Jad Assi

“The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Education Curricula” uses qualitative, thematic analysis of sex education curriculum in America over a decade to understand how pleasure discourse has and hasn’t been incorporated into sexuality curriculum. Pleasurable sex is often linked in sex education curriculum to negative outcomes such as unwanted pregnancy or STD’s, proposing that pleasurable sex and safe sex are mutually exclusive.

Michelle Fine, sited in the article, wrote about the lack of female pleasure in sex education curriculum, arguing that while female victimization was broached it was not included with female pleasure in sexual situations. The debate over sex education pleasure inclusive curriculum has continued since Fine’s article in 1988. Many sex education program including those that have accepted funding for Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) programs provide fear-based sex education programs instead of presenting sexuality in a positive and healthy light, thus promoting sexual stereotypes. The lack of pleasure based curriculum is problem with both abstinence based and comprehensive sex ed programs.

Teaching fear based curriculum promotes trends of slut shaming or negative messages involving female sexuality.

“While President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have called for an end of funding for programmes that do not have evidence to support their effectiveness and have recommended increasing funding to states for teenage pregnancy prevention programmes (Guttmacher Institute 2009), in 2010 the US Congress elected to maintain $50 million of funding for states that wanted to continue to use AOUM curricula”( Lamb, Lustig, Graling, 2013.)

The three researchers studied three different types of curriculum across a decade including AOUM, comprehensive sex education (including sex education that is built to fit into a abstinence promoted curriculum), and liberal, private, sex education programs offered outside of school. “This sample included four AOUM curricula, six CSE curricula, and one nonschool-based CSE curriculum” (Lamb, Lustig, Graling, 2013.)

In regards to the teaching of the body in sex education curriculum, pleasure is often referred to in medical terms which has both benefits and costs. The benefits include a normalization of pleasure, taking away stereotypes that condemn masturbation or pleasure centers in the body, however the costs play out when the conversation of pleasure is not carried out into normal conversations between the educators and students, and thus may not fully inform students, promote dialogue, or even ostracize students who experience alternative forms of pleasure or who identify as asexual. Lamb, Lustig, and Graling note that most scientific oriented curriculum discussing the sexuality of the body leave out the anus as a potential pleasure center for males.

Pleasure was often equated to dangerous and opposed to safe sex. Whilst Lamb, Lustig, and Graling note that sex can be both pleasurable and safe, using the example of condom use, although wearing a condom may decrease some bodily pleasure, the knowledge that both partners are safe, may increase emotional pleasure. They also note that both parties may engage in sexual acts that do not require penetration to achieve pleasure.

Pleasure is also seen as opposed to self-control. This model of sex that involves pleasure as hormonally overwhelming presents that argument that sex is animalistic in nature. This argument is very problematic, promoting the ideology that inclusion of pleasure is mutually exclusive to choice. This presentation of sex is promotional of rape culture in essence. Pleasure is also posited to pressure and regret within relationships in sex education curriculum, unless within a monogamous relationship, which is seen as a safe place to practice sex pleasure between two individuals.

This research is very interesting in regards to my senior thesis on California’s new sex education standards implemented in the California Healthy Youth Act. Comprehensive sex education is now required in California, and has been updated to include many new issues that were not addressed in the previous curriculum, however pleasure not being one of them.

http://0-web.a.ebscohost.com.books.redlands.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=17&sid=7ad68c02-a035-4858-a840-6fa112010103%40sessionmgr4008&hid=4104

Lamb, S., Lustig, K., Graling, K., (2013). The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Education Curricula, 13(3), 305-318.

In this chapter of the book Teaching with Poverty in Mind, the author try and see if there are any factors that actually do correlate with academic performance in elementary school all the way up to high school. One theory that the author looks at is with genes and DNA. The author explains that about 30-50 percent of DNA is being taken up by behavioral genetics, while the other portion is is made up with environmental factors at work. These environmental factors could be anything in the world from where one lives and grows up to the type of relationships that a person could have with people. To go along with this point, the author uses the mnemonic device EACH to explain the risks that children face when dealing with poverty. Individually, they stand for emotional and social challenges, acute and chronic stressors, cognitive lags, and health and safety issues. All together, EACH represents a unique problem with academic success and it is important to understand so that students in poverty could have a better chance at success.

This chapter provided useful information that could help me formulate theories of my own when it comes to graduation rate based on socioeconomic status. Poverty affects many students nationwide, but the educational system is having a hard time cooperating with these students to give them a better chance at succeeding. One fact that I noticed from this chapter is that the author stated that although understanding the concepts of EACH could help many students, it won’t help all students. The author points out that not all children in poverty experience the same behavioral changes, so educators need to be creative in trying to understand these kids and the lives that they have to live with. Overall, I feel that this article made some good points and definitely gave me a more scientific point of view as the chapter looked at behavioral development, something that the other articles have lacked.

Jensen, Eric. “Teaching With Poverty In Mind”. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (2009): 13-46.

Snow Avalanche Climatology of the Western United States Mountain Ranges

Cary J. Mock and Karl W. Birkeland

The Western United States contains three climate zones that can produce avalanches; coastal, intermountain, and continental. Each zone has distinct avalanche characteristics. The coastal zone has abundant snowfall, higher snow densities, and higher temperatures and contains the pacific mountain ranges. The continental zone has by lower temperatures, lower snowfall, lower snow densities, higher snow temperature gradients, and a more persistently unstable snowpack resulting from depth hoar. The continental zone contains the Rockies. The intercontinental zone contains mountains in Utah, Montana, and Idaho and has characteristics of both the other zones. The zones generally follow an east to west gradient starting with continental in the Rocky Mountains and moving to the intermountain and then Pacific zone on the west coast. Defining these zones and describing the climate and environmental characteristics that are associated with each zone is imperative for improving forecasts of avalanche danger and preventing avalanches.

The two primary types of avalanches are loose snow slides or slab avalanches. Slab avalanches pose the greatest threat to life due to their greater size, greater distance they can travel and increased degree of unpredictability. Slab avalanches form when a cohesive slab overlays a less cohesive, weak layer. The slab breaks off from the layer beneath when stress is introduced. This stress can come from new or wind-blown snow, falling cornices, explosives, or the weight of a person on a slope.

The question this article was attempting to answer was could zones that can produce environments that avalanche be defined by characteristics unique to each zone. By answering this question it could enable better long-term predictions of avalanche risk and assist with short-term risk management and forecasting.

The researchers used interval/ratio climate data from public and private records of the Westwide Avalanche Network WWAN to calculate means of temperature, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, and snow density for each of the three climate zones. Data from 45 stations and a few ski resorts from 1969 to 1995 created data sets that the researchers quantitatively analyzed for correlations. The unit of analysis was the same as the unit of observation because the locations the data was collected from was also what parameter for how the correlations were generated, from trends at those locations.

The researchers used a different method for data analysis as well. They used box plots to generate ranges for the snow avalanche climate classification, by comparing the variability of temperature, snowfall, snow water equivalent, snow depth, December temperature gradient, and rainfall for each of the three major avalanche climate regions. For example, this method of analysis visually displayed that coastal zones are characterized by warmer temperatures, ranging from approximately -3 to 0 degrees C on average.

This research provides more of the defining characteristics of the environments I will be investigating for my project. The method was interesting because it used patterns of temperature, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, and snow density, snow water equivalent (SWE) and others to identify spatially where they are correlated to instead of looking at locations and finding patterns in those locations. It allowed for a greater scope and to not make conclusions about areas that you believe are important before the data has been analyzed.

Another valuable piece of information I learned from this article was that WWAN sites collect more information needed for avalanche hazard research such as snow water equivalent (SWE). However WWAN stations rarely observe backcountry avalanches, so Department of Transportation Data can be used as well.

One question this article prompted for my project was are climates shifting from continental to intermountain? There was little variability of zones demonstrating characteristics of other zones occurred during the data analysis but some areas in the southwestern (Colorado) portion of the continental zone expressed certain intermountain characteristics periodically. Could this variation be amplified by climate change and would that increase or decrease the risk of avalanches in that area?

Mock, C. J., & Birkeland, K. W. (2000). Snow Avalanche Climatology of the Western United States Mountain Ranges. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 81(10), 2367-2392. doi:10.1175/1520-0477(2000)081<2367:sacotw>2.3.co;2

In this article, “Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective” by John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., and Theodore Hershberg, the authors speak about the difference between peoples’ transitions into adulthood; comparing the males and females from 1880 to the males and females in 1970. They explain that there are multiple aspects of life that must be considered to see why and if there are changes from 1880 to 1970. The different stages that they closely speculate are the times when youths exit school, when they enter the workforce, become independent from their household origin, and when they get married. They compared the positive and negative relationships between all these phases within their respective years and then compare those years against each other. All this information is looked at in the article to see if there is a change in the patterns of adulthood transitions.

The topic of this article was growing up, the authors more specifically wanted to know if in fact youth has become “extended, normless, and lacking bounds” as has been suggested. To this they found that it is quite the opposite. To answer this question the authors required quantitative data which they used to compare the numbers of people in 1880 and 1970 in each of the transitional phases. They gathered these numbers with the use of pubic records. The method of data analysis would have been interval/ratio data, their data was numeric and their question required them to compare the difference in the numbers of people in each transitional phase and how that affected the numbers in each upcoming phase.

At first I thought this research was very complex and entangled but when the authors explained each step and how everything was  interconnected it made perfect sense and was extremely interesting. What I found to be most interesting was the increase in independence that transitioning youths have today compared to the youths in the nineteenth century.

Modell, John, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr, and Theodore Hershberg. “Social change and transitions to adulthood in historical perspective.” Journal of family history 1.1 (1976): 7-32.

By: Arch G. Woodside and Randolph J. Trappey

Woodside and Trappey hypothesized that the most accessible attitudes that are associate with a given store, with evaluative store attributes are highly predictive of primary store choice. The two looked at principal grocery shoppers of 301 households that responded to a survey assessing 7 possible determinant attributes reflecting J. A. Howard’s 3 key dimensions of retail store image. Those three dimensions are: convenience of the store location, the price of the store’s products, and the information the store provides about its products. Their findings suggested that the attitude accessibility of competing stores and brands in relation to the primacy of responses to evaluative attributes, is useful for accurately predicting primary choices.

Woodside and Trappey article used surveys and public and private records to give answers to stores and brands wondering why people shop at their place or for their brand. Their article discussed how if your store is easier to travel to be it walking, driving, public transportation, appeals to people more because of its close proximity to the targeted customers. Store’s that are cheaper tend to attract poorer families as well as some of the remaining families to be considered middle class. However, these stores are probably located in poorer areas. Stores located in more wealthy areas can raise the price for products. Finally, customers appreciate more descriptions about stores’ products so people actually know what they are getting and where it is coming from.

The types of data that could be used for their research would be survey, public and private records, and interviews but that would be stretching it. Woodside and Trappey used surveys and private and public records to collect their data and pose the research question of: Why do people shop at grocery stores? They mostly used qualitative data with little quantitative.

Early Precursors of Gang Membership: A Study of Seattle Youth

Karl G. Hill, Christina Lui, and J. David Hawkins

This study focuses on Seattle’s youth. It was done by the Seattle Social Development Project. This study looked at the behaviors between kids that are in gangs and kids that are not. The study was done in the 90’s. The research question for this research study is “Why do some youth join gangs while others do not?”.  So, the topic would be gangs and their decisions on why they want to join a gang. This is a good question to answer because this way we can know how to prevent the youth from joining them. The type of data used for this study is Acts, Behaviors, and Events. I would use this data because the surveyor wants to know if the children are involved in a gang or what kind of crimes they have committed. The data gathering method they used for this study was surveys and questioners. There were 808 kids that took these surveys.  The type of data analysis they used was categorical data. They were asked whether they were male or female.  They were also asked their age and what ethnicity they were. Overall I think this was a good study. I want to do something like this. I want to look at gang members and interview do them and ask them why they joined gangs. I will use this information to shape my research study. Something I think they did well was the use of graphs to show their results.

In the article “Long-term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China” the researchers look at various samples and research some long term effects in the soils of the Chinese forests because of the heavy industrial pollution produced in the recent years. In order to do that they  examined temporal variations in topsoil pH and their relationships with atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition across China’s forests from the 1980s to the 2000s. To accomplish this goal, the researchers conducted artificial neural network simulations using historical data from the 1980s and a data set from literature published after 2000. The abstract further summarized their results, saying that there is a definite  negative correlation between atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition, further supporting the argument that there is a need for measures that reduce sulfur and nitrogen emissions so as to maintain ecosystem structure and function in forests and any other ecosystem that may be effected.

The purpose of this study was to better our understanding of the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH, especially in China’s. It is generally well known that the effect of acidic deposition on soil pH is not very good for most plants and the animals that relay on them.  The data used in this study was mostly historical and various reports on how what was emitted and where and then experiments on different soils from the soils all collected together and ran through a satirical analysis software to look for a correlation that came out to be quite strong and in support of their hypothesis that there was a lot of harmful sulfur and nitrogen polluting and damaging the ecosystems.

To gather the data the researchers had to use both detached observations and various records that had been put together in previous years. I think this was a fairly useful study and incredibly important when trying to prove that there is an environmental issue present to be addressed. The only issue is their data for the historical soils is somewhat old, but that is a fairly minor issue.

Yang, Y., Li, P., He, H., Zhao, X., Datta, A., Ma, W., Zhang, Y., Liu, X., Han, W., Wilson, M. C. and Fang, J. (2015), Long-term changes in soil pH across major forest ecosystems in China. Geophys. Res. Lett., 42: 933–940. doi: 10.1002/2014GL062575.

In the education system today, there is a growing problem surrounding the suspension and expulsion rate, especially in high-density socioeconomically disadvantaged areas around the United States. These suspension and expulsion rates then tend to then be related to truancy, and poor performance in school, which then tends to lead to juvenile delinquency. Craig J. Forsyth, Holly Howat, Lai K. Pei, York A. Forsyth, Gary Asmus and Billy R. Stokes conducted a study in Louisiana to investigate patterns in school discipline infractions that lead to suspension and expulsion specifically focusing on the differences between the four racial/ethnic groups. The researchers goals were to answer these five questions. First what is the pattern of suspensions and expulsions among racial/ethnic groups in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Second, what types of infractions result in suspensions and expulsions in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Third, What infraction patterns exist among racial/ethnic groups in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Fourth, what specific infractions tend to result in suspensions and expulsions in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year? Lastly, what differences between racial/ethnic groups are noted among the specific infractions that tend to result in suspensions and expulsions in Louisiana public schools during the 2008–2009 school year?

To conduct this research project, they took sample data from all of the K-12 public schools in the Louisiana department of education (excluding private schools) and examined the enrollment and disciplinary rates for the 2008 2009 school year. They distributed this sample by gender and race, the largest groups being the males and the African Americans. According to the Louisiana Department of Education, student discipline infractions are divided into eight categories, which are disobedience, safety, substance abuse, vandalism, theft, violence, truancy and miscellaneous. With these eight categories of discipline they took data from the department education and created 3 additional tables containing the suspension and expulsion rates by race/ethnicity, discipline infraction by race/ethnicity and the specific disciplinary infraction by race and ethnicity. Analyzing the charts, African Americans have the highest suspension/expulsion percentage with a 69% of the total infractions. On the table that breaks down the specific infraction category by race/ethnicity African Americans also have the highest amount of infractions with 229,443 of the 330,210 total infractions by all race/ethnicity’s.

This research project didn’t come to as concrete of a conclusion as I would’ve expected. One conclusion that was drawn from this research though was that African American students had higher rates of disciplinary infractions and or suspensions and expulsions than any other race. But interestingly enough, they claim that “Any analysis, which compares discipline infractions and/or criminal offenses by students of different races/ethnicities should not accept a literal interpretation of the numbers.” Knowing that there are many more factors involved than just the ones represented in the data, tells me that there needs to be more research conducted in order to be able to fully understand this topic and its causes and correlations.

http://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/2/1/20/htm

The journal “International Advances in Economic Research”   contains the article  Charitable Donations: Evidence of Demand for Environmental Protection? by Debra K. Israel. This article  is an analyzing  the 2001 Giving and Volunteering in the United States survey in order to understand the connections between households and charitable donations to environmental organizations. Which gives way to the research question of how do factors such as levels of income, education, being female, home-ownership, and ability are relate to likelihood of charitable donations to environmental organizations. Since the reasons behind someone donating are many and varied the data type needed to answer the research question is survey data as it allows for collection from a large amount of people and questionnaires can cover enough of the factors to draw conclusions for the question. The analytical approached used in this article is stated as a sensitive analysis so it may fall under a type of analysis we do not cover in the course but can somewhat be compared to a descriptive analysis due to working with large amounts of data. I found this article to be very well done as the author during the analysis mentions that just because the data shows a specific trend doesn’t mean that it reflects why some households are more or less charitable since the information is being gathered from individuals. It is also very thorough as it also makes use of regression to see if there are any non-factors among the projected factors used in the research. One interesting thing I found in this article is that being female has no impact on the likelihood of donations but being Latino does slightly impact the likelihood of donations.

This article can found online in “International Advances in Economic Research” Issue 13 Vol 2 May 2007.

Link to article: http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.books.redlands.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=64ff7b4d-2728-48eb-a39a-a20c418f547e%40sessionmgr104&hid=129