An Assessment of the India Soy Protein Market

This research is a first step in determining India's future need for soy-based protein products. The objective of this study is to determine India's protein demand over the next ten years. Then, using the per capita protein demand derived from this study, along with income, population, and dietary information, per capita soy protein consumption was estimated for the same time period. It was found that income growth has a large positive affect on protein consumption.Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

The Relationship of Age to Personal Network Size, Relational Multiplexity, and Proximity to Alters in the Western United States

Objectives. This study examines the association of age and other sociodemographic variables with properties of personal networks; using samples of individuals residing in the rural western United States and the City of Los Angeles, we evaluate the degree to which these associations vary with geographical context. For both samples, we test the hypothesis that age is negatively associated with network size (i.e., degree) and positively associated with network multiplexity (the extent of overlap) on 6 different relations: core discussion members, social activity participants, emergency contacts, neighborhood safety contacts, job informants, and kin. We also examine the relationship between age and spatial proximity to alters. Method. Our data consist of a large-scale, spatially stratified egocentric network survey containing information about respondents and those to whom they are tied. We use Poisson regression to test our hypothesis regarding degree while adjusting for covariates, including education, gender, race, and self-reported sense of neighborhood belonging. We use multiple linear regression to test our hypotheses on multiplexity and distance to alters. Results. For both rural and urban populations, we find a nonmonotone association between age and numbers of core discussants and emergency contacts, with rural populations also showing nonmonotone associations for social activity partners and kin. These nonmonotone relationships show a peak in expected degree at midlife, followed by an eventual decline. We find a decline in degree among the elderly for all relations in both populations. Age is positively associated with distance to nonhousehold alters for the rural population, although residential tenure is associated with shorter ego-alter distances in both rural and urban settings. Additionally, age is negatively associated with network multiplexity for both populations. Discussion. Although personal network size ultimately declines with age, we find that increases for some relations extend well into late-midlife and most elders still maintain numerous contacts across diverse relations. The evidence we present suggests that older people tap into an wider variety of different network members for different types of relations than do younger people. This is true even for populations in rural settings, for whom immediate access to potential alters is more limited

The Influence of Family and Friends on an Inmate's Pathway to Prison [abstract]

Abstract only availableFaculty Mentor: Dr. Joan Hermsen & Dr. Wayne Brekhus, SociologyAn association between deviant peer networks, single or no parent families, and criminal behavior is routinely recognized in Criminology literature (Coughlin & Vuchinich, 1996).  The absence of marriage and the failure to form and maintain intact family and peer interactions seems to elucidate the prevalence of crime and deviance (Fagan, 1995).  For the purpose of this study, I explored the nature of inmates' family relationships, as well as the people in their life that influenced their behavior before becoming incarcerated by interviewing ten inmates from the Boonville Correctional Center.  This paper employs Glasher and Strauss' Grounded Theory (1967) to efficiently acquire and categorize data.  For my study, the interview operates as a subjective explanation from the inmates on their perceived reasons for becoming incarcerated, along with the inmates' relationships within their community, peers, and family before coming to prison.  Contradictory to expected claims about family structure, most inmates were primarily taken care of by both of their biological parents and had a strong relationship with them.  However, 80% had a family member who has been incarcerated.  As for peer relationships, it seems that the more the inmates moved around when they were growing up, than the more likely they were to become involved in deviant groups since they may be less selective and more open to unfamiliar peers. Further research needs to add a quantitative component to this study, as well as discover how inmates were integrated into their community and interacted with their peers and family, so we might better understand how certain individuals become incarcerated

Geographic space and time: The consequences of the spatial footprint for neighborhood crime

Many disciplines frequently use residents' home neighborhoods as a proxy for their entire social lives, which ignores people's temporary spatial presence in other neighborhoods for activities such as work and school. While most research only uses information on where people sleep - their home residence, my dissertation investigates this gap in the literature by focusing on the daytime movements of residents and how different areas of the city are interrelated over the day. My dissertation examines the spatial travel patterns of people over time - what I refer to as the spatial footprint - and uses these emph{spatial footprints} to understand local crime patterns in 13 cities over the day, week, and season. By focusing on the distinct spaces of individuals' daily activities and their relevant social space over the day, I dynamically model the changing activity and availability for social control across time, examine issues that are often treated as statistical nuisances (e.g., selection effects) as theoretical processes, and explicitly investigate how the nearby area and the interdependencies between neighborhoods matter for crime. I also examine crime within and around different land uses, including residential, commercial, school, and industrial areas, as they are occupied (or unoccupied) throughout the day, week, and season

Egohoods as waves washing across the city:  a new measure of “neighborhoods”

Defining “neighborhoods” is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes.  Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of “neighborhood”, we argue that previous strategies relying on non-overlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed.  The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods:  egohoods.  These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with non-overlapping boundaries.  This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities:  Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson.  The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts.  Results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the non-overlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by utilizing our egohood approach

Parks as crime inhibitors or generators: Examining parks and the role of their nearby context.

Although neighborhood studies often focus on the presence of some particular entity and its consequences for a variety of local processes, a frequent limitation is the failure to account more broadly for the local context. This paper therefore examines the role of parks for community crime, but contributes to the literature by testing whether the context of land uses and demographics nearby parks moderate the parks and crime relationship. A key feature of our approach is that we also test how these characteristics explain crime in the park, nearby the park, and in other neighborhoods in the city with data from nine cities across the United States (N = 109,808 blocks). We use multilevel Poisson and negative binomial regressions to test our ideas for six types of street crime. Our findings show that nearby land uses and socio-demographic characteristics are a key driver of crime being located within the park or nearby the park. Our results also show a clear distance decay pattern for the impact of various land uses and socio-demographics nearby parks. The results emphasize a need for research to consider the broader socio-spatial context in which crime generators/inhibitors are embedded

Parks as crime inhibitors or generators: Examining parks and the role of their nearby context.

Although neighborhood studies often focus on the presence of some particular entity and its consequences for a variety of local processes, a frequent limitation is the failure to account more broadly for the local context. This paper therefore examines the role of parks for community crime, but contributes to the literature by testing whether the context of land uses and demographics nearby parks moderate the parks and crime relationship. A key feature of our approach is that we also test how these characteristics explain crime in the park, nearby the park, and in other neighborhoods in the city with data from nine cities across the United States (N = 109,808 blocks). We use multilevel Poisson and negative binomial regressions to test our ideas for six types of street crime. Our findings show that nearby land uses and socio-demographic characteristics are a key driver of crime being located within the park or nearby the park. Our results also show a clear distance decay pattern for the impact of various land uses and socio-demographics nearby parks. The results emphasize a need for research to consider the broader socio-spatial context in which crime generators/inhibitors are embedded

Immigrants and social distance:  Examining the social consequences of immigration for Southern California neighborhoods over 50 years

"This project studied the effect of immigrant in-mobility on the trajectory of socioeconomic change in neighborhoods. The authors suggest that immigrant inflows may impact neighborhoods due to the consequences of residential mobility and the extent to which these new residents differ from the current residents. The authors use Southern California over a nearly 50-year period (1960 to 2007) as a case study to explore the short- and long- term impact of these changes. The authors find no evidence that immigrant inflow has negative consequences for home values, unemployment, or vacancies over this long period of time. Instead, the authors find that a novel measure they develop—a general measure of social distance—is much better at explaining the change in the economic conditions of these neighborhoods. Tracts with higher levels of social distance experienced a larger increase in the vacancy rate over the decade. The effect of social distance on home values changed over the study period: whereas social distance decreased home values during the 1960s, this completely reversed into a positive effect by the 2000s.