Twitter Watch: Leveraging Social Media to Monitor and Predict Collective-Efficacy of Neighborhoods

Sociologists associate the spatial variation of crime within an urban setting, with the concept of collective efficacy. The collective efficacy of a neighborhood is defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. Sociologists measure collective efficacy by conducting survey studies designed to measure individuals' perception of their community. In this work, we employ the curated data from a survey study (ground truth) and examine the effectiveness of substituting costly survey questionnaires with proxies derived from social media. We enrich a corpus of tweets mentioning a local venue with several linguistic and topological features. We then propose a pairwise learning to rank model with the goal of identifying a ranking of neighborhoods that is similar to the ranking obtained from the ground truth collective efficacy values. In our experiments, we find that our generated ranking of neighborhoods achieves 0.77 Kendall tau-x ranking agreement with the ground truth ranking. Overall, our results are up to 37% better than traditional baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Transformational Leadership and a Culture of Efficacy: A Search for Correlation in the Alabama Two-Year College System

This research project explores the predominant leadership characteristics among community college presidents as measured by Bass and Avolio’s transformational leadership continuum, the degree of collective teacher efficacy among faculty, and any correlation that exists between them. The populations studied are the presidents and faculty of community colleges in Alabama. Two instruments were employed, the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) developed by Bass and Avolio (1995) and Goddard’s CE-SCALE (2000, 2002), as a measure of collective teacher efficacy. The researcher found evidence of mid-range collective efficacy scores among faculty and strong evidence of pervasive transformational leadership characteristics among college presidents. The researcher also found a positive correlation using Spearman coefficients between the degree of transformational leadership characteristics and the degree of collective teacher efficacy among four of the five dimensions of transformational leadership on the leadership continuum. Correlation was most pronounced for Idealized Influence (Behavior), which centers on the fact that transformational leaders communicate their most important values and sense of purpose to followers, a characteristic that promotes a collective and cohesive view of institutional purpose. Although a slightly negative correlation was found for Idealized Influence (Attributes), modest positive correlations were also found for Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation, and Individual Consideration

Collective Efficacy and Firearms Violence in Anchorage, Alaska: Preliminary Findings

Paper also presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Western Society of Criminology, Scottsdale, Arizona.This paper seeks to advance the discussion of the utility of collective efficacy, as captured by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls, in understanding community levels of crime by exploring the relation between community structure, collective efficacy, and in this case firearms violence, in Anchorage, Alaska. The specific aims of this paper are to report the results of a test of the collective efficacy thesis, modeled loosely after the test presented in the 1997 Science paper by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls, as an explanation of neighborhood rates of firearms violence in Anchorage.Measures Replication and Data / Collective Efficacy and Violence in Anchorage / Discussion and Conclusions / References / Table

Beyond Collective Efficacy: New Brief Measures to Assess the Outer Layers of the Social Ecology

Abstract Introduction: Community support can be a valuable interpersonal resource anywhere, yet past research has largely been focused on adults in urban neighborhoods. Because communities are no longer solely defined by a shared physicality, we offer psychometric data on three new measures to assess other communal resources: informal community support, support for community youth, and workplace integration. Methods: Participants (N=1706) from a largely rural, low-income Southern region completed a computer-assisted questionnaire as part of a larger study on character development and personal strength. Ages range from 11 to 70 years old (M=29.3 years; SD=12.3 years); 63% of participants are female. Results: Internal consistency was good for our 3 new measures, .70 to .86 and each scale comprised a single factor in exploratory factor analyses. Correlations with collective efficacy (convergent validity) were all positive and significant and range from .18 to .57. Correlations with measures of subjective well-being range from .21 to .29, and correlations with mental and physical health outcomes ranged from .14 to .23. Implications: Studying communities in addition to individuals and families can potentially shed light on the variety of ways in which community ties can foster well-being and resilience. The three new measures presented here assess important but understudied aspects of communities

Development and validation of the Just Community Gardening Survey: A measure of the social and dietary outcomes of community garden participation

Our aim was to develop and validate a survey measuring outcomes of community gardening related to food system equity. Face validity was assessed by six community gardening experts and resulted in minor changes to the survey. Weighted kappa and Cronbach’s alpha were used to determine test-retest reliability and internal consistency using a sample of community gardeners in New York City (n=38). Weighted kappa analyses revealed almost perfect agreement (mean = 0.981, range 0.498-1, p≤.001). Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for eight scales, most of which had excellent agreement. The resulting 25-item Just Community Gardening Survey consisted of demographic, garden participation, garden activities, social participation, social cohesion, collective efficacy, perceived impact on dietary intake, food access and security, horticultural and environmental knowledge and diet-related health questions. This validated survey not only measures the social and dietary outcomes of community gardening, it incorporates important aspects of food justice not assessed in previous research

Preparing adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses urban charter schools to analyze, navigate, and challenge race and class inequality

Background/Context: Sociopolitical development (SPD) refers to the processes by which an individual acquires the knowledge, skills, emotional faculties, and commitment to recognize and resist oppressive social forces. A growing body of scholarship has found that such sociopolitical capabilities are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes, including resilience, academic achievement, and civic engagement. Many scholars have long argued that schools and educators have a central role to play in fostering the sociopolitical development of marginalized adolescents around issues of race and class inequality. Other scholars have investigated school-based practices for highlighting race and class inequality that include youth participatory-action research, critical literacy, and critical service-learning. Objective of Study: The present study sought to add to the existing scholarship on schools as opportunity structures for sociopolitical development. Specifically, this study considered the role of two different schooling models in fostering adolescents' ability to analyze, navigate, and challenge the social forces and institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Setting: The six high schools participating in the present study were all urban charter public high schools located in five northeastern cities. All six schools served primarily low-income youth of color and articulated explicit goals around fostering students' sociopolitical development. Three of these high schools were guided by progressive pedagogy and principles, and three were guided by no-excuses pedagogy and principles. Research Design: The present study compared the sociopolitical development of adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses charter high schools through a mixed methods research design involving pre-post surveys, qualitative interviews with participating adolescents and teachers, and ethnographic field notes collected during observations at participating schools. Results: On average, adolescents attending progressive high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their ability to analyze the causes of racial inequality, but adolescents attending no-excuses high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their sense of efficacy around navigating settings in which race and class inequality are prominent. Neither set of adolescents demonstrated significant shifts in their commitment to challenging the social forces or institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Conclusions: Both progressive and no-excuses schools sought to foster adolescents' commitment to challenging race and class inequality, but focused on different building blocks to do so. Further research is necessary to understand the pedagogy and practices that show promise in catalyzing adolescents' analytic and navigational abilities into a powerful commitment to collective social action-the ultimate goal of sociopolitical development

Anchorage Community Survey 2007 Survey Sampling Design: Power and Sample Size

This working paper documents the power analysis, literature review, and precision considerations contemplated in designing the Anchorage Community Survey’s (ACS) 2007 sampling design. The ACS will obtain at least 30 completed surveys from individuals in each of the 55 census tracts that make up the Anchorage Municipality, allowing us to discern a fairly small effect size of 0.30 with our smallest anticipated intraclass correlation and a moderate effect size of 0.40 with our largest anticipated intraclass correlation, both at 0.80 power level. This cluster sample size and number of clusters should yield sufficient precision to allow good estimation of variance components and standard errors, acceptable reliability estimates, and reasonable aggregated measures of constructed neighborhood variables from individual survey item responses.Abstract / Introduction / Number of clusters (J) = 55 / Cluster Size (n) = 30 / Intraclass correlation (ρ)=.10 to .20 / Effect size (δ)=.30 or greater / Power Graphs / Support from the Literature / A Note on Precision / Reference

The relationship between civic attitudes and voting intention : an analysis of vocational upper secondary schools in England and Singapore

From 2009 to 2011, a team from the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies carried out a mixedmethods study of young people in England and Singapore. With regard to civic attitudes, the study showed that there was a greater sense of political self-efficacy and collective (school) efficacy in Singapore than in England. In addition, the group in Singapore scored higher on future voting relative to the group in England. Further, while both political self-efficacy and collective (school) efficacy were correlated with future voting in England, only the latter was correlated in the case of Singapore. For some, the results may seem counter-intuitive. The article reflects on these results, particularly those relating to democratic outcomes

Cultural Hybridization: Bicultural Self-Efficacy And Resilience In Northern Plains American Indians

The present study examined bicultural self-efficacy and its relationship to resilience in Northern Plains American Indians. American Indians in the Northern Plains, like many tribes in the United States, experienced a calamitous history marked by interactions with the federal government that were often fatal to the Indigenous peoples of North America, and found to contribute to a conflicted individual and collective well-being of these people within the Northern Plains region. As such, the investigation sought to identify the relationships between that of cultural identity, resilience, and negative life events, or risk, to measures of psychopathology. To that end, efforts involved the use of a number of assessments to evaluate Northern Plains American Indian community members and college students on general characteristics of past risk or trauma experienced, cultural identity, a measure of resilience via endorsement of protective factors, and internal (psychological) adaptation. The study consisted of 198 participants (130 female, 68 male), ages 18-74 recruited from the University of North Dakota main campus and a tribal Community College. Participants were from a variety of Northern Plains tribes. A simultaneous multiple regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were utilized to test hypotheses with a Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), analyzing each criterion variable of anxiety and hopelessness; with ethnicity, age, resilience, Northern Plains Biculturalism Inventory - III (NPBI-III) cultural classification, indices of Bicultural Self-Efficacy, and exposure to cumulative negative life events as predictors. Interactions within the Simultaneous multiple regression was analyzed to see if resilience served to negate the impact of stress on indices of psychological well-being in American Indian participants. Results indicated that the endorsement of protective factors tapped by the resilience construct were negatively associated with anxiety and hopelessness. Furthermore, resilience was found to moderate the relationship between negative life events and hopelessness, but only at medium and high levels of self-reported resilience. Thus, the relationship of negative life events with hopelessness was unaffected when self-reported protective factors were low. In contrast, self-reported endorsement of negative life events or risk was positively correlated with indices of psychopathology in this study. Next, scores on the measure of cultural identification (NPBI-III) was positively correlated with indices of bicultural self-efficacy as measured by the Bicultural Self-Efficacy Scale (BSES). With respect to bicultural self-efficacy, the Role Repertoire subscale within the BSES construct were found to predict hopelessness, being positively correlated with hopelessness; whereas, the Communication subscale of the BSES was found to predict anxiety, being negatively correlated with the measure of anxiety. Interestingly, the BSES subscales were largely unrelated to cumulative adversity experienced (i.e., negative life events). However, BSES subscale scores were positively related to scores on the resilience measure. In particular, the Positive Attitudes subscale and Communication subscales both significantly contributed to the prediction of resilience within this sample