Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

2014 Data Indicate That Four In Ten Children Live In Low-Income Families, Jessica A. Carson, Andrew P. Schaefer, Marybeth J. Mattingly

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this brief, authors Jessica Carson, Andrew Schaefer, and Marybeth Mattingly use American Community Survey data to explore child poverty rates across the United States by region, state, and place type (rural, suburban, and city). They also examine data on children who are deeply poor (those in families with incomes below half of the poverty line), as well as low-income children (those in families with incomes less than twice the poverty line). They report that in 2014, more than four in ten children (44.1 percent) lived in low-income families. More than one-fifth of children (21.7 percent) were poor, and nearly …

Deaths Exceed Births In Most Of Europe, But Not In The United States, Kenneth M. Johnson, Layton M. Fields, Dudley L. Poston Jr.

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this brief, authors Kenneth Johnson, Layton Fields, and Dudley Poston, Jr. present important new findings about the diminishing number of births compared to deaths in Europe and the United States from their recent article in Population and Development Review. Their research focuses on the prevalence and dynamics of natural decrease in subareas of Europe and the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century using counties (United States) or county-equivalents (Europe). The authors report that 58 percent of the 1,391 counties of Europe had more deaths than births during that period compared to just 28 percent …

Campus Community Readiness To Engage Measure: Its Utility For Campus Violence Prevention Initiatives—Preliminary Psychometrics, Katie Edwards, Mary M. Moynihan, Kara Anne Rodenhizer-Stampfli, Jennifer M. Demers, Victoria Banyard

Peer-Reviewed and Other Publications

The researchers present preliminary psychometric information on a recently developed measure—the Campus Community Readiness to Engage Measure (CCREM)—which was developed as a tool for campuses to determine their readiness to address sexual assault (SA) and relationship abuse (RA). Participants were 353 community leaders and administrators at 131 colleges and universities across New England. Factor analytic results demonstrated that the CCREM had three factors for both SA and RA: denial (the campus community is unwilling to acknowledge that SA and RA are issues for the community), initiation (the campus community is beginning to create efforts to address SA and RA and …

Why Do The Children Flee? Public Security And Policing Practices In Central America, Mary Fran T. Malone

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this brief, author Mary Fran Malone discusses the security crisis in Central America and successful policing strategies for confronting this crisis. She reports that Central Americans’ experiences and perceptions of crime are linked to an increased likelihood of migration. In 2014, approximately 57,000 unaccompanied minors traveled from Central America to Mexico, continuing north to cross the U.S. border illegally. The large numbers of people fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras testify not only to the violence of illicit markets but also to the failure of these countries’ governments to fulfill their most important task—protecting the lives of their citizens. …

Should I Say Something? Dating And Sexual Aggression Bystander Intervention Among High School Youth, Katie Edwards, Robert P. Eckstein, Kara Anne Rodenhizer-Stampfli

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

Using data from a sample of 218 high school youth from three high schools in New England (one rural, two urban), this brief discusses dating and sexual aggression bystander intervention among high school youth. Authors Katie Edwards, Robert Eckstein, and Kara Anne Rodenhizer-Stämpfli report that an overwhelming majority (93.6 percent) of high school students reported having the opportunity to intervene during the past year in situations of dating aggression or sexual aggression; however, in over one-third of the episodes (37.4 percent) students reported not intervening. Girls were more likely to intervene in situations of dating and sexual aggression than boys, …

Federal Eitc Kept 2 Percent Of The Population Out Of Poverty Greatest Poverty Reductions In Texas, North Carolina, And Arizona, Douglas J. Gagnon, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Andrew P. Schaefer

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

This brief documents the proportion of Americans who would have been poor absent the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), all else being equal, across 2010–2014. It consists of a pooled sample using the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) between the years of 2011–2015. Authors Douglas Gagnon, Marybeth Mattingly, and Andrew Schaefer examine Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) rates as well as hypothetical increases in the rates of poverty in the absence of federal EITC benefits. They report that the proportion of people who are poor in the United States as measured by the SPM would increase …

Scaling U.S. Community Investing The Investor-Product Interface, Michael E. Swack, Eric Hangen

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

Scaling U.S. Community Investing: The Investor-Product Interface, an in-depth landscape study of the U.S. Community Investing (USCI) field. The full report includes a detailed analysis of the major types of USCI products, parameters that different investors use to evaluate investment opportunities, and the barriers and opportunities to increasing investment.

Trump And Sanders Supporters Differ Sharply On Key Scientific Fact, Lawrence C. Hamilton

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this fact sheet, author Lawrence C. Hamilton reports the results of a recent WMUR/CNN poll by the UNH Survey Center asking more than 700 New Hampshire residents whether they would vote for Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders if the 2016 presidential election was being held on that day, and how candidate preferences matched up with people's beliefs about a basic scientific fact -- the rising con­centration of CO2 or carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Podia And Pens: Dismantling The Two-Track System For Legal Research And Writing Faculty, Kristen K. Tiscione, Amy Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

At the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting, a panel was convened under this title to discuss whether separate tracks and lower status for legal research and writing (“LRW”) faculty make sense given the current demand for legal educators to better train students for practice. The participants included law professors, an associate dean, and a federal judge.2 Each panelist was asked to respond to questions about the “two-track” system—a shorthand phrase for the two tracks of employment at many law schools whereby full-time LRW faculty are treated differently than tenured and tenure-track faculty. The panelists represented differing views on the topic. This …

Tracking Public Beliefs About Anthropogenic Climate Change, Lawrence C. Hamilton, Joel N. Hartter, Mary D. Lemcke-Stampone, David W. Moore, Thomas G. Safford

Sociology

A simple question about climate change, with one choice designed to match consensus statements by scientists, was asked on 35 US nationwide, single-state or regional surveys from 2010 to 2015. Analysis of these data (over 28,000 interviews) yields robust and exceptionally well replicated findings on public beliefs about anthropogenic climate change, including regional variations, change over time, demographic bases, and the interacting effects of respondent education and political views. We find that more than half of the US public accepts the scientific consensus that climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities. A sizable, politically opposite minority (about …

Although Child Poverty Declined In 2014, Persistent Racial And Ethnic Disadvantages Remain, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Andrew P. Schaefer, Jessica A. Carson

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

Poverty data from the American Community Survey were released on September 17, 2015, allowing a detailed examination of poverty in 2014 across the United States. In this brief, authors Beth Mattingly, Andrew Schaefer, and Jessica Carson discuss changes in child poverty between 2013 and 2014 and since 2009, just after the Great Recession ended. They report that in 2014, 21.7 percent of children were poor, representing a modest, but statistically significant decline since 2013 (by 0.6 percentage point), but still 1.7 percentage points higher than in 2009. Though cities and rural places remain home to the highest rates of child …

Official Poverty Statistics Mask The Economic Vulnerability Of Seniors A Comparison Of Maine To The Nation An, Andrew P. Schaefer, Marybeth J. Mattingly

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this brief, authors Andrew Schaefer and Beth Mattingly compare Maine, one of the oldest states in the nation, to the United States as a whole. Historically, both children and the elderly were regarded as vulnerable groups in need of support from government programs. Traditional poverty estimates suggest that at least since the late 1960s, senior poverty has been on the decline, whereas poverty among children has increased.

Declines among seniors are largely attributable to the advent of programs such as Social Security. Similar to the nation, about half of Maine seniors (51.0 percent) would be poor without Social Security …

Wearing Memories: Clothing And The Global Lives Of Mourning In Swaziland, Casey Golomski

Anthropology

This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women’s memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how clothing of the deceased is privately possessed and ritually manipulated by the bereaved. While human and spiritual self-other relations are produced through clothing and its material efficacy, current global ideologies of immaterial mortuary ritual associated with Pentecostalism have emerged as contraries to this local, intersubjective grief work. This article describes how such contrarian ideologies paper over existing global …

Pircnews, Fall 2015, Prevention Innovations Research Center

PIRC Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Conservative And Liberal Views Of Science, Does Trust Depend On Topic?, Lawrence C. Hamilton

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

Conservative distrust of scientists regarding climate change and evolution has been widely expressed in public pronouncements and surveys, contributing to impressions that conservatives are less likely to trust scientists in general. But what about other topics, where some liberals have expressed misgivings too? Nuclear power safety, vaccinations, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are three widely mentioned examples. For this report, five similarly worded survey questions were designed to test the hypothesis that, depending on the issue, liberals are just as likely to reject science as conservatives. The five questions were included along with many unrelated items in telephone surveys of …

Gmo Propaganda, Stanley P. Kowalski

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] “GMOs are not inherently more dangerous than conventionally bred crops - on the contrary. For example, Gold Rice, rice genetically engineered to accumulate beta-carotene and thereby alleviate serious vitamin A deficiency in developing countries, has been stymied and blocked by anti-GMO activists for over a decade. Ironically, this product (which original experimental versions contained Monsanto technology) could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in developing countries.”

Behind At The Starting Line: Poverty Among Hispanic Infants, Daniel T. Lichter, Scott R. Sanders, Kenneth M. Johnson

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this brief, authors Daniel Lichter, Scott Sanders, and Kenneth Johnson examine the economic circumstances of Hispanic infants using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey annual microdata files from 2006 through 2010. They report that a disproportionate share of Hispanic infants start life’s race behind the starting line, poor and disadvantaged—an important finding because the proportion of all U.S. births that are Hispanic is growing rapidly. The poverty risk is especially high among rural Hispanic infants and those in new destinations. Despite higher poverty risks, Hispanic infants receive less governmental assistance. High Hispanic infant poverty has immediate and long-term consequences …

Red Rural, Blue Rural; Rural Does Not Always Equal Republican, Dante J. Scala, Kenneth M. Johnson

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this fact sheet, authors Dante Scala and Kenneth Johnson examine voting data for nearly 9,000 rural residents to identify how voting patterns differ across rural areas comparing farm and recreational counties to those elsewhere in rural America. They also examine voting data from the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections for each rural county. Scala and Johnson report that rural America is not the undifferentiated Republican bastion depicted by commentators. While Republican presidential candidates do best in rural counties dominated by farming, Democratic presidential candidates do well in rural counties dominated by recreation. In “battleground” states, these rural differences may …

Rates Of Snap Receipt Stabilize Or Drop In All Regions For First Time Since Great Recession, Jessica A. Carson, Paul Anskat

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

This brief uses data from the American Community Survey to document rates of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) receipt in 2013, to track changes since the onset of the recession in 2007, and to monitor receipt by region and across rural places, suburbs, and cities. In addition, it examines levels of SNAP receipt among potentially vulnerable populations to determine how receipt has changed among these groups since the recession began. Authors Jessica A. Carson and Paul Anskat report that the share of households receiving SNAP benefits declined slightly between 2012 and 2013 from 13.6 to 13.5 percent, the first decrease …

A Transformation In Mexican Migration To The United States, Rogelio Saenz

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

Author Rogelio Sáenz reveals that the shift in migration has coincided with changes in the composition of the Mexican population coming to the United States. Sáenz reports that Mexicans migrating today tend to have higher socioeconomic status than earlier migrants and more women and older individuals are migrating.

Many Eligible Children Don’T Participate In School Nutrition Programs; Reauthorization Offers Opportunities To Improve, Jessica A. Carson

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

This brief uses data from the 2013 Current Population Survey’s Food Security Supplement to document levels of participation in two of the largest programs authorized by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010—the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program—by region and place type (rural, suburban, and city), to identify areas where expanding participation may be especially important. Author Jessica Carson reports that only 64 percent of eligible households participate in the National School Lunch Program, and 52 percent participate in the School Breakfast Program. Fifty-nine percent of eligible suburban households and 63 percent of rural households participate …

Trust In Scientists On Climate Change And Vaccines, Lawrence C. Hamilton, Joel N. Hartter, Kei Saito

Sociology

On climate change and other topics, conservatives have taken positions at odds with a strong scientific consensus. Claims that this indicates a broad conservative distrust of science have been countered by assertions that while conservatives might oppose the scientific consensus on climate change or evolution, liberals oppose scientists on some other domains such as vaccines. Evidence for disproportionately liberal bias against science on vaccines has been largely anecdotal, however. Here, we test this proposition of opposite biases using 2014 survey data from Oregon and New Hampshire. Across vaccine as well as climate change questions on each of these two surveys, …

Women As Economic Providers: Dual-Earner Families Thrive As Women's Earings Rise, Kristin Smith

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

This brief examines married and single women’s contributions to family income using Current Population Survey data for 2000 and 2013. Women’s contributions to family income are essential for most families. This is obviously true for the growing number of single-mother families, but increasingly so for married couple families. While dual-earner families are doing relatively well, family income overall has been stagnant or decreasing among single-earner families, resulting in a widening income gap. Author Kristin Smith reports that of different family types, married couples in which the husband was the primary earner had the highest median family income in 2013 ($101,000), …

Diversity Growing Because Births Far Exceed Deaths Among Minorities, But Not Among Whites, Kenneth M. Johnson

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

In this brief, Carsey Senior Demographer Ken Johnson analyzes new Census Bureau estimates that reflect two important demographic trends affecting the growing diversity of the U.S. population. The minority population is growing and the non-Hispanic white population is not. This interplay of white and minority population change is fueling the growing diversity of the U.S. population. Non-Hispanic whites currently represent 62% of the population and are projected to remain in the majority until the mid-2040s. Growth is minimal because the non-Hispanic white population is aging, which reduces fertility and increases mortality. In contrast, the minority population now represents 38 percent …

Child Protective Services May Link Families To Needed Income Supports, Wendy A. Walsh, Marybeth J. Mattingly

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

A number of public safety-net programs exist to help improve the economic well-being of vulnerable children, but little is known about the extent to which families with a child maltreatment report receive these services over time. In this brief, we examine the incidence of receiving four types of income support both immediately after the child maltreatment report and eighteen months following. The data for this analysis come from the second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW II), a national sample of children who had a maltreatment report that resulted in an investigation by CPS within a 15-month period …

Polar Facts In The Age Of Polarization, Lawrence C. Hamilton

Sociology

Many drivers of polar-region change originate in mid-latitude industrial societies, so public perceptions there matter. Building on earlier surveys of US public knowledge and concern, a series of New Hampshire state surveys over 2011–2015 tracked public knowledge of some basic polar facts. Analysis indicates that these facts subjectively fall into two categories: those that are or are not directly connected to beliefs about climate change. Responses to climate-linked factual questions, such as whether Arctic sea ice area has declined compared with 30 years ago, are politicized as if we were asking for climate-change opinions. Political divisions are less apparent with …

Coverage Rates Stabilize For Children’S Health Insurance: State Policy Change May Be Needed To Address Remaining Children Without Insurance, Michael J. Staley

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

This brief uses data from the American Community Survey to estimate children’s health insurance coverage from 2008–2013 across the United States as well as by region, place type, and type of coverage. Author Michael Staley reports that decreases in rates of private insurance coverage among children were offset by increases in rates of coverage by public insurance in 2013, keeping national coverage stable at 92.9 percent. Rates rose in the West, continuing a trend since 2008. However, at 91 percent, rates among children there are still lower than in the Northeast and Midwest, where rates have stabilized above 94 percent. …

A Holistic Approach To Child Maltreatment, David Finkelhor, Corinna J. Tucker

Sociology

No abstract provided.

A Community Schools Approach To Accessing Services And Improving Neighborhood Outcomes In Manchester, Nh, Justin R. Young

The Carsey School of Public Policy at the Scholars' Repository

This brief uses data collected by the Manchester Health Department in 2013 and analyzed by the Carsey School of Public Policy in the Bakersville, Beech Street, and Gossler Park neighborhoods in Manchester, New Hampshire, to provide information about how barriers to various dimensions of well-being differ by place and also across race/ethnicity, foreign-born status, and age. Survey data and focus groups also gave residents a voice in the implementation of the Manchester Community Schools Project—a partnership between the Manchester Health Department, city elementary schools, philanthropists, neighborhood residents, and several nonprofit agencies—to improve and enhance educational achievement, economic well-being, access to …

Charting Success: Using Practical Measures To Assess Information Literacy Skills In The First-Year Writing Course, Annie E. Donahue

Library Community Scholarship

Objective – The aim was to measure the impact of a peer-to-peer model on information literacy skill-building among first-year students at a small commuter college in the United States. The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is the state’s flagship public university and UNH Manchester is one of its seven colleges. This study contributed to a program evaluation of the Research Mentor Program at UNH Manchester whereby peer writing tutors are trained in basic library research skills to support first-year students throughout the research and writing process.

Methods – The methodology employed a locally developed pre-test/post-test instrument with fixed-choice and open-ended …