Correa-Cabrera, Guadalupe and Miriam Rojas-Arenaza. “The Mathematics of Mexico-US migration and US Immigration Policy” Policy Studies. Vol 33 (4). July 2012. pp 297-312.

This peer reviewed article is outlining the mathematical research behind the policies designed in the US regarding Mexico-based immigration. They use statistics, qualitative data analysis, and the mass media to showcase the affects that the policies passed by the US has, especially since there is a bias against Mexico-based immigrants. The study concluded the misuse of the numbers related to immigrants, and the slanderous portrayal in the media about immigrants being violent, and harmful for the US economy and society. The falsification and misrepresentation of these numbers and statistics have resulted in many harmful laws, including Arizona SB 1070, which allows for the police to racially profile people who they feel do not carry proper identification. The act of fixing these false numbers to the correct statistics could result in better policies for immigration, and a better representation of a group of people all together. I feel this article has all of the right statistics in which I am looking to use for my research question as it covers all sorts of issues related to my question: media, self-identity, statistics of immigration, etc.

Schewe J, Heinke J, Gerten D, Haddeland I, Arnell NW, Clark DB, Dankers R, Eisner S, Fekete BM, Colón-González FJ, et al. March 2014. “Multimodel Assessment of Water Scarcity under Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 9 (2014): 3245-3250. (Schewe J, et al. 2014) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23770677.

Water scarcity can be defined as the universally-understood struggle to overcome barriers to accessing clean, potable water for the purposes of sustaining life. Many factors can influence water scarcity, but the question narrows our focus down to the issue of climate change and its correlation to increasing levels of water scarcity. The relationship between climate change and water is well-established, but the magnitude in which climate change exacerbates water scarcity continues to be muddled by inconsistent findings and reports among the scientific community. Even though climate change models agree on the global average change, they do not focus on individual communities and their changes at smaller scales. Thus, comparing spatial models of different global communities and their levels of water scarcity to measures of population increase, global mean warming, and estimates of people living in places facing a change in water resources will reveal the underlying details of the correlation between climate change and water scarcity. This study reveals some very key issues about the preexisting way to measure global water scarcity; if one country happened to overcome water scarcity issues on a large-scale, and a much smaller location started facing very threatening water scarcity issues, the net measurement of global water scarcity would remain at zero change. Therefore, the way that water scarcity was measured would conceal some serious issues in smaller regions. Overall, the uncertainty found in global hydrological models (GHM) contributed to the spread of water scarcity and unchecked issues in more specific locations. The examination of these GHMs shed light on how to streamline the analysis of them in order to improve projections for water scarcity in the future.

Saltman, Kenneth J. “Capitalizing on Disaster: How the Political Right Is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling.” JAC 28, no. 1/2 (2008): 11-27.

This research by Keneth J. Saltman uses a correlational research logic to analyze the harmful impacts of educational policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Renaissance 2010 project in Chicago schools, “educational” restructuring in Iraq by U.S. companies, and the privatization of New Orleans Public Schools after Hurricane Katrina. While the research focuses on four different educational case studies, I was able to gain more information on corporate, for-profit responses to natural disasters that exploit communities with high poverty rates and residents of color. In describing the actions and policies used to make corporate profits Saltman calls such actions systems of “urban cleansing”. These systems operate off of high-pressure models that pose threats to educational opportunities and teacher’s job security even in the wake of a natural disaster that blocks many students from returning to school without buying into new privatized, for-profit charter schools at rates they cannot afford. While a large proportion of the privatization of public schools in New Orleans was seen as a response to the damage by Hurricane Katrina by private companies, the threat of privatization of school systems was felt at smaller rates prior to the disaster. Board members and politicians, especially the Louisianna Governor, held the threat of turning over “failed” schools to the economic market to be privatized and restructured when in reality they were “failing” due to inadequate funding and resources. However, when Katrina hit, the governor used the opportunity to bring in notorious for-profit companies like the Edison Schools to restructure many New Orleans school systems, destroying public education systems in order to profit off of the control of privatized education. For-profit companies such as the Edison Schools used the disaster of Hurricane Katrina to expand the reach and profits of dominantly white businesses and right-wing conservative politicians through educational privatization that further ostracized and displaced poor and black communities in the wake of the hurricane. The privatization of public schools is eerily similar to the privatization of for-profit prisons, further solidifying oppressive systems of for-profit control the feed the school-to-prison pipeline.

Meng, Juan. “The Impact of Organizational Culture and Leadership Performance on PR Professionals’ Job Satisfaction: Testing the Joint Mediating Effects of Engagement and Trust.” Public Relations Review 45.1 (2019): 64–75. Print.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0363811118303801

“Work engagement is a strong predictor of job satisfaction through its direct influence on trust. The study examines the impact of critical organizational factors (organizational culture and excellent leader performance) on public relations professionals’ overall job satisfaction by focusing on testing the joint mediating effects work engagement and trust could generate. A national online survey of 838 public relations professionals working in a variety of organizations was used as the empirical data to test the relationships in a proposed conceptual model. Results confirmed the strong impact organizational culture and leader performance could have on public relations professionals’ work engagement, trust, and job satisfaction. More importantly, results revealed the significant joint mediating effects of engagement and trust on professionals’ job satisfaction, when supportive organizational culture and excellent leader performance were achieved. The study concludes with research and practical implications”.

The article’s topic is about how organizational conditions affect a professionals’ work engagement and trust on professionals’ job satisfaction as a classic employee. The research question is “how does organizational conditions affect an employee’s job satisfaction and productivity?” The type of data that is required for this research topic is reports of acts, behaviors, and events; organizational data, and shallow opinions. They used reports of acts, behaviors, and events, as well as shallow opinions and attitudes. They conducted a national online survey of public relations professionals in the U.S. to test proposed relationships.

I think that this is a very valid piece of research. I think that the sample size was large enough, the data collection methods were correct and I found the topic to be very interesting. With that being said, and the author even touches on this point in their journal, the survey didn’t produce qualitative data, so the findings were rather limiting. In depth interviews would have overcome this limitation. I think that the findings of this research could be applied to any organization or situation, not solely to businesses. The study confirms the strong effects of organizational culture and leader performance on public relations professionals’ work engagement and trust, with an ultimate goal of increased job satisfaction. Being able to take the information from this survey and apply it to all aspects of life can be very valuable.

Elizabeth Nichols and Jennifer Hunter Childs “Respondent Debriefings Conducted by Experts: A Technique for Questionnaire Evaluation”. Field Methods (formerly Cultural Anthropology Methods) vol. 21. no. 2. May 2009

This article focuses on the evaluation of the quality of survey data by using expert respondent debriefings. The aim of the study was to gain insight into how to better script survey questions. The subject used in this case study was the US Census Bureau and their accuracy when conducting the US Census, by comparing the “true” residence status of respondents with the residence status received obtained on the questionnaire alone. In this case study, experts on the subject observed 169 interviews and conducted qualitative respondent debriefings on select cases in a field test of a census coverage survey in an attempt to learn about response strategies, data sources, and definitions. The researcher then assesses whether the answers met the intent of the question. Once the case study was completed, the results showed that for the 473 people for whom survey data was available, the questionnaire only failed five times in a way that would have drastically affected coverage estimates. So this technique helped pinpoint specific problems that were present in the questionnaire as well as reassuring and confirming that the questionnaire was adequate in its ability to obtain wanted results. I believe this relates to my topic because I too planned on creating a survey/questionnaire regarding the design and layout of music festivals and the information presented in this article can help me create adequate questions that will produce the results I am looking for.

Paul S. Goodman and Rangaraj Ramanujam “The Relationship Between Change Across Multiple Organizational Domains and the Incidence of Latent Errors”. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Pp. 410-431
This article discusses the relationship between change across multiple organizational domains and the incidence of latent errors. Latent errors can be defined as deviations from rules and standard operating procedures that can potentially result in adverse outcomes of organizational significance. In this article, the authors went into detail explaining a study they conducted using data from internal audit reports and interviews with managers in 80 business units in a large financial institution. They had three hypotheses regarding the relationship between organizational change and latent errors, which they constructed their study around. They laid out a detailed explanation for the procedure of their study and the results that came from it. They found that after a change was in place and institutionalized, the consequences of change would affect attentional resources. The positivity or negativity also of the change affected the amount of errors that would occur after the change. If there was a positive change, there would be more attentional resources and fewer errors and if there was a negative change, there would be a drain of attentional resources and also an increase in errors. I find this to be relevant to my topic because like this study, I will be looking at changes in layout or design of music festivals and the corresponding affects those changes may have on festival goers and employees working for the festival.

Venkataraman B. January 2018. The Paradox of Water and the Flint Crisis. Environment Magazine. 60(1): 4-17. (Venkataraman 2018)

Bhawani Venkataraman cites a statistic reported by the United Nations Joint Monitoring Program claiming that of the 42 countries in the world that provide 100% of its citizens access to clean water, the United States is not one of them. In fact, the United States denies about 2.5 million people the right to access clean water. A large amount of these people were victims of the Flint Water Crisis. This article seeks to answer the question of what lead to the Flint Crisis and how to avoid crises like this in the future, and it does so by means of reports and retrospective analysis.
The issue of water crises like what occurred in Flint lies in the inherent paradox of water; the same properties that make water essential to providing and sustaining life make it vulnerable to contamination and spreading waterborne diseases. Awareness of this paradox calls political institutions to realize how easy it is for water to be contaminated. Ignorance of this paradox allowed the governor of Michigan to appoint an emergency manager to oversee the budgetary appropriations in 2011, and this emergency manager took it upon himself to lower deficit by curtailing the water budget. Instead of using the Detroit Water and Sewage Department as the primary provider of water for the citizens, the emergency manager switched to other unprepared sources as the Flint River was getting contaminated. The disorganization of this fiasco snowballed into the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis which left the entire city defenseless against unsafe drinking water.
In order to determine the main causes of this crisis, the failures of the Flint Water Service Center (FWSC) was assessed from monthly operating reports, reports from an engineering company, and water quality reports from Flint, Michigan. These records uncovered a great lack of attention to the fact that the necessary chemicals for treating water (like chlorine) were missing in great amounts in the Flint water. Upon conducting retrospective analysis of these records, parameters used to treat the water and determine its cleanliness and safety were completely inaccurate. While these mistakes lead up to the crisis, in the midst of the crisis the plant personnel were not well trained and understaffed, which lead them to address the issue with trial and error solutions that simply did not work.
One of the most harrowing conclusions drawn from this testimony is that this crisis can be labeled as an environmental crime. Flint, Michigan has a history of low-income communities and people, as well as comparatively high percentages of minorities. Many scholars contend that the reason this crisis receives so little attention is because of the fact that if wealthier people more representative of majority demographics lived here, the crisis would be treated a lot faster and with greater care. Environmental injustice plagues our nation as people all over the United States struggle to find access to clean water, and Flint, Michigan is just one example of how our political institutions actively neglect these people and their right to live.

Ditto, R. M.The association of parenting styles and classroom environment on the development of self-worth and behavioral competence of third and fourth grade students Available from Social Science Premium Collection. (60429706; 200220328). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.redlands.edu/docview/60429706?accountid=14729

This article discusses the relationship between children’s perceived self worth, parenting styles and the nature of different classroom environments. I found it interesting what improved and what contributed to children’s low self worth – at a young age they are very sensitive to outside factors what contribute to their self image. In terms of classroom environments, more competitive classrooms and places where academic achievement was pushed, students self worth was overall lower.  It was also found that Authoritative and generally more harsh parenting styles had a negative impact on the child’s self worth. I thought this was a pretty clear result, since being more harsh on a child definitely seems like it would have a negative reaction rather than positive. This is similar to dog training, where positive reinforcements lead to much more reliable and friendly dogs than when a dog is negatively reinforced when being trained.

Wilkinson, Wayne W. and Stephen D. Berry. 2019. “Together they are Troy and Chase: Who Supports Demonetization of Gay Content on YouTube?” Psychology of Popular Media Culture. 

This article presents the issue of YouTube censoring people who are content creators for the LGBTQ+ community by taking away the ability to earn advertising revenue. Wayne and Stephen to find who supported this, and they conducted finding this data by collecting samples of people who watched certain YouTube channels, concluding their findings that it was people with more conservative ideologies, and that gay perceptions made public had negative effects on society. Their findings also concluded that these negative feelings towards the content creators reflected more on on self-negativity. I find this to be related to my research topic and question, regarding how the media reflects immigrants form of self-identity, because this is an example of how media can have a result on personal identity. While it is not related or has any correlation to immigration, it shows that the media can have effects on how you view yourself within self-identity.

Avery, James. “Racial Threat and the Influence of Latino Turnout on State Immigration Policy”. Social Science Quarterly. Vol. 98 (2). pp. 750-765

James Avery, Jeffery Fine, and Timothy Marquez wanted to find if there would be correlation with states passing more restrictive immigration policies with larger Latino populations compared to those with few Latinos in their state. This article is bringing forth data from 2009 to 2012 to examine the influence of Latino constituency and Latino electoral strength on the number of restrictive immigration laws enacted by U.S, state legislatures. They find correlation between states having larger Latino populations having more restrictive laws and policies passed, rather than those with fewer Latino populations. They also find a correlation with an electoral college with greater Latino representation leads to fewer and less restrictive policies and laws. Later, they show the positive effect of Latino mobilization, based on electoral influence, and ethnic composition of the state legislature. I find this to be relevant to my topic, because as much as the media has an influence on immigrants psychological state, so do the policies that directly concern them. I feel it might be useful to use this in my research, especially because it brings forth such great data supporting claims that more policies and laws are passed if there is a greater Latino population in states.