This dissertation presents new evidence on neighborhood transition and its impact on housing markets using a novel micro-level dataset on housing transactions. It focuses on three issues: the neighborhood effect, housing discrimination, and stable integration. The first essay examines the relationship between increased minority composition and…

In June 2007, the Supreme Court limited the tools that school districts could use to voluntarily integrate schools. In the aftermath of the decision, educators around the country have sought models of successful plans that would also be legal. One such model may be Berkeley Unified School District's (BUSD) plan. Earlier this year, the California…

This study investigates how community characteristics, student background, school climate, and zero-tolerance policies interact to affect school crime. The study articulates and fits a school crime model to 712 high schools participating in the 2000 School Survey on Crime and Safety, confirming that school location and student socioeconomic status…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how social capital might be instrumental in mediating concerns about terrorism and promoting appropriate responses for emergency preparedness. Results are presented from a random-digit dialed survey of a metropolitan area measuring individual characteristics as well as community-level characteristics as…

The present study investigated demographic differences in school readiness within Jordan, a particularly interesting context because of widespread national reform currently sweeping the education system in Jordan. Teacher reports and researcher direct assessments of the school readiness of a national sample of 4681 Jordanian first grade children…

Context: Small towns across the United States struggle to maintain an adequate primary care workforce. Purpose: To examine factors contributing to physician satisfaction and retention in largely rural areas in Massachusetts, a state with rural pockets and small towns. Methods: A survey mailed in 2004-2005 to primary care physicians, practicing in…

For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to…

Three field studies compared helping behavior across a sample of 24 small, medium and large cities across the United States. The relationship of helping to statistics reflecting the demographic, social, and economic characteristics of these communities was then examined. The strongest predictors of city differences in helping were population size,…

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the Division of Violence Prevention in the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collaborated to conduct a rigorous impact evaluation of programs aimed at improving students' behavior. For this evaluation, such programs were termed Social…

This paper aims to identify the links that show how the establishment of an Aboriginal Elders Group in the Wagga Wagga community has contributed to the social capital of the Wagga Wagga Aboriginal Community. The paper will highlight the key educational episodes: oral history program; incorporation of the Elders group; self governance of the group,…

Poverty and unemployment aren't spread evenly across cities or regions, but rather are concentrated in disinvested urban neighborhoods and rural communities around the country. These communities are home to the nation's most vulnerable children and families. Despite some signs of improvement in economic conditions for families in the United…

Learning about local government seems boring and irrelevant to most young people, particularly to students from high-poverty backgrounds. The authors explore a promising approach for solving this problem, Storypath, which engages students in authentic learning and active citizenship. The Storypath approach is based on a narrative in which students…

This investigation is concerned with adolescent male participation in sexual health peer education programs. Research questions focused on identifying the percentages of male peer educators in these programs, exploring the relationship between financial compensation and male participation, and identifying male-specific recruitment strategies, if…

This paper reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the language socialisation of a group of Moroccan adolescents who migrated to Italy in the late 1990s. The approach is based on the notion of language socialisation, which sees the process of acquiring a language as linked to that of becoming a member of a culture. The participants live in…

The 400 fastest-growing churches (based on the percentage change in average worship attendance in the previous five years) in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a mainline Protestant denomination, were invited to take part in the US Congregational Life Survey. Completed surveys were received from 19,033 worshipers in 93 fast-growing churches. These…