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Sexual assault self-protection programs often address either broad educational goals (e.g., alcohol awareness, gender, and safety) or are restricted to the practice of violent hands-on self-protection techniques. Enrollment is almost entirely restricted to female audiences, in spite of a high risk of assault among gay men. We describe the development of Elemental, a sexual assault protection program, wherein we undertook a sociologically grounded yet multidisciplinary approach to produce a holistic and inclusive program that teaches a variety of response options, including nonviolent physical and verbal techniques. Through the use of survey data from program participants and a control group, we present results of initial longitudinal tests of the efficacy of the program. Directions for further testing and development are discussed.

Although researchers have been interested in the psychological impact of school and community violence on children in South Africa, little work has been done on the effects of exposure to school violence on teachers. de Wet's exploratory study of South African teachers and administrators is an exception, although her focus was on student bullying of school personnel that included violence, rather than violence per se. Because there is so little research on the impact of school violence on educators in South Africa, we took an exploratory approach conducting four focus groups (and one in-depth interview) to investigate the impact of school violence on educators. Specifically, the research focused on school violence and its social and psychological effects from the perspective of educators in South Africa. The research also included a standardized measure of exposure to violence and victimization, and a measure of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Eight major themes emerged in the focus groups and interview; the most common theme was frustration and the fourth most common theme was actually teacher aggression and the use of corporal punishment as a response to learner violence. The findings are discussed in the context of violence in postapartheid South Africa, and in terms of social-psychological theories of violence and sociological perspectives on \"mock\" bureaucracy and role breadth. Possible interventions to reduce social and psychological distress as well as school violence are also discussed.

This study examines the importance of inclusive human development in promoting education quality in a panel of 49 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2000–2012. The empirical evidence is based on ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects (FE), and quantile regression (QR) estimations. It is apparent from the OLS and FE findings that inclusive human development has a negative effect on the outcome variable. This negative effect implies that inclusive human development improves education quality. This result should be understood in the light of the fact that the adopted education variable is a negative economic signal given that it is computed as the ratio of pupils to teachers. Therefore, a higher ratio reflects diminishing education quality. From QR, with the exception of the highest quantile, the tendency of inclusive human development in reducing poor quality education is consistent throughout the conditional distribution of poor education quality. Policy implications are discussed.

This article presents two case studies, linked together as chained projects, as examples of public sociology involving university/community partnerships. Research described here illustrates specific ways that applied sociology and public sociology can be put to work to address community problems. While the projects described here are an important focus, the article argues that they are primarily valuable in showing how a regional resource exchange network can be set up over a period of decades and how the presence of these partnerships creates the possibility for one project to chain into another. We describe this chaining as a resource exchange network and as a “virtual organization.” Virtual organizations are intentionally created, possess internal logic, and contain a set of actors who carry out interdependent roles. Virtual organizations lack formal structure and require a minimum of organizational maintenance. The chaining method and the associated virtual organization help to bring university actors and resources to bear on helping to solve community problems.

We are now well into the second decade of the “outcomes” revolution, the increasing expectation on the part of funders that social and human services agencies report on the impacts or outcomes of their programs. It is no longer enough to “do good” poorly; rather, the expectation these days is that the agencies report on program outcomes and the impact they have on the communities they serve. Unfortunately, however sensible such expectations would seem to be, agencies continue to resist, and in some cases sabotage, these more complex reporting requirements. Program outcomes, it turns out, are often difficult for agencies to conceptualize and even more difficult for them to attain. This study explores the sources of agency resistance to outcomes measurement and management through qualitative interviews with directors and staff of eight human service nonprofit agencies and their one common funder in a large southeastern metropolitan area. Along with the usual logistical issues, we find that a lack of communication between agencies and funders about their intended goals leads to frustration on both sides, ultimately making it more difficult to measure community-level impact than it truly needs to be.

We propose that female methamphetamine users who live in suburbia experience risks for disease transmission stemming from their social environment that remain under the radar of public health surveillance networks. The data analyzed in this article were collected from 2007 to 2011 and were drawn from two sequential studies on methamphetamine use. The studies were conducted in the suburbs of a southeastern U.S. metropolis. We analyzed a total of 65 qualitative interviews with former and active methamphetamine-using women. Data from focus groups also were included in the analysis. The participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 51 years. We identified three major themes with regard to risk behaviors and transmission of infectious diseases: (1) setting risk behaviors such as sharing syringes and homelessness, lack of transportation, and unemployment; (2) sexual risk behaviors such as condom use and having multiple partners; and (3) service-related risks such as risk awareness and prevention behaviors as well as utilization of social services and health care. Our findings point to the pervasive nature of social influences on the risk for infectious disease transmission. We suggest that harm-reduction programs (HRPs) be implemented in suburban communities to increase access to these services. Second, our data support the concept of social recovery for drug users to better their health and social lives holistically.

Most sexual assault prevention focuses exclusively on primary prevention programs. Risk reduction strategies, however, have an equally important role to play in prevention efforts. By way of illustration, we provide efficacy data on a sexual assault protection program that incorporates both primary prevention and risk reduction within a single seminar. These data, which replicate previous program evaluations while adding two new cohorts of program and control group students, indicate that program participants exhibit long-term attitude change and have significantly reduced rates of assault relative to the control group. Implications for campus programming are discussed.

The cultivation of neighborhood-based social capital has gained significant attention in the disaster management sector in recent years as a means to increase community disaster resilience. However, within the sector, the concept of social capital remains unclear and its measurement is limited at the neighborhood level due to a focus on predominately top-down and quantitative approaches. By using a qualitative, inductive-driven approach, this paper proposes an integrated social capital measurement framework that combines qualitative and quantitative measures for evaluating levels of social capital in neighborhoods. Nine focus groups consisting of 58 participants across a range of socioeconomically and ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods in New Zealand and the United States were conducted. Three key themes were identified that relate to the formation, activation, and benefits of social capital resources: community demography, cultural influences on social support, and neighborhood governance. By synthesizing the study’s results and existing literature, this paper proposes a measurement framework that incorporates both quantitative indicators and contextual questions across six structural and four cognitive social capital domains. The framework can serve as a starting point for neighborhood stakeholders, emergency management practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to assess the resilience of neighborhoods and identify areas for improvement.

Universities are under increasing pressure both internally and externally to demonstrate student learning outcomes generally and in the liberal arts and social sciences specifically. Internally, students and others often complain about the lack of direct connection between what they learn in the classroom and what happens, or what they perceive happens, in the real world. In addition, universities are often required to demonstrate to state and federal authorities the value of liberal arts and social science education. In this study, we use in-depth interviews to demonstrating the value of an Applied Research Center (ARC) to help communicate value to stakeholders, close learning gaps, and foster university-community partnerships. Our findings suggest that an ARC can play an integral role in reinforcing student learning outcomes, increasing student career success, and establish disciplinary value to a variety of constituents.

The persistence of xenophobia and nativism in the United States has encouraged groups and organizations in the civil society to promote mutual understanding and collaboration between immigrants and native citizens. This study evaluated an ecumenical educational program on immigration organized by a faith-based group of volunteers with those goals in mind. The program was held in fall 2018 in Baltimore, Maryland. The evaluation was based on participant responses to an exit questionnaire and on a focus group with members of the community group responsible for the program. The study concludes that ecumenical workshops on immigration with instructional and dialogical activities likely improve participants’ knowledge of immigration and participants’ inclinations to mutual understanding and collaboration between immigrants and native citizens. Personal testimonials by immigrants are especially conducive to those outcomes.