Emotion and Adaptation

1953 Like much of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction, ‘‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’’ is set in the American South and contains characters whose most notable feature seems to be their ordinariness. Through imagery, dialogue, and moments of revelation, O’Connor explores the themes of morality and religion, both frequent concerns in her work. The story evoked critical praise upon its publication in the Kenyon Review in the spring of 1953. Within the sparse, apparently simple plot of the story, O’Connor constructs a world torn between renewal and emptiness, natural beauty and crass materialism, compassion and cruelty. In the end, O’Connor’s protagonist must choose between these extremes and attempt to experience the grace of God’s love.

The life you save may be your own

Statistical methods that quantify the discourse about causal inferences in terms of possible sources of biases are becoming increasingly important to many social-science fields such as public polic...

konfound: Command to quantify robustness of causal inferences:

Immigrant children make up a sizable portion of children under the age of six in the U.S. Nationally, they comprise about 24 percent of the under-six age group, and that figure climbs to 50 percent in California. The report explores current early childhood education trends for immigrant children and offers suggestions for how to improve early education opportunities for immigrant children. According to the report, estimates show that young immigrant children were more likely than their native peers to be in parental care only, at 59 percent versus 44 percent. Additionally, immigrant children were less likely to be in center-based care, with 14 percent of immigrant children participating versus 25 percent.

Early Care and Education for Children in Immigrant Families

We survey 200 nonprofit executives to investigate the pressure they experience to manage so-called efficiency ratios, and their reactions to that pressure. Specifically, we investigate whether managers’ perceptions of donor pressure are influenced by 1) the degree to which they rely on contributions and government grants, 2) the existence of restricted gifts, 3) oversight by monitoring institutions that may affect donor giving decisions, and 4) the sophistication of management. We then examine factors that affect the likelihood that managers will engage in ratio management. Interestingly, we find no evidence that nonprofits that rely more heavily on donor support feel greater donor pressure. Instead, we provide evidence that specific donors, such as those who make restricted gifts and government grantors, influence perceptions of pressure. Further, more sophisticated managers perceive less pressure to manage ratios. When facing pressure to manage ratios, monitors and sophisticated managers reduce the likelihood of ratio management.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2885036_code337739.pdf?abstractid=2885036&type=2

Pressure to Manage Ratios and Willingness to Do So: Evidence from Nonprofit Managers

Nonprofits offer services to disadvantaged populations, mobilize collective action, and advocate for civil rights. Conducting this work requires significant resources, raising the question: how do ...

Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits

U.S. schools often expect the educational involvement of parents, which may be facilitated when parents have partners, especially a partner also invested in the child. As such, parental involvement at school and at home could be a channel of the diverging destinies of U.S. children from different families. This study applied fixed effects modeling to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to examine the link between mothers' union statuses and their involvement behaviors. Being partnered appeared to benefit mothers' school and home involvement when children were in the primary grades, with little evidence of an additional benefit from that partnership being marital. A biological tie between the male partner and the child only seemed to matter for mothers' school involvement. These patterns did not vary by family income, maternal depression, or maternal employment, but they were stronger when children were just beginning schooling.

/pdf/mothers-union-statuses-and-their-involvement-in-young-1x0wothyxr.pdf

Mothers' Union Statuses and their Involvement in Young Children's Schooling.

Trust and Participation in Associations

Donations in social context

In the 1930’s, the Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC) drafted maps to quantify variation in real estate credit risk across US city neighborhoods. The letter grades and associated risk ratings assigned to neighborhoods discriminated against those with black, lower class, or immigrant residents and benefitted affluent white neighborhoods. An emerging literature has begun linking current individual and community health effects to government redlining, but each study faces the same measurement problem: HOLC graded area boundaries and neighborhood boundaries in present-day health datasets do not match. Previous studies have taken different approaches to classify present day neighborhoods (census tracts) in terms of historical HOLC grades. This study reviews these approaches, examines empirically how different classifications fare in terms of predictive validity, and derives a predictively optimal present-day neighborhood redlining classification for neighborhood and health research.

Robert W. Ressler

Papers

Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits

Mothers' Union Statuses and their Involvement in Young Children's Schooling.

Trust and Participation in Associations

Donations in social context

Connecting past to present: Examining different approaches to linking historical redlining to present day health inequities