Out on the Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, and Food Sharing Networks in Nain, Labrador

In recent Inuit ethnography, a major concern has been how and to what extent contemporary Inuit participate in and depend on subsistence activities, particularly in the context of increasing wage employment and growing participation in the cash economy. This paper provides an analysis of these activities in the predominately Inuit community of Nain, Labrador. Using social network data and demographic information collected between January and June 2010, we examine the interconnections between subsistence activities—obtaining “country food” through activities such as hunting, fishing, and collecting—with access to the means of obtaining subsistence resources (such as snow mobiles, cabins, and boats), employment status, and income. Our data indicate that individuals with higher employment status and income tend to be more central to the network of subsistence food sharing, but not because they have greater access to hunting tools or equipment (they do not).We conclude that those individuals who play the most central role in the network are those who are financially able to do so, regardless of access to hunting tools/means

Effectiveness of The Cure Violence Model in New York City

New research from the John Jay College Research & Evaluation Center (JohnJayREC) suggests that the Cure Violence strategy may effectively reduce the incidence of homicide. Researchers at John Jay worked with analysts at the New York Police Department (NYPD) to assemble information about violence in New York City neighborhoods and compared areas with and without Cure Violence programs. The analysis focused on programs in three areas: two in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan. All three areas were operating Cure Violence programs as of 2010, and homicides were tracked through 2013. When the study compared homicide rates in those areas with a matched comparison group of neighborhoods in New York, the presence of the Cure Violence programs was associated with an 18 percent drop between 2010 and 2013, while homicides in the comparison areas were 69 percent higher in 2013 than in 2010

Trends in misdemeanor arrest rates in New York.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice is pleased to publish this report documenting patterns in misdemeanor arrests in New York City (and, to a lesser extent, in New York State) over the past three decades. This report presents trends in the types of misdemeanors for which New Yorkers have been arrested; analyzes these data by the age, gender, and race/ethnicity of those receiving this enforcement attention; examines shifts in misdemeanor arrest activity by police precincts; displays changes in the issuance of Desk Appearance Tickets over time; and traces these misdemeanor arrests to the initial court disposition at arraignment. (from Introduction, p. 8) Report downloaded from: https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/publication/trends-in-misdemeanor-arrests-in-new-york Table of Contents Acknowledgements -- List of figures -- Introduction -- Goals of the Project -- About the data presented in this publication -- Overall trends : felony arrests and misdemeanor arrests -- Overall trends by gender -- Overall trends by age -- Overall trends by race/ethnicity -- Overall trends by charge types --Overall trends by disposition types -- Ovrall trends by sentence types -- A closer look at New York City -- Desk appearance tickets -- Arrests by precincts from 1993 to 2013 -- Conclusion -- Appendix A: Charge codes, frequency, and categories from 1980 to 2013 for New York State -- Appendix B: Rates of misdemeanor arrests for females in New York City by age -- Appendix C: Number of misdemeanor arrests in New York City by precincts from 1993 to 2003. Link to the report in the John Jay College Library Catalog

Assessing Respondent Driven Sampling for Network Studies in Ethnographic Contexts

Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) is generally considered a methodology for recruiting “hard-to-reach” populations for social science research. More recently, Wejnert has argued that RDS analysis can be used for general social network analysis as well (where he labels it, RDS-SN). In this article, we assess the value of Wejnert’s RDS-SN for use in more traditional ethnographic contexts. We employed RDS as part of a larger social network research project to recruit n = 330 community residents (over 17 years of age) in Nain, a predominantly (92%) aboriginal community in northern Labrador, Canada, for social network interviews about food sharing, housing, public health, and community traditions. The peer referral chains resulted in a sample that was then analyzed for its representativeness by two means—a comparison with the Statistics Canada 2006 Census of the same community, and with house-by-house demographic sur- veys carried out in the community as part of our research. The results show a close fit with available community statistics and our own survey. As such, we argue that the RDS sampling used in Nain was able to provide a useful and near-representative sample of the community. To demonstrate the usefulness of the results, the referral chains are also analyzed here for patterns in intragroup and intergroup relation- ships that were apparent only in the aggregate

Out on the Land: Income, Subsistence Activities, and Food Sharing Networks in Nain, Labrador

In recent Inuit ethnography, a major concern has been how and to what extent contemporary Inuit participate in and depend on subsistence activities, particularly in the context of increasing wage employment and growing participation in the cash economy. This paper provides an analysis of these activities in the predominately Inuit community of Nain, Labrador. Using social network data and demographic information collected between January and June 2010, we examine the interconnections between subsistence activities—obtaining “country food” through activities such as hunting, fishing, and collecting—with access to the means of obtaining subsistence resources (such as snow mobiles, cabins, and boats), employment status, and income. Our data indicate that individuals with higher employment status and income tend to be more central to the network of subsistence food sharing, but not because they have greater access to hunting tools or equipment (they do not).We conclude that those individuals who play the most central role in the network are those who are financially able to do so, regardless of access to hunting tools/means

Estimating the Size of the Methamphetamine-Using Population in New York City Using Network Sampling Techniques

As part of a recent study of the dynamics of the retail market for methamphetamine use in New York City, we used network sampling methods to estimate the size of the total networked population. This process involved sampling from respondents’ list of co-use contacts, which in turn became the basis for cap-ture-recapture estimation. Recapture sampling was based on links to other respondents derived from demographic and “telefunken” matching procedures–the latter being an anonymized version of telephone number matching. This paper describes the matching process used to discover the links between the solic-ited contacts and project respondents, the capture-recapture calculation, the estimation of “false matches”, and the development of confidence intervals for the final population estimates. A final population of 12,229 was estimated, with a range of 8235 - 23,750. The techniques described here have the special vir-tue of deriving an estimate for a hidden population while retaining respondent anonymity and the ano-nymity of network alters, but likely require larger sample size than the 132 persons interviewed to attain acceptable confidence levels for the estimate

A Reexamination of Connectivity Trends via Exponential Random Graph Modeling in Two IDU Risk Networks

Patterns of risk in injecting drug user (IDU) networks have been a key focus of network approaches to HIV transmission histories. New network modeling techniques allow for a reexamination of these patterns with greater statistical accuracy and the comparative weighting of model elements. This paper describes the results of a reexamination of network data from the SFHR and P90 data sets using Exponential Random Graph Modeling. The results show that “transitive closure” is an important feature of IDU network topologies, and provides relative importance measures for race/ethnicity, age, gender, and number of risk partners in predicting risk relationships