men and women unequally. Instead, it recognizes and celebrates the physical differences between men and women and their obvious sexual complementarity. Traditional marriage laws do not discriminate on the basis of gender; rather, they recognize the equal indispensability of both genders to the institution of marriage. The dual-gender requirement, like the decision in Loving, is animated by a moral sense that discerns the true nature of marriage. As Justice Ginsburg put it so well, most people understand that the two sexes are not fungible and that dual-gender marriages and same-sex unions are …

"They Call Me 'Eight Eyes'": Hardwick'S Respectability, Romer'S Narrowness, And Same-Sex Marriage, Richard F. Duncan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Justice White's landmark opinion in Hardwick has survived both the test of time and the many slings and arrows of outraged scholarship launched at it by law professors who believe the Constitution should be interpreted as codifying the Kama Sutra. The eminent respectability and rightness of Justice White's methodology and reasoning in Hardwick was completely vindicated in Glucksberg, the Supreme Court's latest--and one of its most significant--decisions on the meaning of fundamental rights protected by substantive due process.

In Glucksberg, the Supreme Court reaffirmed an objective historical methodology based upon a careful and precise description of the asserted liberty …