In the article “Examining Masculine Gender Role Conflict and Stress in Relation to Religious Orientation and Spiritual Well-Being”, authors James R. Mahalik and Hugh D. Logan delve into the topic of  the intersection between gender roles and religion. More specifically, the two men wished to answer the research question: “Do gender role conflict and stress predict. Catholic seminarian an college age men’s religiosity and spiritual well-being?”. To answer this question, the researchers collected data in the form of surveys, asking 151 single, primarily Caucasian, Catholic men to fill out several tests. Of these men, 77 were seminarians, while the rest were not. Both groups were surveyed on the Gender Role Conflict Scale, the Gender Role Stress Scale, the Extrensic and Intrinsic Religious Orientation Scales, and the Spiritual Well-Being Scale. Mahalik and Logan analyzed the results of the surveys, and came to the conclusion that there are significant relationships between gender role conflict and stress and religiosity and well-being. Interestingly, however, these relationships were often manifested differently between nonseminarians and seminarians, with seminarians often fairing worse than nonseminarians when under a great deal of gender role stress and conflict.

I found the project to be very interesting, though I do agree with the authors’ sown assessment that the self-reported nature of the project, as well as the common answer of “not applicable”, may have somewhat skewed the data. I did appreciate that the numbers of seminarians and nonseminarians were nearly equal, and that both groups drew from a range of states. I would have liked to see a broader study on the topic, rather than one focusing on a single religious denomination, but understand that to do so would have required a much more extensive study. As a whole, I found the article to be interesting, and the arguement to be compelling.

Psychology of Men & Masculinity 2.1, Jan 2001, pgs. 24-33

The article, “Minimizing Harm and Maximizing Pleasure: Considering the Harm Reduction Paradigm for Sexuality Education”, by Michael Naisteter and Justin Sitron,  has four goals: to define the goals of a comprehensive sexual education program as well as an HIV/STI prevention program, to analyze the absence of pleasure as a topic for sex education program for youth, to define and identify harm reduction based sex education, and, lastly, to offer specific suggestions for implementing pleasure and harm reduction oriented topics into the current sexual education curriculum.

The article begins by arguing that a comprehensive sex education program not only includes disease and pregnancy prevention, which is only one small portion of sex safety, but must also include, “sexual development, sexual and reproductive health, interpersonal relationships, affection, intimacy, body image, and gender roles” (Naisteter and Sitron, 102.) Since the HIV epidemic in 1980s sex education has been primarily focused on prevention of pregnancy and STIs through the use of contraceptives, abstinence, and identification of risky behaviors. This curriculum has continued with the focus of sex education programs on abstinence only.

“Primary prevention operates in a paradigm of risk preemption by exclusively focusing on teaching participants to avoid negative health consequences before they transpire (Broom, 2008). Proponents often emphasize evidence-based programs, medicalization, and behavioral risk (Broom, 2008).” (Naisteter and Sitron, 104.) The article argues that positing safe sex versus unsafe sex sets up a dichotomy that only allows sex educators to teach about sexuality in a negative light rather than teaching that sex, including sex for pleasure, can be positive with risk prevention.

Naisteter and Sitron argue that sex education should be set up on a spectrum that does not polarize any group of people, including those who have sex for pleasure, those who have already contracted STDs or STIs, and who have practiced risky sexual behavior in the past. As sex education is currently, solely based on risk prevention, pleasure is seen as mutually exclusive to safety. The article argues that sex education should be reformed to include a spectrum that includes sex that is not inhibited by sexual safety on one end and sex that is hindered by sexual safety on the other.

By introducing harm reduction programs that view sex positively and acknowledge pleasure. Harm reduction programs would allow sex educators to speak to a wide variety of people who have different sexual histories and promote safe sex including pleasure in a positive light. Incorporated into current sex education curriculum, harm reduction and pleasure based curriculum would have to loo for alternatives to teaching only safe versus unsafe practices, abstinence only, and the use of the condom as the only birth control.

Broom, D. (2008). Hazardous good intentions? Unintended consequences of the project of prevention. Health Sociology Review, 17(2), 129–140.

Naisteter, M., Sitron, J. (2010). Minimizing Harm and Maximizing Pleasure: Considering the Harm Reduction Paradigm for Sexuality Education. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 5, 101-115.

In this article, the study looks at the dropout rates by looking at first graders to find any early signs. In the study, there were 1,242 black students that went to school in an urban neighborhood. In this community, dropout rates were very high, so the people in the study wanted to find any correlation. In the study, the researchers looked at school performance in the first grade, along with family background, family environment, and educational hopes at the time. They compared these factors to see if any pattern related to dropout rates in high school or just any major educational problems. In order to do this study, the researchers decided to take longitudinal data so that they can continually get the data overtime from the same 1,242 individuals that started the study.When the researchers collected the data for the final time, they found school files from 1,101 of the 1,242 that started the study. The researchers also took out all the people that moved and or died in the given time. Of the remaining students, it was calculated that 57% of males and 44.8% of females had dropped out. One of the underlying reasons was that some families struggled to get the kids to school due to economic constrictions. Overall, there was a link to socioeconomic status and dropout rate in this particular district.

This study could be beneficial because it answers the main question that I am researching. However, it only looks at one community in an urban area. I might want to look at more areas, both urban and rural, to see how this data relates to others that are similar. This study was beneficial for my learning and is another source that I could use later on.

Ensminger, Margaret E., and Anita L. Slusarcick. “Paths to High School Graduation or Dropout: A Longitudinal Study of a First-Grade Cohort.” Sociology of Education, vol. 65, no. 2 (1992): 95–113

The book set looks at international sources from the 1950s to the present day to provide an outlook on retailing. This article mentions the structural spatial relationships in the spread of hypermarket and the personality of the retail store.  Stores use a multiple-item scale for measuring consumers to see what they want/prefer.  Findlay analyzes the oligopolistic behavior in the market as well as clarifying the difference between manufacturers’ brands. The role of brands in European marketing is compared to the role of brands in American marketing.  Findlay touches on some problems that stores face such as economic factors that affect the spending of consumers and their customers.  Findlay raises a question during the collect:  Are store brands perceived to be just another brand?

The topic of this book set is to understand the personality of stores and who they are trying to appeal to while taking into account economic concerns as well as the structure of the American marketing system.  They used in-depth interviews, expert knowledge, as well as public and private records to gather their data.  I think they did a good job with their research as well as comparing it to another market system.  This topic was interesting in the fact that they consider stores and the market system to have human characteristics.  I think it would be an interesting read for my classmates to see how their favorite stores prove or disprove their results.

In this article the author, Daniel J. Levinson, with the use of collected research, talks about adult development and its various phases. He goes over peoples’ life course, life cycle, and the “eras” of a person’s life cycle; he goes over the life structure and its development in adulthood. Along with this he talks about the overall study of adult development as its own respective field. He discusses that people can not necessarily be defined just by adolescence and use that as a basis of comparison for how people turn out as seniors. Not only must one’s mature or adult stages of life be considered but the phases within those years and the events within those phases must be understood to make proper connections. These phases must also not be put in hierarchical positions because no phase that people go through is necessarily better than the ones that precede it they are just an old phase that will eventually be grown out of.

The topic of this article is adult development and what Levinson is specifically looking at are the phases between the ages of 17 to 65 which he considers the lifespan of the adult years. For this research, he used reports of acts, behavior, and events building off of previously done research on this topic. To gather this, he would have used public records/research that was already published which required in depth analysis of the qualitative data found.

I found this research to be incredibly insightful into the phases of adulthood which was something I always lumped together as one phase. Seeing people’s lives broken down into a structure that can be carried across to all types of people was fascinating. It gave me a better look into adulthood  gives an incredible as well as objective perspective on this topic. One thing that was the most interesting to me was seeing how he broke down the adult life span into nine separate groups but keeping with his idea that there is no hierarchy among them only transitions from one phase to another without any being better or less developed than the others.

Levinson, Daniel J. “A Conception of Adult Development.” American Psychologist 41, No. 1 (1986): 3-13.

Identifying exact species extinction risks has been a challenge for scientists for centuries. The IUCN Red List is the most widely accepted classification system, but is sometimes biased towards larger and more easily sampled species. In the article “An integrated trait-based framework to predict extinction risk and guide conservation planning in biodiversity hotspots,” the authors use base knowledge from the IUCN Red List population trends and “expert-perceived” vulnerability of environmental changes as the response variables for determining the risk of extinction for 195 amphibians in the Brazilian Cerrado. This is the world’s most biodiverse savanna as well as the largest. With the creation of this specialized extinction risk framework, the results show that the worldwide extinction risk for amphibians is underestimated by the IUCN.

The data utilized to address the research topic was reports of acts, events or behavior and acts, behavior, or events. The goal of building this framework is so that any biologist can add additional species-specific predicators on top of the basic data obtained from the IUCN. With that goal in mind, the authors obtained that data from public records from the IUCN, expert knowledge and observations; a very in depth data collection method. Although an extensive data collection method, the analysis of the data was through random forest models. They then assessed the accuracy of the models through the percentage of species correctly classified, the percentage of species not threatened that are correctly classified, and percentage of threatened species that are correctly classified with a statistical constant testing for agreement between the two classification systems.

Overall, this article was the most helpful article I have found on my research topic so far. It highlighted various ways to define priority areas for species with a lack of data and what predictors to use when attempting to create a more in depth classification system. This article also makes me question how many more taxa are underestimated for extinction risks. It is a daunting task for a scientist striving to save all the species we co-inhabit this planet with.

Joana Ribeiro, Guarino R. Colli, Janalee P. Caldwell, Amadeu M.V.M. Soares, An integrated trait-based framework to predict extinction risk and guide conservation planning in biodiversity hotspots, Biological Conservation, Volume 195, March 2016, Pages 214-223, ISSN 0006-3207, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.042.

Foreign direct investments have played a large role on China’s rapidly emerging economy. The author argues that foreign direct investments (FDI) in China have had no negative effects on the FDI flows to neighboring Asian countries. There was controversy in the 1990s when China was receiving a lot more FDI than surrounding countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The author argues that the scale of China’s economy justified its larger intake of FDI since its growing economy far outweighed those of less wealthy neighboring countries. Thus the amount of FDI was proportional to China’s scale. The author also denounced the belief that this was a zero-sum game, where more FDI to China meant less FDI to neighboring countries—in fact he states that it still benefitted the region. He also explains how China’s economic policies have favored FDI and is restructuring the regional economy. In order to demonstrate that China received proportional FDI, the article used economic data from an FDI Performance Index, which shows the ratio of FDI received by a country to its annual GDP. He collected this from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Thus he used publicly available data, which he collected available records. He also consulted the WTO and MOFTEC (Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation) for statistics. The article was well written and the author thoroughly explained his methods, making the research easily understandable.

Das, Dilip K. “Foreign Direct Investment in China: Its Impact on the Neighboring Asian Economies.” Asian Business & Management 6, no. 3 (2007): 285-301. doi:10.1057/palgrave.abm.9200225.

Environmental Beliefs and Attitudes in Sweden and the Baltic States

Geoffrey D. Gooch

Gooch, Geoffrey D. “Environmental beliefs and attitudes in Sweden and the Baltic states.” Environment and behavior 27.4 (1995): 513-539.

This particular article studies the topic of environmental behavior in Europe and challenges the dominant sociocultural paradigms, or a group’s way of looking at the world, regarding specific environmental beliefs and attitudes in Sweden and the Baltic states of Latvia, and Estonia. This is a relatively old study, conducted in 1995 and published in a Environment and Behavior Sage Publishing journal online, which I uploaded in PDF form. The principal purpose of the study was to determine correlations (if any) that prevail between a number of specified beliefs and values and degree of environmental concern, and what the consistencies are of those beliefs and values. Since the study is measuring beliefs and attitudes, the type of data needed to answer the question are shallow opinions and attitudes or deeply held opinion and attitudes depending on the individual’s perception of environmental issues. The cities in which the research was conducted were urban populations in Tartu, Estonia, Riga, Latvia, and the county of Ostergotland, Sweden. The study uses a data-gathering method of surveys and in-depth interviews and it utilized three scales to measure values and beliefs, a 6-question version of the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale that measures “primitive” environmental beliefs and their differences, a four-item scale to measure support for environmental science and technology, and another four-item scale version of Ronald Inglehart’s “post-materialism scale.” Methods of data analysis used in this research consisted of statistical analyses or interval/ratio data since the survey data were transferred into a quantitative fashion. Results of the surveys conducted revealed that support for the NEP, distrust of science and technology, post-material values, and concern for environmental conditions were only partially supported by the results of the Swedish study, and, not at all in the case of the Baltic samples.

The study seemed to be pretty comprehensive and it accounted for a lot of variability between the cities being analyzed in an attempt to make it as controlled as possible. However, I feel like there could’ve been a few more cities analyzed in case one of the urban areas wasn’t an accurate sample of the survey population. One thing I find quite interesting is that socio-cultural symbolic representations of reported global problems is used as a fourth explanatory factor in determining environmental attitudes for individuals for this study.

In the article “Lunch Pails and Thugs: The Richard Sherman Saga, Sport Literature, and the Racial Discourse of American Sports”, found in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature XXXI: 1& 2, Matthew S. Tettleton writes about the categories and stereotypes of black and white athletes based on outbursts in interviews and their play on the field. The topic of race it seems has always been brought up in pro sports in America, going back to 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the immediate aftermath of the 2014 NFC Championship Game, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman interview with Erin Andrews created headlines after he yelled into the camera and called out San Francisco 49er receiver Michael Crabtree. Sherman who in the interview called himself ‘the best corner in the game’ is not the first athlete, black or white to show arrogance. Boxer Muhammad Ali famously said he was the greatest of all time as did golfer Phil Mickelson but what was shocking in this case was the  level of intensity that Sherman displayed. It was something that I don’t think America had ever seen before in a post game interview. In the days following and the lead up to the Super Bowl, “the ensuing public reaction on Twitter was sadly predictable” (47)with the majority of the criticism being directed towards Sherman. There were some online who called Sherman- who is black- a thug.

Sherman’s very public outburst brought the topic of race and sports back to mainstream media. Race itself is a social construct and something America deals with. And when it comes to sports, there are different narratives and stereotypes associated with each athlete based their skin color and background. At times, according to Tettleton there is no escaping these stereotypes. For example “we hear about black players being categorized according to the traits that mark their blackness” (60) while there are stories of “white athletes lauded for their work ethic, intelligence, teamwork” (60) and this is something that has been brought up over time. However by writing and understanding about where every athlete comes from, it allows us to get a better understanding of where they come from and in response we learn about ourselves as well.

Crime rates and how they are effected by poverty is the topic of interest to me. The journal Crime and Social Justice put out an analysis of the correlation between these two things. The article, “Crime Rates and Poverty – a Reexamination,” dives into the issues surrounding this very topic. The study of the topic was carried out using existing previously collected data from the US census bureau and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports. The two sets of data were then compared with one another in the efforts of searching for a correlation between the two. They tested for four different variables to represent poverty those being: low educational achievement, unemployment rates, and broken families. The study was designed to see specifically if violent and property crimes had a positive correlation with any or all of the four variables being tested. However, each variable was examined independently in order to see relationships between specific ones as well not just poverty in general. The researchers are suggesting that in the case of their study these variables “cause” crime and in that case they would like to make the argument that social interventions and actions could be used as a possible solution or to help begin to solve this positive correlation. The research did prove a positive correlation between all the variables and crime.  However they did find discrepancy in populations when testing for violent crime and therefore populations who commit violent and non-violent crimes are different socially. This combats the argument that social interaction may prove effective and leaves the discussion open for more debate and analysis.

Lieberman, Louis, and Alexander B. Smith. “Crime Rates and Poverty — A Reexamination.” Crime and   Social Justice, no. 25 (1986): 166-77. www.jstor.org.books.redlands.edu/stable/29766301.