You are my sunshine: A thematic unit for early childhood

Sun-sational experiences for young children abound as late spring, early summer days brighten how together we look at the world around. Some ideas may also be appropriate to include in a Things-to-do-over-the-summer newsletter to parents.Rose C. Merenda is Associate Professor at the Henry Barnard School, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI     

The application of cultural and social capital: a study of the 25th year reunion entries of prep school and public school graduates of Yale College

This article compares the post-college experiences of graduates of elite prep schools, non-elite prep schools and public schools who attended Yale College in the early 1960s. Drawing on previous research, and on Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, it was hypothesized that Yale graduates who had attended public secondary schools would be more likely than Yale graduates who had attended prep schools to accumulate what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, but that Yale graduates who had attended prep schools would be more likely than their public school counterparts to accumulate what Bourdieu calls social capital. A study of the life experiences of the Yale College class of 1963 during the 25 years after their college graduation supported this general expectation. There was also support for a series of more specific expectations about post-graduate educational achievement, occupational choices, and behavioral indices of loyalty to Yale.     

Islamophobia in China: news coverage,stereotypes, and Chinese Muslims’ perceptions of themselves and Islam

An analysis spanning 10 years of news reports about Muslims and Islam in Chinese state news media (N?=?15,427) demonstrates that Chinese news reports project an overall negative view of Muslims. An implicit association test performed in the non-Muslim Chinese population (N?=?1479) reveals negative stereotypes of Muslims. In addition, a survey of Chinese Muslims (N?=?384) shows that they perceive negative coverage of Muslims and Islam in Chinese media, and that real-life discrimination might be a consequence of such negative stereotyping. This study reveals that (1) there is an overall negative framing of news coverage of Muslims and Islam; (2) non-Muslim Chinese hold a negative stereotype of Muslims and Islam; (3) Chinese Muslims are cognizant of a negative media portrayal of Islam and of themselves; and (4) some Muslim Chinese experience discrimination in their daily lives. The present study contributes to the literature on global Islamophobia, a phenomenon that is understudied in China.     

Utilization of CSR to build organizations’ corporate image in Asia: need for an integrative approach

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been found to be a strong predictor of a favorable corporate image [Gray, 1986. Managing the corporate image: The key to public trust. London: Quorum Books]. Websites have become an essential communication platform [Dawkins, 2004. Corporate responsibility: The communication challenge. Journal of Communication Management, 9(2), 108–119]. This study aims to investigate how CSR can be used in enhancing organizational corporate image. Content analyses of 150 corporate websites of organizations in Asia headquartered in Singapore were conducted, followed by in-depth interviews with public relations (PR) practitioners to examine the motivations behind their CSR engagement. Findings showed that organizations utilized CSR as a means to enhance corporate image via four ways: Engaging in two-way conversations with stakeholders, adopting an inside-out communication approach with employees, recognizing the relevance of other CSR communication channels, and communicating CSR with authenticity. However, some organizations hesitate to use CSR communication to enhance their corporate image because they wanted to avoid being seen as using CSR as a promotional tool.     

Serving a Fragmented Field: Information Seeking in Higher Education

This study examines the information seeking habits and needs of scholars of higher education. Because higher education is a field which draws on many disciplinary traditions rather than a pure discipline in itself, the information needs of these scholars require diverse information seeking strategies. Phenomenological interviews with productive scholars of higher education were conducted and analyzed for this study. Ellis' (1989) common information seeking behaviors of social scientists are used as a framework to examine the behaviors of these applied social scientists in the modern information seeking environment.     

比较制度分析的若干要素

制度是一种社会结构,由文化认知、规范和规则三个要素构成。它们既独立存在,又相互依存,提供了不同的意义和秩序基础,对于社会结构特征具有很强的解释力。制度理论在研究关注点、研究方法、分析层次和结论方面表现出多样性的特点。新兴的制度理论研究有以下几个动向:一是在承认制度是社会秩序和政治稳定性的基础之外,开始关注制度对于组织结构和行为的影响;二是采用特性研究方法和过程研究方法,前者注意比较与不同制度相对应的成本和效益,后者强调制度的产生和变化;三是在注重分析趋同变化过程的同时,也开始注意趋异和多样化过程;四是在多种分析水平上开展研究,从单个组织到组织域,甚至到更加宏观的系统层次;五是关注世界系统和全球化这两种力量对于国家——政府结构和行为的影响。     

Extracting Latent Moral Information from Text Narratives: Relevance,Challenges, and Solutions

ABSTRACT

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral content represented in media stimuli with a reliable procedure—has not been systematically studied. In this article, we subject different extraction procedures to rigorous tests, underscore challenges by identifying a range of reliabilities, develop new reliability test and coding procedures employing computational methods, and provide solutions that maximize the reliability and validity of moral intuition extraction. In six content analytical studies, including a large crowd-based study, we demonstrate that: (1) traditional content analytical approaches lead to rather low reliabilities; (2) variation in coding reliabilities can be predicted by both text features and characteristics of the human coders; and (3) reliability is largely unaffected by the detail of coder training. We show that a coding task with simplified training and a coding technique that treats moral foundations as fast, spontaneous intuitions leads to acceptable inter-rater agreement, and potentially to more valid moral intuition extractions. While this study was motivated by issues related to MFT and MIME research, the methods and findings in this study have implications for extracting latent content from text narratives that go beyond moral information. Accordingly, we provide a tool for researchers interested in applying this new approach in their own work.