Social Problems are Social: Empirical Evidence and Reflections on Integrating Community Psychology into Traditional Curriculum

The paper will describe the development and impact of a course that exemplifies the principles and values of community psychology, but does so outside the bounds of a community psychology program or concentration in a large, diverse, public university. The class, Community Engagement for Social Change, has two aims: to teach undergraduates that social problems have social causes, and to engage students in a range of social problem-solving approaches that incorporate that understanding. It accomplishes these aims by introducing a “multi-level analysis” of social problems, using a case study of the social problem of poverty, and requiring that all students complete 20 hours of service in community organizations. The development of the class required strategic thinking and significant retooling in order to attract and promote learning across a broad range of students. It has now been offered each semester for seven years, and has evolved into an opportunity for the first author and her graduate students to integrate social justice-oriented teaching and research. For the past three years, the authors have been engaged in a longitudinal project evaluating the impact of the class on student outcomes. This paper provides an overview of this course, and describes lessons learned from two sources: (1) the experience of teaching and refining the class, and (2) the longitudinal dataset collected from students who did and did not take the course. Data show that the class is effective in shifting attitudes both specific to poverty and more generally to social problems. Results also show that implicit bias did not shift over the course of the semester, and that individual and systemic attributions for social problems are only moderately related. We hope that sharing our experience is useful to those interested in similar coursework in other institutions that lack an explicit focus on community psychology

Social Problems are Social: Empirical Evidence and Reflections on Integrating Community Psychology into Traditional Curriculum

The paper will describe the development and impact of a course that exemplifies the principles and values of community psychology, but does so outside the bounds of a community psychology program or concentration in a large, diverse, public university. The class, Community Engagement for Social Change, has two aims: to teach undergraduates that social problems have social causes, and to engage students in a range of social problem-solving approaches that incorporate that understanding. It accomplishes these aims by introducing a “multi-level analysis” of social problems, using a case study of the social problem of poverty, and requiring that all students complete 20 hours of service in community organizations. The development of the class required strategic thinking and significant retooling in order to attract and promote learning across a broad range of students. It has now been offered each semester for seven years, and has evolved into an opportunity for the first author and her graduate students to integrate social justice-oriented teaching and research. For the past three years, the authors have been engaged in a longitudinal project evaluating the impact of the class on student outcomes. This paper provides an overview of this course, and describes lessons learned from two sources: (1) the experience of teaching and refining the class, and (2) the longitudinal dataset collected from students who did and did not take the course. Data show that the class is effective in shifting attitudes both specific to poverty and more generally to social problems. Results also show that implicit bias did not shift over the course of the semester, and that individual and systemic attributions for social problems are only moderately related. We hope that sharing our experience is useful to those interested in similar coursework in other institutions that lack an explicit focus on community psychology

The Rising Relative Risk of Mortality among Singles: Meta-analysis and Meta-regression

Never-married persons (singles) constitute a growing demographic group; yet, the magnitude of the all-cause relative mortality risk for nonelderly singles is not known and important moderating factors have not been explored. The authors used meta-analysis to examine 641 risk estimates from 95 publications that provided data on more than 500 million persons. The comparison group consisted of currently married individuals. The mean hazard ratio for mortality was 1.24 (95% confidence interval: 1.19, 1.30) among multivariate-adjusted hazard ratios with a high subjective quality rating. Meta-regressions showed that hazard ratios have been modestly increasing over time for both genders, but have done so somewhat more rapidly for women. The results also showed that the hazard ratio decreased with age and that study quality has an important relation to hazard ratio magnitude

PIF-Mediated Sucrose Regulation of the Circadian Oscillator is Light Quality and Temperature Dependent

Studies are increasingly showing that metabolic and circadian (~24 h) pathways are strongly interconnected, with the circadian system regulating the metabolic state of the cell, and metabolic products feeding back to entrain the oscillator. In plants, probably the most significant impact of the circadian system on metabolism is in its reciprocal regulation of photosynthesis; however, the pathways by which this occurs are still poorly understood. We have previously shown that members of the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factor PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR (PIF) family are involved in the photosynthate entrainment of the circadian oscillator. In this paper, using Arabidopsis mutants and overexpression lines, we examine how temperature and light quality affect PIF-mediated sucrose signaling to the oscillator and examine the contributions of individual PIF members. Our results also show that the quality of light is important for PIF signaling, with red and blue lights having the opposite effects, and that temperature affects PIF-mediated sucrose signaling. We propose the light sensitivity of PIF-mediated sucrose entrainment of the oscillator may be important in enabling plants to distinguish between sucrose produced de novo from photosynthesis during the day and the sucrose products of starch degradation at the end of the night