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Moral Laboratoriesis an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.

This paper describes an innovative service delivery model to reduce the number of children entering the child welfare system. Point of Engagement (POE) is a collaborative family- and community-centered approach initiated in Compton, a regional office in Los Angeles County that serves south Los Angeles, a predominantly African American and Hispanic / Latino area. Over the past two years, the POE has been implemented in the Compton area by providing more thorough investigations, engaging families, and delivering needed services to children and families within their homes and communities. POE has demonstrated a reduction in the number of children removed from their families, an increase in the number of children returned to their families within one year, and an increase in the number of children finding legal permanency.

Parents who adopted children from out-of-home care with prenatal substance exposure were interviewed four months after the child's placement in the home, and again after the first year regarding their experience with adoption and their concerns about their child's development, attachment, and behavior; aspects of parenting and the adoption process; effects of prenatal substance exposure; and availability and helpfulness of resources. Adoptive parents found parenting children with prenatal substance exposure to be both more rewarding and more difficult than they had imagined.

Connecting literature from sociology and urban planning, this dissertation tests two dominant assumptions about the relationship among urban growth, racial inequality, and black socioeconomic mobility. The first is that African Americans' neighborhood quality is best explained by place stratification theory, which argues that, due in part to the persistence of white racism and wealth inequalities, African Americans typically move to relatively disadvantaged communities that become more disadvantaged over time. The second is that exurban growth (often denigrated as urban sprawl) has an all-around negative effect on society, leading to environmental degradation, longer transportation commutes and greater racial segregation, among other ills. Since most evidence supporting place stratification theory is drawn from inner cities and their nearby suburbs, it is unclear whether similar trends apply to the exurbs, places whose rapid, lower density development out of relatively racially unmarked countryside in the context of fair housing law may have led to diverse communities with more equal neighborhood conditions among racial groups. In turn, the persistence of racial wealth gaps and the reluctance to provide affordable housing on a widespread scale in high cost regions may render exurban growth increasingly important in enabling African Americans to live as homeowners in safe neighborhoods with high performing schools—conditions critical to attaining socioeconomic mobility. The growth of California's Inland Empire, which encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino Counties on the Los Angeles region's eastern border, is an ideal case study for assessing the effect of exurban development on racial equity and black mobility. Between 1980 and 2007, there was a net migration of 130,000 African Americans into the area, with the vast majority moving from Los Angeles County. Through interviews with seventy people who moved to the region from Los Angeles County and forty-seven Inland Empire and Los Angeles County community leaders, an analysis of existing data from the U.S. Census, California Department of Education, and FBI Uniform Crime Reports among other sources, and a media content analysis, this research shows that, due to the Inland Empire's rapid new housing construction and relative lack of racial segmentation in the housing market, the exurbs were a new frontier for Los Angeles area African Americans—a place where they could become homeowners and live in lower poverty, more integrated and safer neighborhoods free from the oppression of inner city gangs. Yet, unexpected costs accompanied families' gains. Homeowners' ability to accumulate equity was defined by a distinct window of opportunity that has since closed with the recent foreclosure crisis. Long commutes characterized most black professionals' first years in the Inland Empire, with a handful burdened by years of multiple-hour journeys to work. In turn, families' access to more integrated schools also has entailed dealing with the cultural inexperience of predominately white teachers and administrators. Most disturbing, however, is that their safety gains have been accompanied by an increased risk of police racial profiling, which threatens the wellbeing of young men. Overall, this research provides evidence that exurban growth may be enabling African Americans' socioeconomic mobility and—contrary to place stratification theory—greater racial equity in neighborhood conditions. It also identifies some of the challenges that inner city families face in acclimatizing to and thriving in fast growing exurbs—an understudied topic worthy of policymakers' attention.

This study finds that residential location does affect minority youth employment. The key issue is access to jobs. Residential segregation is associated with residence in low-income neighborhoods that offer few job opportunities for youth. Where black & Latino youth live in neighborhoods with middle-income & affluent families & high numbers of jobs for teenagers, black & Latino employment rates are often similar to white non-Hispanic rates. The availability of retail employment in the neighborhood is an important determinant of youth employment. 6 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix. Adapted from the source document.

Context: Whether the effect of gender on the risk of first intercourse is influenced by adolescents' ethnicity has received limited attention in research on age at first sex. Such information could provide a more complete understanding of adolescent sexual behavior. Methods: Life-table analysis using data from a population-based, ethnically diverse sample of 877 Los Angeles County youths was employed to estimate the median age at first sex for each gender-and-ethnicity group. Multivariate analysis using proportional hazards techniques was conducted to determine the relative risk of sexual activity among teenagers in each group. Results: Overall, the teenagers in the sample had a median age at first sex of 16.9 years. Black males had the lowest observed median (15.0), and Asian American males the highest (18.1); white and Hispanic males, and white and black females, reported similar ages (about 16.5 years). Hispanic and Asian American females had rates of first sex about half that of white females, although these protective effects were explained by differences in family structure. Even after controlling for background characteristics, black males had rates of first sex that were about 3-5 times the rates of the other gender-and-ethnicity groups. In addition, Asian American males were less likely than Hispanic males to be sexually experienced, and Hispanic males had almost twice the rates of sexual activity of Hispanic females. Conclusions: Socioeconomic conditions account for ethnic differences among females in the age at first sex, and cultural influences may contribute to the difference between Hispanic males and females; explanations for black males, however, remain elusive.