Measuring Journal Prestige in Criminal Justice and Criminology

Recent years have seen an increased reliance on the Thomson Reuters Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as a method of evaluating the prestige of academic journals. While the JIF has existed for many years, the increased use of technology to track publications and citations has resulted in other methods of measuring prestige, including Google Scholar’s H-index and Elsevier’s Cite Score. It is unclear, however, whether these “objective” methods of evaluation are correlated with the journals’ reputations among scholars. This paper compares objective and subjective evaluations of journals in criminal justice and criminology among a sample of ASC and ACJS members. Our findings indicate that subjective evaluations of experts are more strongly correlated with Google’s H-Index and Elsevier’s Cite Score than with impact factors. We conclude that for criminal justice and criminology scholars, Thomson Reuters’ JIF may not be the best measure of quality.     

Teaching communication and conflict as a game

Courses: Communication and Conflict.

Objectives: Through the use of a game-based framework, students will build intrinsic motivation to engage with course material and course content, and will engage their critical-thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills in relation to conflict management over the length of the course.     

Family risk as a predictor of initial engagement and follow-through in a universal nurse home visiting program to prevent child maltreatment

Objective

As nurse home visiting to prevent child maltreatment grows in popularity with both program administrators and legislators, it is important to understand engagement in such programs in order to improve their community-wide effects. This report examines family demographic and infant health risk factors that predict engagement and follow-through in a universal home-based maltreatment prevention program for new mothers in Durham County, North Carolina.

Methods

Trained staff members attempted to schedule home visits for all new mothers during the birthing hospital stay, and then nurses completed scheduled visits three to five weeks later. Medical record data was used to identify family demographic and infant health risk factors for maltreatment. These variables were used to predict program engagement (scheduling a visit) and follow-through (completing a scheduled visit).

Results

Program staff members were successful in scheduling 78% of eligible families for a visit and completing 85% of scheduled visits. Overall, 66% of eligible families completed at least one visit. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated that high demographic risk and low infant health risk were predictive of scheduling a visit. Both low demographic and infant health risk were predictive of visit completion.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that while higher demographic risk increases families’ initial engagement, it might also inhibit their follow-through. Additionally, parents of medically at-risk infants may be particularly difficult to engage in universal home visiting interventions. Implications for recruitment strategies of home visiting programs are discussed.     

Debating Affirmative Action: Politics,Media, and Equal Opportunity in a “Postracial” America

This article explores how race-conscious education policy is interpreted in the political landscape of a “postracial” America. Based on a qualitative media analysis of the press coverage surrounding Amendment 46, an antiaffirmative action initiative, we examine language, statistics, and messages leveraged by advocates and critics of the ballot measure. We argue that despite using some of the same data sources, terms, and concepts, proponents and opponents of Amendment 46 proposed divergent policies. We analyzed this phenomenon vis-à-vis the framework of conflicting racial projects (Omi &; Winant, 1994 Omi, M. and Winant, H. 1994. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, New York, NY: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]), moral paradigms of race (Loury, 2002 Loury, G. 2002. The anatomy of racial inequality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  [Google Scholar]), and interpretations of equality of educational opportunity (Howe, 1997 Howe, K. 1997. Understanding equal educational opportunity: Social justice, democracy and schooling, New York, NY: Teachers College Press.  [Google Scholar]). Arguably, the public's understanding of race-conscious education policies relies in part on opportunities for researchers, journalists, and the public to deliberate about issues related to race. We conclude with some recommendations for fostering more communication and understanding based in deliberative democratic theory (Gutmann &; Thompson, 1996 Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. 1996. Democracy and disagreement, Cambridge, MA: Belknap.  [Google Scholar], 2004).     

What Account of Science Shall We Give? A Case Study of Scientists Teaching First-year University Subjects

This article presents a case study of four academic scientists. These academics teach in the first year of a Bachelor of Science degree at a large research-focused Australian university that has demanded and supported a greater focus on undergraduate learning. Taken as a whole, the accounts of science that the first-year academics in this case study gave, and which they are presenting to their students, challenge the images of science and scientists typically presented in school science curricula. Using Roberts' heuristic of Vision 1 and Vision 2 for the broad purposes of learning science, we consider various accounts given of science by these academic scientists and consider how science might appear to a student who takes all four of their subjects.     

Categorizing pupils' written answers to a mathematics test question: 'I know but I can't explain'

In the literature on school bullying, it is often stated that there is an age decline in the frequency of students victimized by their peers. The empirical studies showing this downward trend are, however, typically based on self-report data. The aim of the present study was to examine the grade-level differences in frequencies of victims bullied at school in cross-sectional data gathered from multiple informants: students themselves, their peers and their teachers. The participantswere 1,220 elementary school children (600 girls and 620 boys) from 48 school classes from the fourth, fifth and sixth grades (i.e. 9-12 years). The often reported age-related decrease in self-reported victimization was found but it was not confirmed by either peer or teacher reports. What actually decreased as a function of age was the frequency of self-identified victims (also labelled as 'paranoids' or 'sensitives' in the previous literature), i.e. students who themselves reported victimization but who did not have the reputational status of being victims among their peers.