My research topic deals with the influence community has on educational outcomes for students. I came across Marshall and Toohey’s article: “Representing Family: Community Funds of Knowledge, Bilingualism and Multimodality” in the Harvard Educational Review, vol. 80, no. 2. Marshall and Toohey’s research topic concerns schools and teachers connecting school learning to children’s out-of-school learning and culture. Their question would be: “What happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil”? The researchers “use critical discourse analysis to examine educators’ efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school” (Marshall & Toohey, 2010). I believe the authors’ types of data are: reports of acts, behaviors, or events and acts, behaviors, or events. The first  data type is reports of acts, behaviors, or events. Marshall and Toohey first researched the community, conducting “community scans.” They used private and public records, looking at the Canadian census to research the community’s housing, language, and availability of services. They also used interviews and field observations . Collecting this data allowed them to obtain cultural knowledge about the Punjabi Sikh community in Canada, such as the importance of grandparents in the lives of many of these families. The researchers next data type used is acts, behaviors, or events. In the next part of the research, teachers implement “funds of knowledge” of the Punjabi Sikh community in the curriculum and observe how this affected their students. Funds of knowledge is defined as:  “essential cultural practices and knowledge and information households use to thrive.” This study was what the authors call a “teacher-researcher collaboration.” The study happened over the course of three years. In these three years, particular classroom activities were planned, observed, evaluated, and revised by the teachers and researchers. It is hard for me to categorize this data collection method as I can see it as an ethnography because the teachers and researchers were involved in implementing curriculum and working with the students to help them execute the curriculum. This could also be detached observation because the teachers and researchers are observing both the students and the students’ work  and how these were both affected by the curriculum the teachers implemented. Yet, it is not detached because the teachers were working directly with the student, however the researcher were not. The researchers found the importance of connecting students’ funds of knowledge to the classroom, as well as implementing experiences of their peer groups and popular cultural into the curriculum. The researchers find ways in which technology can be implemented in the classroom to open up a space for bilingualism, as the curriculum involved Punjabi Sikh students interviewing their grandparents and recording it with and MP3 player. Finally, the researchers conclude there is a lack of engaging materials written in students’ first languages and recognize the need for culturally engaging material.

Marshall, E., & Toohey, K. (2010). Representing family: community funds of knowledge, bilingualism and multimodality. Harvard Educational Review, 80(2), 221-241.

I am very interested in water quality and water pollution because water is essential to every living organism. We have a responsibility to ensure that our drinking water is safe. I found an article in the June 2011, Volume 73, Number 10 issue of the Journal of Environmental Health that speaks to the water quality of bottled natural spring water. Michael J. Sullivan, PhD, CIH, REA and Shannon Leavey write the feature article titled “Heavy Metals in Bottled Natural Spring Water.” This article describes a study conducted using a random sample of six sources of water to test for the presence of seventeen heavy metals. The heavy metals included in the study are silver, arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, lead, antimony, selenium, thallium, vanadium, and zinc. The authors bought six natural spring bottled water brands from a local grocery store. The brands include Ethos, Icelandic Glacial, Fiji, Evian, Arrowhead, and Crystal Geyser. A total of three samples of each of the six brands was given a random number and sent to a lab for testing of the seventeen heavy metals. All of these metals except beryllium, mercury, and thallium were found in at least one of the bottled natural spring water sources. Arsenic was the only metal whose concentration was found to exceed the maximum contaminate levels established by the state of California. Based on the results, the authors recommended that changes be made to the way bottled water is regulated and stated that bottled water should have the same criteria for water quality as tap water. They also recommended that a process be developed to allow consumers access to testing results for bottled water. The authors suggested that the results could be posted on company websites or on water packaging. This will allow people to make an informed decision when choosing which brand to buy. I was surprised by the results of the study and I will be more careful about which brand of bottled water I drink from now on.

Sullivan, Michael J, and Leavey, Shannon. 2011 “Heavy Metals in Bottled Natural Spring Water.” Journal of Environmental Health Volume 73(10): 8-14.

My topic of research focuses on the challenges facing today’s American ranchers. In the June 2008, Volume 73, Number 2 print of Rural Sociology, I found an article addressing one of these challenges. Carla Barbieri, Edward Mahoney and Larry Butler collaborate to write the article, “Understanding the Nature and Extent of Farm and Ranch Diversification in North America.” In this article, the three authors outline the reasons why North American farms and ranches are needing to diversify in the services they provide and ways they use their lands. They write that this need to diversify comes from developments in technology and government policies as well as the changing market, competition, and demands of consumers. To name just a few, these diversifications come in the form of renting out properties for events, repurposing properties as hospitality operations, and producing other merchandise (yarn, wine, gift baskets) not normally associated with their field of production. While a question is never posed in the article, the hypothesis of the study is stated and can lead the reader to understand what question is being answered with the data collected: do different characteristics of the farmer/rancher as well as different characteristics of the farm/ranch make a difference between lightly, moderately, and highly diversified farms/ranches? Using an online survey, Barbieri et al. collected demographic data by looking at public records and obtaining a list of names from the North American Farm Direct Marketing Association (NAFDMA). They emailed the survey to members of the NAFDMA as well as farmers and ranchers not involved with the association and asked recipients to pass on the survey to others who might be able to provide data as well. In the end, they obtained 1,135 usable surveys, 934 of which were obtained through snowball sampling.  The data obtained was analyzed by classifying the diversifications reported in the surveys into the three levels (light, moderate, high) using multiple linear regression and a-posteriori. This article and data collected provide me with some of the most interesting information that I have found on my topic thus far.

Barbieri, Carla, Edward Mahoney, and Larry Butler. 2008. “Understanding the Nature and
Extent of Farm and Ranch Diversification in North America.” Rural Sociology73(2):205–29.

Jamie Nord

Since I am interested in antiquities and repatriation, the Society for American Archaeology scholarly journal in the Current Periodicals section of the library appealed to me.  I discovered a research article titled, “The Inuvialut Living History Project” that related to my research topic.  It appeared in the September 2012, Volume 12, Number 4 issue.  The contributing authors of the research article were Natasha Lyons, Kate Hennessy, Mervin Joe, Charles Arnold, Stephen Long, Albert Elias, and James Pokiak.  The article details the 2009 collaborative project between the Smithsonian Institution’s Artic Studies Center and the Inuvialuit indigenous community in the Canadian Western Arctic.  The team of anthropologists and museum officials sought a way to make the MacFarlane Collection of Inuvialuit ethnographic objects available to the tribe without physically returning them.  The collection was not “eligible for repatriation” under NAGPRA, since the community resides in Canada.  The cultural objects were acquired by Hudson Bay’s trader Roderick MacFarlane while operating a fur trade post in the 1860’s.  The team collected data of cultural knowledge, expert knowledge, and deeply held opinions and attitudes through in-depth interviews with Inuvialuit elders.  As a result of the process of this action research, the team launched a website www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.ca as a form of “digital repatriation.”  The article concedes that a limitation of this project culmination is that internet access is not universal.  However, the project included a trip for a few Inuvialuit community members to the Arctic Studies Center, so they were able to view and reconnect with their cultural objects.  The team expressed that they believed the outcome to be an overall success but reported another challenge was obtaining meaningful feedback from the Inuvialuit community.  I found the results of this research to be less than inspiring.  In my opinion, a “virtual exhibit” does not offer the same cultural significance or value in a community.  It is difficult to believe a  website could compensate for the lack of repatriation of their cultural objects.

Natasha Lyons, Kate Hennessy, Mervin Joe, Charles Arnold, Stephen Long, Albert Elias, and James Pokiak.  “The Inuvialut Living History Project.”  Society for American Archaeology.   September 2012, Volume 12, Number 4 issue.

The article “Who Gives What to Charity? Characteristics Affecting Donation Behavior” written by  Yu-Kang Lee and Chun-Tuan Chang from the National Sun Yet-sen University in Taiwan, is a very in depth study of exactly what they state in the title who gives what to charity. Their researching topic was streamlined by the concept that giving to charity appears in two forms time and money resulting in the question “can donors and nondonors be distinguished using demographic, socioeconomic, and psycho-graphic variables”. This is one of the easier research studies to determine what kind of data they need to answer their question which is self-identities or demographic data. Even their data gathering method is plainly explained even if you just read the abstract the data gathering method was a large-scale telephone survey done in Taiwan. As for the analysis that was something you had to read past the first two pages to get at but it isn’t really hidden amongst scientific jargon like many other research studies like to do to people trying to figure out how they performed their research. The analysis method was a qualitative one using transcripts from recordings of the telephone surveys. This piece was great when I first found when I was also deciding to shift my research project from a pollution based study to a donation study. However it feel into that category of being of a similar design just on a different topic. Those who are interested in volunteer work would find this very interesting as it is essentially a study that can be used to determine if people you know are more or less willing to donate either their money or time to help a charity or organization you happen to be working with. So I think this a great piece almost simply of the fact that it is still professional but doesn’t add in extensive amounts of scientific language to bog down report seeing as they already had a lot to cover as well as adding a future research section in case you wanted to help expand on it.

Link to article: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Y_K_Lee/publication/233603047_Who_Gives_What_to_Charity_Characteristics_Affecting_Donation_Behaviour/links/543b704d0cf2d6698be2fc9d.pdf

The field of sociology has quite the amount of subsections where people can just dedicate their time and effort into studying. The article “Donation Behavior toward In-Groups and Out-Groups: The Role of Gender and Moral Identity” by Karen Page Winterich, Vikas Mittal, and William T. Ross JR. is one such study. The premise of this article is to investigate some important two social identities one being gender and the other being moral. From what is present in the title and abstract the research question for this study could be “Does gender and moral identity influence donation behaviors between in-groups and out-groups”. The type of data for this study is simply identities and reports of actions. These two data types are needed because without both of them they could never come to a conclusion. The data gathering method for each study was done via survey in various locations. After all the separate studies were finished a qualitative analysis was carried out over the aggregated survey data using cross tabs to see if there was any significance to their findings. Overall I think this is a really good piece just in terms of seeing how a multi-study research study should carried out. Besides that it goes to show that even just the topic of donations have a lot of studies that could done because this study just does gender and moral identities so it could easily be expanded to other identities like region, age, or race. What I think others might find interesting about this study is that when giving out surveys your actually able to control for biases naturally wording the questions of the survey differently.

Link to article:  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.569.642&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The article “Does the government crowd-out private donations? New evidence from a sample of non-profit firms” published in the Journal of Public Economics 69. Is written by Abigail Payne  who is a professor in the Department of Economics from the University of Toronto. The research question in this piece is clearly stated i the the article “does the government crowd-out private donations?”.  This premise of the research starts back in the 1980’s when the Canadian government started to reduce the number of grants given to non-profit organizations. However since government grants and private donations are the only way non-profits are able to generate revenue with either or being a large component of the revenue suddenly being removed can cause a dramatic shift in how a non-profit markets themselves. The data needed to solver this kind of question is organizational data because each non-profit is going to handle donations in a way so you’d have to ask each organization to get access to the data of the donation and grant money. The gathering method behind this research is reports of actions, the specific action being money donated via individual or grants from the government. This is a very interesting piece because many of the other research studies I’ve looked at have all been based in Canada. So those who are interested in governmental impact on non-profits should look into this.

Link to Article: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/Econ%20272B%20readings/payne.pdf

Author: Greg Scott

Title: ‘It’s a sucker’s outfit’: How urban gangs enable and impede the reintegration of ex-convicts

This scholarly journal is looking at how gangs affects ex-gang member’s life after they have been released from jail and gone back to their neighborhoods. So, I would say that the research question is “how do drug-dealing gangs shape the pre- and post-carceral lives of male ex-convicts in Chicago”. The type of data needed for this research is Acts, Behavior, and Events. The author wants to see what these ex-convicts do after they come out of jail. So, the look at their acts, behaviors, and any event that is going on. Given that the data collection method the author used was an Ethnography. He conducted 18 ethnographies with former and gang affiliates. But he also conducted an additional 85 interviews. The method for data analysis is qualitative. The act, behaviors, and events where described in words therefore make the information qualitative. The results of this study were that these ex-convicts where being exploited on both sides of the end. They faced poverty and institutionalized racism so they would join a gang and once they were inside they realized that the gang was just as exploitative as the mainstream institutions. This is great for my project because it gives me another perspective on what I can look at when I do my project. This is a new possibility on why people leave gangs because they are being exploited and I had never thought about that and will further investigate the exploitation.

As of 2006, pregnancy rates and STDs were very high, despite the general decline in teen pregnancy in the United States. In other developed countries, teen pregnancies were much lower than those of the U.S, although STD contraction remained a growing problem. The study discussed in this article was performed in all 83 countries with youth up to the age of 25, in order to see the effectiveness of HIV and Sex Education programs on youth behavior and on pregnancy and STD contraction rates. This research project collected studies that had already been performed on the same topic and analyzed them. The studies had to be published after 1991, have a experimental or quasi-experimental design, with sample sizes that were at least over a 100, and measured the impact of sex education and HIV education on sexual behaviors. These studies were analyzed and effects on behavior were only considered significant if the P<.05.

A three step process was used to identify common characteristics of programs that effected behavior. The first was to generate a list of potentially important characteristics, the second to generate a list of common curriculum content, which were then coded  and used for the third, which was the determination of the process of designing and implementing the effective curricula. The results were as follows: “52% [of effective programs] focused on preventing only STD/HIV, 31% focused on preventing both STD/HIV and pregnancy, and 17% focused only on teen pregnancy . . . Only 7% of the programs were abstinence-only programs. All of these were in the United States . . . More than four fifths of the programs (83%) identified one or more theories that formed the basis for their programs, and often specified particular psychosocial mediating factors to be changed. Social learning theory and its sequel, social cognitive theory, formed the basis for more than half (54%) of the interventions. Related theories identifying some of the same mediating factors were mentioned by substantial percentages of other studies: theory of reasoned action (19%); health belief model (12%); theory of planned behavior (10%); and the information, motivation, and behavioral skills model (10%). Nearly all (90%) of the interventions included at least two different interactive activities designed to involve youth and help them personalize the information (e.g., role playing, simulations or individual worksheets that applied lessons to their lives). Finally, at least 90% of the programs trained their educators before the educators implemented curriculum activities.”

Overall the studies showed that education systems that incorporated sex education and HIV prevention curriculum into the lesson plans for youth had positive behavior outcomes rather than negative ones. It was found that an individual program could many times have the capacity to decrease sexual activity in teens while increase the use of condoms and contraceptives in regards to youth’s sexual activity. The results were consistent in developed and developing countries, with low income and middle income youth, with urban and rural  youth, with boys and girls, and with different age groups.

The article includes a table, that was very useful for my own research into California sex education curriculum, into the subjects broached in successful sex education programs.

Kirby, D., Rolleri, L. 2007, “Sex and HIV Education Programs: Their Impact on Sexual Behaviors of Young People Throughout the World.” Journal of Adolescent Health (40). 206-217.