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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Predicting Police Discretion: A Traffic Stop Analysis, Andrew Girard May 2010

Predicting Police Discretion: A Traffic Stop Analysis, Andrew Girard

Honors Projects

Examines Donald Black's (1976) theory of pure sociology with data from traffic stops collected over eight months during seventy hours of "ride alongs" with eight different police departments in Rhode Island. Posits that the social structure of each traffic stop is predictable based on observable characteristics of the parties involved and that distance in social space increases the likelihood of a police officer issuing a citation to a driver, while social characteristics similar to that of the police officer reduces the likelihood of a driver receiving a citation. Twenty-one variables throught to impact a police officer's discretion are analyzed. As …


Communalism Predicts Prenatal Affect, Stress, And Physiology Better Than Ethnicity And Socioeconomic Status, Cleopatra M. Abdou, Christine Dunkel Schetter, Belinda Campos, Clayton J. Hilmert, Tyan Parker Dominguez, Calvin J. Hobel, Laura M. Glynn, Curt A. Sandman Jan 2010

Communalism Predicts Prenatal Affect, Stress, And Physiology Better Than Ethnicity And Socioeconomic Status, Cleopatra M. Abdou, Christine Dunkel Schetter, Belinda Campos, Clayton J. Hilmert, Tyan Parker Dominguez, Calvin J. Hobel, Laura M. Glynn, Curt A. Sandman

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The authors examined the relevance of communalism, operationalized as a cultural orientation emphasizing interdependence, to maternal prenatal emotional health and physiology and distinguished its effects from those of ethnicity and childhood and adult socioeconomic status (SES). African American and European American women (N = 297) were recruited early in pregnancy and followed through 32 weeks gestation using interviews and medical chart review. Overall, African American women and women of lower socioeconomic backgrounds had higher levels of negative affect, stress, and blood pressure, but these ethnic and socioeconomic disparities were not observed among women higher in communalism. Hierarchical multivariate regression analyses …