The Connection between Neighboring and Volunteering

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 720-736 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wilson ◽  
Joonmo Son

Sociological theory predicts that volunteers are likely to be more socially integrated into their communities than nonvolunteers. In this study, we test this theory by examining three dimensions of relations to neighbors—contact, social engagement, and the perception that neighbors trust each other. We hypothesize reciprocal relations between volunteering and these three measures. Using cross–lagged structural equation models applied to two waves of data from the National Survey of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), we find that frequency of contact with neighbors is positively related to volunteering, but there is no reciprocal effect. Frequency of social engagement does not predict future volunteering but volunteers tend to become more socially engaged with their neighbors. Perceptions of neighbors as trusting are unrelated to volunteering.

2021 ◽  
pp. 104515952110485
Author(s):  
Shalini Sahoo ◽  
Roberto J. Millar ◽  
Takashi Yamashita ◽  
Phyllis A. Cummins

Research on factors associated with motivation to learn (MtL) is limited, particularly among middle-aged adults and immigrants. This study examines educational attainment, literacy skills, and nativity (foreign-born vs. native-born) as predictors of MtL in middle-aged adults living in the United States. Nationally representative data of middle-aged adults between the ages of 40 and 65 years were obtained from the 2012/2014 Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Structural equation models were used to assess the validity of the latent MtL construct and to examine the associations with the selected determinants in middle-aged adults. Postsecondary education degrees and higher literacy skills were linked with greater MtL. However, foreign-born individuals had lower MtL than their US-born counterparts. Educators and researchers should be aware of lower educational attainment, limited literacy skills, and being an immigrant as possible demoting factors of MtL, and in turn, barriers to lifelong learning participation among middle-aged adults.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 560-561
Author(s):  
Bret Howrey ◽  
Jaqueline Avila ◽  
Brian Downer ◽  
Rebeca Wong

Abstract Social engagement is linked to better cognition, but it is unclear if the social engagement of husbands and wives influences their own cognition as well as each other’s cognition in two very different country contexts. Data on married couples come from the 2001 Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) and the 2000 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), with follow-up cognition measured in 2012. Structural equation models (SEM) were used to test the actor-partner interdependence model on the association of social engagement with cognition. In Mexico wives’ social engagement benefited their own cognition as well as their husbands’, but husband’s social engagement was unrelated to cognition. In the U.S. both wives’ and husbands’ social engagement benefited their own cognition, but not each other’s. Results suggest asymmetric patterns of actor-partner interdependence in Mexico, possibly reflecting more traditional social roles of women and co-dependence within couples, but more independence within U.S. couples.


2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phia S. Salter ◽  
Glenn Adams

Inspired by “Mother or Wife” African dilemma tales, the present research utilizes a cultural psychology perspective to explore the dynamic, mutual constitution of personal relationship tendencies and cultural-ecological affordances for neoliberal subjectivity and abstracted independence. We administered a resource allocation task in Ghana and the United States to assess the prioritization of conjugal/nuclear relationships over consanguine/kin relationships along three dimensions of sociocultural variation: nation (American and Ghanaian), residence (urban and rural), and church membership (Pentecostal Charismatic and Traditional Western Mission). Results show that tendencies to prioritize nuclear over kin relationships – especially spouses over parents – were greater among participants in the first compared to the second of each pair. Discussion considers issues for a cultural psychology of cultural dynamics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001100002110024
Author(s):  
Andrés E. Pérez Rojas ◽  
Na-Yeun Choi ◽  
Minji Yang ◽  
Theodore T. Bartholomew ◽  
Giovanna M. Pérez

We examined two structural equation models of international students’ suicidal ideation using data from 595 international students in two public universities in the United States. The models represented competing hypotheses about the relationships among discrimination, cross-cultural loss, academic distress, thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and suicidal ideation. The findings indicated there were direct, positive links between discrimination, cross-cultural loss, and academic distress to perceived burdensomeness; a direct, positive link between perceived burdensomeness and suicidal ideation; and indirect, positive links between discrimination, cross-cultural loss, and academic distress to suicidal ideation via perceived burdensomeness. The only predictors that related to thwarted belongingness were cross-cultural loss and academic distress, and there were no indirect links to suicidal ideation via thwarted belongingness. In fact, with all other variables in the model, thwarted belongingness was unrelated to suicidal ideation. Finally, academic distress was directly related to suicidal ideation. We discuss implications of the findings.


1988 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Recascino Wise

Three dimensions for analyzing public sector pay administration are used to examine central government pay administration in Sweden and the United States of America. On the first dimension, market posture, both countries are found to fall short of their espoused policy, comparability. Greater consistency is found on the second dimension, social orientation, where both countries have pursued the goal of social equality. The equilization of salary levels across society is far greater in Sweden in keeping with the socialist objectives of wage solidarity. The third dimension, reward structure, shows the greatest distance between the two countries with the struggle to implement performance-contingent pay underway in the U.S. while Swedes continue to rely on longevity for pay increases.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noni Zaharia ◽  
Kurt C. Mayer Jr. ◽  
Eric Hungenberg ◽  
Dianna Gray ◽  
David Stotlar

<p>This study sought to develop and test a cross-national sport sponsorship model. Sponsorship and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theories were utilized for the theoretical framework for this study. A survey was conducted with 522 Chelsea FC soccer club’s fans from the United States, the United Kingdom, and India in the area of sponsorship through a jersey sponsorship. Single and multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the global sport sponsorship model. The results acknowledged the measurement and structural invariance of a global model for five sport sponsorship outcomes (i.e., sponsorship awareness, sponsorship fit, attitude toward the sponsor, gratitude, and purchase intentions), controlling for age, gender, education, household income and the household’s decision maker. The statistical analyses indicated that structural relationships among the analyzed sponsorship outcomes were invariant among all three countries. The effect of sponsorship fit predicted the presence of purchase intentions, while the attitude toward the sponsor was the strongest predictor of purchase intentions.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Light ◽  
Vincent J. Roscigno

In this article, we build on prior sociological theory pertaining to power as well as historical research on antebellum slavery to offer an integrated framework of subordinate resistance – a framework that incorporates a matrix of potential responses ranging from collective action, to symbolic resistance, to projective agency, and even quiescence. Using text networks as an index, we then analyze a rich collection of antebellum slave narratives (n=128) to investigate such response possibilities. These thematic networks, consistent with a large body of historical research on American slavery, demonstrate central domains of enslavement in the United States and the diverse resistance strategies that the enslaved employed. Moreover, our more qualitative immersion into these thematic patterns and the narratives themselves—narratives that have been largely overlooked by sociologists—uniquely highlight how particular resistance strategies are deployed in specific everyday contexts and sometimes resolve into what seem, at first glance, to be quiescence. We discuss these findings, and conclude more broadly by highlighting how the sociological study of inequality and power would benefit from attention to the variety of resistance strategies subordinate actors in their everyday lives and in the uneven and sometimes dangerous contexts they traverse.


Author(s):  
John Levi Martin

Chapter abstract The author of this chapter proposes that we consider Bourdieu’s work neither on its own terms, nor in the terms of the postwar French academic field, but in terms of the general problems that it solved. When we do so, we find that Bourdieu developed lines of thinking that had stalled in Germany and the United States. The former was the field theoretic tradition associated with Gestalt psychology and empirical phenomenology; the second was the habit theoretic tradition associated increasingly with pragmatism. Each had stalled because each seemed, in a way, too successful—everything turned into habit for pragmatist social psychology; field theory also put everything indiscriminately in the field of experience. By focusing on the reciprocal relations of habitus and field, Bourdieu developed these insights in ways that allowed for empirical exploration, and that cut against the French rationalist vocabulary that he inherited.


Author(s):  
Leigh Goodmark

The United States relies heavily on law enforcement to protect people subjected to intimate partner violence. The decision to prioritize law enforcement intervention may seem natural, but it is, in fact a political decision, with consequences along three dimensions. First, prioritizing the law enforcement response has precluded the development of other policies to address intimate partner violence. Second, channeling money into law enforcement helped to facilitate the growth of a hypermasculine, militarized environment where violence against women flourishes. Third, the decision to rely on law enforcement ignores research establishing that police officers are more likely than other groups to commit intimate partner violence. These political decisions have profound consequences for all people subjected to abuse, particularly the partners of police officers.


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