Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

neighborhood effects; social experiment; mixed methods; youth risk behavior

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered over 4,000 public housing residents in five U.S. cities the opportunity to move to very low poverty neighborhoods. Results from a survey conducted four to seven years after random assignment showed that boys in the experimental group fared no better or worse on measures of risk behavior than their controlgroup counterparts, while girls in the experimental group demonstrated better mental health and lower risk behavior relative to control group girls. We seek to understand these differences by analyzing data from the survey and from in-depth interviews conducted with a random subsample of 86 teens 14 to 19 years old in Baltimore and Chicago. We find that control group boys, especially in Baltimore, deployed conscious strategies for avoiding neighborhood trouble, in contrast to many experimental boys who had subsequently moved back to higher poverty neighborhoods. Second, experimental group girls¿ patterns of activity fit in more easily in lowpoverty neighborhoods than boys¿, whose routines tended to draw negative reactions from community members and agents of social control. Third, experimental boys were far less likely to have strong connections to non-biological father figures than controls, which may have contributed to behavioral and mental health problems

Morality and Work–Family Conflict in the Lives of Poor and Low-Income Women

Contemporary understandings of work and family are largely based on middle-class women\u27s experience, whereas poverty and welfare researchers focus on the economic struggles of single female-headed families. This qualitative study examines the cultural and moral forces underlying the tension between paid work and family responsibilities through the experience of poor and low-income women. Interview data reveal that as expected, the conditions of poverty and welfare shape work and family decisions. Yet, choices about work and family entail moral and emotional commitments defined through powerful gendered cultural schemas. Providing financially for children reflects a strong work ethic and moral worth corresponding to a masculine model of individual responsibility privileging self-sufficiency and independence. This is challenged by a shared moral imperative that mother\u27s primary responsibility is the care of children. This examination is important for researchers in understanding the moral and emotional salience of gender in shaping the work and family lives of poor and low-income women