For many years educational practitioners have tended to focus on issues within the child for the causes of special educational needs and or disabilities. However, as the field has developed in professional maturity, a more inclusive approach has now tended to look beyond the child themselves, and recognise that often the cause of the child's…

An emerging body of research in the sociology of sports has captured how black males' academic identities become subsumed under an athletic identity. This body of research, unfortunately, focuses heavily on black male students at the college or university level and offers little empirical insights that probe academic and athletic related issues…

An earlier phase of a research project proposed a theoretical model linking the key concepts of community commitment, media use, knowledge about community, community evaluation, and community pride as well as a series of social locator variables. The present phase of the study concerned itself with the central part of the model, ignoring the…

A study examined structural determinants of opinion expression by merging two theoretical perspectives: the "spiral of silence" model advanced by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, and the structural approach to communication research offered by Phillip Tichenor, George Donohue, and Clarice Olien. The study also distinguished between different…

Student responses were elicited in classroom discussions about alcohol use in their own rural community. Teachers and parents responded to questionnaires and interviews concerning various aspects of alcohol consumption as part of the local lifestyle. Students gave reasons for drinking such as ethnic and religious acceptance in the local community,…

This study focuses on the tension between community norms/values and teacher behavior in Canada. A series of instances where teachers in public or denominational schools are accused of misconduct are presented, and these instances are traced from their beginnings to their ends (that is, to the resolution or acceptance of the social conflict). Part…

This paper discusses the planning processes and plans of school principals in Israel. It describes how educational planning processes often expose educators to a dilemma: public expectations pressure principals to create quick solutions for complicated educational issues, whereas their professional obligation is to produce plans that will address…

A secondary analysis of data collected by Thomas Patterson during the 1976 presidential campaign was made to test three hypotheses: (1) respondents in a media-rich environment will show higher levels of political information holding than respondents in a media-poor environment, (2) differences in information holding levels between a media-rich…

Based on previous research on the influence of community context on the needs and concerns of first year teachers and on the implementation of induction program components, this study sought to determine the effects of the community context on the lives of beginning teachers as related to their teaching experience in the classroom. Data were…

Factors that influence the perceptions held by school site council members and others about the quality of site-based management (SBM) are examined in this study. Specifically, the relationships among a group's assessment of SBM, perceived level of influence on council decision making, perceived level of support from other groups, and perceived…

Four television stations were studied and potential audiences surveyed in Los Angeles, California, to explore the extent of ethnic television, determine how its content reflects community influence, and examine viewers' attitudes toward ethnic television broadcasting. Fourteen ethnic oroups were represented in ethnic television during the…

A study examined the personal, social, and institutional factors that facilitated the career development and career choice of 11 African-American and 9 Latino juniors and seniors (12 females and 8 males) who were attending a large Midwest university and who had successfully identified and acted on their vocational plans. The students had all…

The development, implementation, and modification of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools' Quality Education/Racial Balance Policy of 1975 provides the case example of how experts and the specialized knowledge they employ are part of the educational politics of a postindustrial community. In the existing literature, there are competing…

A taxonomy of levels of analysis in mass media decision making is presented in this paper, and a strategy is proposed for incorporating the different levels into the design of research. Following a clarification of the concept of influence and its relationship to the levels of analysis used in the taxonomic structure, the paper describes the…

A term project for a journalism course in documentary photography (the proposal for which is cited in ED 177 560) centered on photographically documenting a rural community and measuring its symbolic sociodramas. The focus of the project was to determine how various community groups interpreted a given set of photographs selected to represent a…