Engagement of seniors: \u27How\u27 and \u27why\u27 engagement profiles change over time

This study explored \u27how\u27 and \u27why\u27 engagement profiles change throughout older adulthood within a framework of successful aging. A convergent parallel mixed methods design was employed. Fifty-four participants (mean age = 79.17, age range = 65-97 years; 21 males, 33 females) completed questionnaires to quantify \u27past\u27 and \u27present\u27 engagement. Focus groups segmented by decade of life and semi-structured interviews were completed with a subsample of participants (n = 42). Results indicated that participation in productive and active leisure activities decreased with increasing age, while social and passive leisure engagement remained stable. This change in engagement pattern may be a function of the themes derived from the fundamental qualitative description: (a) health and physical limitations, (b) death, (c) freedom, (d) desire, and (e) external influential factors. The \u27how\u27 and \u27why\u27 of engagement changes in later life were often embedded within the lay-based, multi-dimensional model of successful aging proposed herein

Strip Development and Community: Maintaining a Sense of Place

Abstract Strip development eases communities’ economic troubles by providing jobs and cheap goods at the expense of a sense of place and social fabric. Four factors are critical to the dissolution of place in strip development: mobility, standardization, specialization, and technology. (Randolph Hester) Mobility gives people the freedom to move over distances with little constraint; a consequence of this is a produced sense of rootlessness within many communities. Standardization creates placelessness in communities by the repetition of form and function. Specialization diminishes comprehensive knowledge of place and complex social and ecological thinking. Technology may divorce people from their natural environments. I want to test these four place indicated principles within LaFollette, Tn. Through methods of mapping, observation, structured interviews, and photographic and archival research I will show how strip development has negatively altered the social and economic development of the city of LaFollette. I will identify elements that currently and historically give the city of LaFollette a sense of place, and encourage social interaction and investment. Strip development can drastically alter the dynamics of communities, both physically and socially. How can communities grow and develop while maintaining this connection to “place”, and how can the social dynamic of a community be encouraged in light of a changing, and growing community

Rhetorical Contingency and Affirmative Action: The Paths to Diversity in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision addressing the constitutionality of university affirmative action policies. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. concluded that universities could consider race as a factor to achieve the goal of a diverse student body. This study situates Bakke within its broader rhetorical environment of public discourses about race, law, and education, examining the selection process by which Powell found “diversity” to be the most justifiable answer to the question of affirmative action's permissibility. Using materials retrieved from Powell's archives at Washington and Lee University, including memoranda, personal notes, and draft opinions, the project makes three interrelated arguments. First, this study asserts that the Supreme Court is a rhetorical institution, dependent upon rhetoric for its inventional needs and its credibility while simultaneously cloaking its reliance on rhetorical invention in a rhetoric of formalistic inevitability. As such, it attends to how the legal invention process, explicated by classical rhetorical theorists and manifest in contemporary legal practice, enhances understanding of Powell's decision. Second, the project examines how Powell pulled from far-reaching rhetorical and ideological environments for his “diversity” rationale. Here, the study traces public discourses about race and examines Bakke's legal briefs, outlining the appeals to multiculturalism, colorblindness, race consciousness, and individualism that comprised Powell's inventional warehouse. A critical scrutiny of Powell's opinion-writing process reveals an inventional program guided by an ideological negotiation of these competing and compelling rhetorics of race and education in the United States. Third, this project argues that Powell's opinion-writing process is a corporate, rather than individual, process. Examining the negotiations between Powell, his law clerks, and fellow justices further illuminates the rhetorical nature of the Court, as well as the ideological influences upon individual Court opinions. The study concludes by explicating how Bakke reflects the ways that the Supreme Court works as part of a broader rhetorical culture, constructing its decisions from the materials of public arguments and the architecture of jurisprudential norms. Finally, the study explores the ideological circulation of Powell's decision: divorcing the goal of diversity from the justification of past discrimination

Which Local Governments Cooperate on Public Safety?: Lessons from Michigan

Despite the increased interest in voluntary services cooperation, little is known about the factors that encourage local governments to enter into collaborative services arrangements with each other. This paper addresses this question through an analysis of interlocal contracting arrangements for police and fire services reported by 464 local governments in Michigan. While the contracting of public services is increasing common in local governments across the country, collaborations on police and fire services have proved far more difficult to achieve. Public safety contracting presents a dilemma for public managers. On one hand, local governments devote a substantial part of their budgets to police and fire, and public safety employees may approach 25 percent of the unit’s workforce and 40 percent of its total payroll. Given the importance of public safety expenditures in the budgets of local governments, it may be impossible to reduce the costs of local government without reducing spending on police and fire services. Yet the fear of lost jobs and lower quality services will often make contracting for police and fire highly controversial in the community. Also, collaborations involving police and fire services may become entangled with the “politics of place.” Unlike other services areas where the contractor may be a private or nonprofit organization, public safety contractors are other local governments, and the baggage of past conflicts and rivalries attach to the issue. We group the factors expected to influence the incentives and feasibility of local governments to collaborate on public services into the following categories: the organization of local governments in the county and variations in the unit’s administrative structure, community demographics, and the fiscal capacity of the local unit. Using logistic and negative binomial regression, we analyze the effect of these factors on the frequency and extent of cooperation reported for police and fire services. We find important differences in the role played by these factors in the frequency and extent of cooperation reported across the two different service areas and within the different types of local units (city, village, and township)

Explaining Local Government Cooperation on Public Works: Evidence from Michigan

In recent years, analysts have begun to study cooperation on public services among local governments. These studies have often concluded that services with scale economies are likely candidates for shared service delivery. This article contributes to the emerging literature on this topic by examining interlocal service arrangements for ten public works services in Michigan. Despite the fact that public works exhibit substantial scale economies, many local governments do not cooperate on these services. Empirical studies of local government contracting suggest four groups of factors that may help explain why local governments opt to collaborate on public services: local economic factors, characteristics of the communities in areas adjacent to the local government, demographic characteristics of the local government, and the influence of policy and planning networks. We use data on the service delivery arrangements from 468 general-purpose local governments in Michigan to examine the role played by the factors in explaining interlocal cooperation on public works

Measuring Agency-Level Results: Lessons Learned from Catholic Relief Services’ Beneficiary and Service Delivery Indicators Initiative

Background: Many NGOs have less success documenting their results at the agency level than at the program or project level. Little has been published on the challenges NGOs face in developing and measuring agency-level results. To address this issue, InterAction, an alliance of NGOs, commissioned a comparative study that drew on the existing grey literature, and a sample of 17 InterAction member organizations through case studies and interviews. Purpose: This paper builds on that InterAction study by presenting one of the first published case studies of a successful agency-level measurement (ALM) system – Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS’) Beneficiary and Service Delivery Indicators (BSDI) initiative. Setting: A faith-based multi-national relief and development NGO. Intervention: N/A Research Design:  A case study approach was used to describe and document the development of the CRS ALM. Data Collection and Analysis: The information in this study is derived primarily from CRS files and documents. Data reflecting ALM practices in other NGOs were derived from the 17 InterAction member NGOs. Data reflecting the ALM practices developed by specific NGOs and presented in tabular form in the paper were derived from official documents published by those NGOs. Findings: The authors discuss key lessons for other large and small organizations to consider when developing their own ALM systems. Keywords: agency-level results (ALR); agency-level measurement (ALM); monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL); monitoring and evaluation; non-governmental organization (NGO); agency-wide metrics; results-based planning and reporting; Catholic Relief Services (CRS

Irish drug abusers II: their psychological characteristics.

This is the second in a series of 3 articles based on a study of a cohort of Irish drug abusers. This article attempts to identify the psychological traits of drug abusers within the cohort. The cohort consists of 100 drug abusers who attend a drug advisory and treatment centre in Dublin for the first time between November 1977 and February 1979. Three psychosocial, scales (GEFT, NSQ, and PFS) were administered to each subject. Overall, the results indicate that subjects who participated in the study, while of average or above average intelligence, were poorly psychologically adjusted, characterised by a poor sense of identity, a high level of suggestibility and a tendency towards emotional dependence. Their overall level of intelligence was within or above the normal range

Catching Lightning in a Bottle: Surveying Plagiarism Futures

The digitization of higher education is evolving academic misconduct, posing both new challenges to and opportunities for academic integrity and its research. The digital evidence inherent to online-based academic misconduct produces new avenues of replicable, aggregate, and data-driven (RAD) research not previously available. In a digital mutation of the misuse of unoriginal material, students are increasingly leveraging online learning platforms like CourseHero.com to exchange completed coursework. This study leverages a novel dataset recorded by the upload of academic materials on CourseHero.com to measure how at-risk sample courses are to potential academic misconduct. This study’s survey of exchanged coursework reveals that students are sharing a significant amount of academic material online that poses a direct danger to their courses’ academic integrity. This study’s approach to observing what academic material students are sharing online demonstrates a novel means of leveraging digitized academic misconduct to develop valuable insights for planning the mitigation of academic dishonesty and maintaining course academic integrity