Reassessing the People's Choice: Revisiting a Classic and Excavating Lessons for Research About Media and Voting

This article reassesses The People's Choice by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, one of the foundations of communication and voting behavior research. As with most classics, which are often cited but seldom read, we believe this book has much to teach contemporary social scientists. We return to the original context of the research and use voting data from the period with three broad goals: (a) to find ideas and lessons from this work that generally have been overlooked, (b) to suggest new ways of applying these ideas, and (c) to encourage scholars to engage more with this seminal work to understand ideas that are often overlooked when a complex piece of research is reduced to a brief discussion or passing citation.     

Legacies in Black and White: The Racial Composition of the Legacy Pool

Selective universities regularly employ policies that favor children of alumni (known as legacies) in undergraduate admissions. Since alumni from selective colleges and universities historically have been disproportionately white, admissions policies that favor legacies have disproportionately benefited white students. For this reason, legacy policies lead to additional costs in terms of reductions in racial diversity. As larger numbers of minority students graduate from colleges and universities and have children, however, the potential pool of legacy applicants will change markedly in racial composition. This analysis begins with a review of the history and objectives of the preference for children of alumni in undergraduate admissions. We then consider the specific case of the University of Virginia and employ demographic techniques to predict the racial composition of the pool of potential legacy applicants to the university. Significant changes in the racial composition of classes that graduated from the University of Virginia from the late 1960s through the 1970s foreshadow similar changes in the characteristics of alumni children maturing through the next two decades.     

Challenges and Opportunities in Religious Education: Re-Considering Practitioners’ Approaches in Scottish Secondary Schools

Abstract

In Scotland, and particularly with regards to non-denominational RE, known as Religious and Moral Education (RME), a current focus of debates is on how and why practitioners are implementing or deviating from legal and curricular expectations. Using the findings of a small-scale qualitative practitioner enquiry centered on one local education authority in Scotland, this article advances recent discussions and engages with comparative international scholarship by identifying the challenges and opportunities in relation to the provision of RME and arguing that practitioners are motivated by the demands of learners and the priorities of school leaders, rather than official expectations.     

How do instructional designers evaluate? A qualitative study of evaluation in practice

This study employed a qualitative research design to investigate how instructional designers use evaluation in everyday design practice. While past research has examined how designers spend their time, how they generally make decisions, and expert-novice differences, little attention has been paid to use of context, input, process, or product evaluation, from the perspective of practicing designers. Based on interviews of practitioners, our findings included ten themes regarding how designers use evaluation to improve their products. While these results substantiate to some degree the claim that practitioners believe clients will not pay for formal evaluations, they also suggest that practitioners use evaluation in important but less formal ways. Other conclusions regarding the role of evaluation in design are provided and future directions for training and research are discussed.