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Student affairs personnel must both ensure the safety and basic civil rights of students and also find ways to expose students to the consequences of their actions and speech. These obligations involve tensions between students' rights to free speech and their rights to equal protection under the Constitution, thus to education free from harassment. Among current policy options is the Chaplinsky "fighting words doctrine" to be used in place of vaguely-worded policies; other policies or refinements also exist. Regardless of which approach an institution chooses, several factors must be considered when developing and implementing a hate speech policy. Among these are which minority groups are to be affected, whether the policy includes faculty as well as students, whether it extends to off-campus activities, whether harm must be actual or merely potential, how the policy will be enforced, and what the range of sanctions is to be. Institutions should take a comprehensive approach to the problem, encourage on-campus dialogue, adapt the policy to particular campus circumstances, and focus methodically and concretely on First Amendment issues. Campuses should also educate students about diversity and condemn intolerance, "censuring" rather than "censoring" racist speech. Includes and 84-item selected bibliography on verbal harassment policies. (MSF)

The development of some psychometric indices of performance rating quality based in judgement is traced. The conceptual and analytical confusion that characterizes contemporary research in this area is described. The operational definitions of several criteria of rating quality, including leniency and severity of the rating effect, halo effect, central tendency, and reliability are discussed. A set of positively-toned criteria for evaluating the quality of rating data as well as the suitability of some common research designs for generating statistical indices is presented. (Author/HLM)

Many criticisms of Fiedler's contingency model focus upon the LPC (Least Preferred Coworker) scale. The characteristics of the LPC scale were investigated in two studies. Experiment 1 focused upon determining the factor structure of LPC and relevance ratings, while Experiment 2 dealt with relationships among LPC, relevance, and self-ratings. Results indicate the following: (1) the growing body of research supports the finding that LPC can be more productively viewed as a multidimensional measure rather than the bipolar task versus relationship oriented scale proposed by Fiedler (1967); (2) LPC should be viewed as an indirect measure of the rater's attitudes and priorities vis-a-vis a description of an undesirable person; (3) the results draw into question the LPC typology proposed by Fiedler and suggest that the low-LPC person be considered highly oriented to the dimension being rated, and a high LPC score as indicating the absence of this orientation; and (4) many of the problems associated with research on the Fiedler model are the result of the measurement problems associated with LPC, and point directly to the need to develop an alternative means of measuring this critical individual characteristic. (Author/CKJ)

This document contains 10 papers presented at a symposium on corrections education. The proceedings are organized in two parts; the first part contains six research and program reports, and the second part contains four papers on various instructional strategies. The papers in Part I are as follows: "The Politics of Rehabilitation: A Study of Legislative Ideology" (Mark S. Hamm); "University Prison Education in British Columbia Combining Academic and Living Skills for Personal Growth" (Stephen Duguid); "State of Wisconsin Division of Corrections Bureau of Juvenile Services Post-Secondary Education Pilot Program" (James R. Wickman); "Post-Secondary Correctional Education: An Evaluation of Parolee Performance" (Jerry Holoway and Paul Moke); "Needs Assessment in Correctional Education" (Raymond Bell and Coleen McDonnell); and "The Relationships of WAIS-R [Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised] Scores, Social Variables and Educational Preparation to Reading Achievement in Prison Population" (Scott Coleman Greenwood and Raymond Bell). The papers in Part II include "Computer Labs in Ohio's Correctional Prerelease Program" (Norman Rose and Kurt Williams); "Ethical Considerations in Land Use: An Exploration of Values in the Prison Lab Science Classroom" (James A. Brey); "Peer Tutoring: It Makes a Difference in a Juvenile Detention Center School" (Betty W. Farrar); and "A Five Year Comparison of APL [Adult Performance Level] Lifescoping Skills Test Results at Lebanon Correctional Institution" (Donald DeBald). Some papers are preceded by abstracts, and the editor of the proceedings provides a short commentary on and summary of the conference. (KC)

Researchers have sought to understand why cognitive skill disparities between black and white children persist in American society, but the most thorough examinations study schoolaged children during a period when the black/white achievement gap is already well established. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Birth Cohort of 2001, we find trivial black/white differences in cognitive skills at 10 months of age but a large disparity at 24 months, suggesting that the gap emerges in force during this 14-month period. Unlike previous work, our models completely explain the black/white achievement gap at two years of age. We find that black/white differences in parenting are the principal mechanism, but its role is ecologically conditioned, partly accounted for by factors we can measure (i.e. socioeconomic status and neighborhood quality) and factors we have yet to measure (i.e. stress, social isolation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does schooling exacerbate inequality in children's academic skills? Studies comparing skill growth in summers versus school years provide a provocative way of addressing this question, but most seasonal studies have been limited in two important ways. First, the most persuasive seasonal studies have been restricted to the early grades of schooling, making it difficult to know whether the patterns from these studies extend into later grades. Second, they have focused primarily on achievement "gaps" between social groups (e.g., social class, race/ethnicity), which constitutes only a fraction of achievement inequality. In this study, we compare the growth of inequality in students' academic skills during 10 school years to that occurring during the 10 preceding summers in recent national data on first through tenth graders from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). Findings reveal that the impact of schooling on achievement inequality varies by subject. Exposure to schooling appears to exacerbate inequality in math skills, reduce inequality in reading and language use skills somewhat, and reproduce inequalities in science skills. We consider the implications of our findings for theoretical perspectives on schools and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many parts of the world, fertility has declined in important ways in the last century. How does this matter? Our study expands the empirical basis for understanding the relationship between number of siblings in childhood and social outcomes among adults. An important recent study found that for each additional sibling one grew up with, the likelihood of ever having divorced as an adult declined by three percent (Bobbitt-Zeher, Downey, and Merry 2014). Vulnerability to divorce between those growing up in small versus large sibships, therefore, could vary by fifteen percent or more. Although this earlier study was based on a large national sample (~50,000 Americans from the General Social Surveys), it is unclear yet whether this pattern is robust and whether the benefits of siblings during childhood extend to other aspects of adulthood. We expand this previous work by: (1) determining whether the original pattern replicates among two high-quality nationally representative datasets--the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) -- and (2) extending the analysis beyond divorce to consider whether growing up with siblings is related to other pro-social adult behaviors (e.g., relationships with friends, membership in voluntary organizations, obligations to aging parents). Our results confirm a negative association between number of siblings and divorce in adulthood, although the patterns vary by dataset. We also find mixed outcomes related to other pro-social adult behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do schools play in the stratification system? A half century of scholarship since the Coleman Report has failed to produce a clear understanding of how schools matter. I focus on the evidence regarding socioeconomic gaps in cognitive skills and conclude that schools primarily reflect inequalities that already exist in broader society. And while both compensatory and reproductive forces are observable in schools, the best evidence indicates that schools' compensatory mechanisms are stronger. Schools reproduce inequality in an indirect way, however-they divert attention from its real sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines heterogeneity among individual trajectories of residential exposure to the risk of industrial hazard over nearly a two decade period. Using a latent class growth analysis on geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics merged with Toxics Release Inventory data, we discover four common risk trajectories: those always at risk of exposure (23%); those always at low levels of risk (42%); those that begin the study period with high risk but see their situation improve (23%); and those that start the study period with low risk but end under high levels of exposure to industrial pollution (12%). This study then examines several key social determinants of membership into these four risk trajectories, focusing especially on disparities by race and socioeconomic status. Differences in socioeconomic status between whites and blacks accounts for much of the racial disparity in long-term exposure risks, but a residual racial gap remains after controlling for individual-level socioeconomic characteristics. Accounting for the role of residential mobility in shaping individual trajectories of exposure, this study finds for white households that frequent moves increase the probability of maintaining persistently low levels of exposure. For black households, frequent moves increase the probability of maintaining persistently high levels of exposure. Interestingly, the racial disparity is robust among immobile households that began the study period under low levels of exposure but saw their exposure increase. These findings speak to the dual struggle many black households face in trying to first locate and then maintain housing in safe urban neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most consistent patterns in the social sciences is the relationship between sibship size and educational outcomes: those with fewer siblings outperform those with many. The most prominent explanation for this pattern is resource dilution--parents' resources are finite and spread more thinly as the number of children in the family increases. This theoretical claim is provocative because it transcends place and time, suggesting a universal law. Studies beyond the United States, however, indicate another possibility--that the relationship between sibship size and educational outcomes may depend on context. With a focus on historical and contextual patterns in the U.S. setting, we extend tests of the dilution model in two ways with data from the General Social Surveys 1972-2010. First, we find that the effect of sibship size on educational outcomes has slowly declined during the twentieth century, but has also shown signs of uptick among the most recent cohorts, a pattern that resembles the broader patterns of inequality exhibited in Kuznets Curve. Second, large sibships are less detrimental among individuals that identify as Mormon than for other religious groups, highlighting the way in which broader social norms influence the consequences of sibship size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates that environmental sociologists cannot fully explain the relationship between humans and the environment without developing structural theories that link resource extraction and raw material transport to state violence. In it, we argue that to fully explain the existence of severe environmental degradation, researchers need to understand, at a minimum, why wealthy industrial societies are able to extract so many natural resources, at such a great volume, from so many places around the world. Obviously, extraction, transportation, and communications technology play an important role in allowing this to occur. However, our ability to extract vast quantities of resources from the earth and to get these resources to the factories and people that need them also requires complex social arrangements that are instituted, organized, shaped, and directed by specific organizations and institutions. One set of institutions that do this are international trade and finance institutions such the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. These institutions have multiple, often violent, negative impacts on individuals, societies, and the environment. However, these institutions do not directly use or control the means of violence, which also play a critical role in ensuring stable and efficient resource extraction and transport. The means of violence are, instead, controlled by military and police forces around the world that sometimes act on their own behalf and sometimes to ensure capital accumulation. Thus, military and police forces play a critical role in ensuring that environmentally harmful activities surrounding mining, resource extraction, raw material processing, and transport can occur. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How social hierarchy is reproduced across generations has been an important area of inquiry among social scientists. But while scholarship in this area has frequently described how children born on the bottom of the stratification ladder struggle to make it into the middle class, relatively less attention has focused on the reproduction of the middle class. Why do so many youths raised in middle-class families fail to move into, or even aspire to, elite positions? We explore this issue by highlighting the college decision-making process and future aspirations among nineteen middle-class honors students at a large state university. We note how the conceptual tools often employed to explain the reproduction of the working class can be usefully extended to clarify how the structural conditions of middle-class life shape what students come to see as possible futures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although environmental inequality researchers have increased our understanding of race- and class-based environmental inequality in many important ways, few environmental inequality studies ask whether children are disproportionately burdened by environmental pollution or whether poor and minority youth are less likely than their white and wealthier counterparts to spend time in green spaces and the natural world. This gap in the literature undermines the ability of researchers to fully understand and explain environmental inequality. In order to demonstrate the importance of filling this gap, we (a) highlight current research findings from the environmental health, environmental education, and environmental psychology literatures regarding the cognitive, emotional, and physical importance of childhood exposure to nature and (b) summarize the few existing studies that have examined class and race-based inequalities in children's exposure to the natural world and industrial environmental hazards. We then suggest several avenues of research that would, if undertaken, significantly increase our understanding of youth-based environmental inequality. By synthesizing findings across multiple disciplines, we hope to convince environmental inequality researchers of the importance of investigating children's differential exposure to nature, green spaces, and industrial environmental hazards. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study combines individual-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with neighborhood-level environmental hazard data derived from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory to provide the first empirical examination of racial and ethnic differences in migration between neighborhoods with varying levels of environmental pollution. Results indicate that profound racial and ethnic differences in exposure to industrial pollution are maintained more by differences in mobility destinations than by differential effects of pollution on the decision to move. Conditional upon moving, black and Latino householders enter neighborhoods that are significantly more polluted than those accessed by whites, while other-race householders enter neighborhoods with less pollution. These differences cannot be explained by group differences in socioeconomic resources or other micro-level characteristics but are shaped, in part, by group differences in the reaction to non-white populations that tend to be concentrated in highly polluted areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether the relationship between neighborhood and household income levels and neighborhood hazard levels varies according to neighborhood and household racial composition. Using a national, census tract-level dataset, we find that black, white, and Hispanic households with similar incomes live in neighborhoods of dissimilar environmental quality, that the association between neighborhood and household income levels and neighborhood hazard levels varies according to neighborhood and household racial composition, and that increases in neighborhood and household income levels are more strongly associated with declining hazard levels in black neighborhoods and households than in white neighborhoods and households. These findings contradict Wilson's claim that the significance of race has declined in the modern industrial period and demonstrate that environmental racial inequality is not the product of racial income inequality. In addition, these findings suggest that the impact of higher incomes on black/white proximity to environmental hazards has less to do with increases in white geographic mobility (relative to black geographic mobility) than with the ability of higher income blacks to escape the highly polluted, disorganized, and deteriorated neighborhoods to which so many low income blacks are confined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research investigates the influence of belly dance on participants' gender identity and involvement in social activism. We focus specifically on the development of oppositional identity as a precursor to social movement activity. In doing so, we interrogate the concept of free spaces - the extent to which leisure communities can be the basis for such spaces, and to investigate distinctions among various types of free spaces - most specifically, variations in terms of their inclusiveness or exclusiveness. Our research focuses on the belly dance community in Utah's Wasatch Front metropolitan areas (Salt Lake-Ogden and Orem-Provo), and comprises two components: a survey questionnaire for participants and a limited series of qualitative interviews with instructors. The research is ongoing; this paper presents an initial draft outlining our theoretical concerns, and points to initial (pre-systematic) analysis of survey data. We will have full preliminary analyses to present in August. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three questions underlie much environmental sociology research. Why do individuals, communities, and societies behave in environmentally destructive ways? What motivates environmentally sustainable behavior? And what would it take to get individuals, communities, and societies to behave in environmentally sustainable ways? Two approaches have been taken to answer these questions. One approach examines the relationship between pro-environmental attitudes, values, and behavior. The second focuses on societies' structural arrangements (the way societies are organized) and the ways in which these arrangements restrict individual and organizational choice, affect individual's attitudes, values, and beliefs, and shape the incentives individuals, communities, and organizations face. The first approach is problematic because research has shown that pro-environmental attitudes, values and beliefs are only weakly associated with pro-environmental behaviors. The second approach is problematic because it tends to be too abstract to be useful in many situations. This paper attempts to overcome the limitations of these two approaches by combining insights from economic, political and environmental sociology to (a) develop a new structural model of the relationship between humans and the environment and (b) identify elite-based organizations and networks that make positive environmental change difficult to implement. More specifically, this paper focuses on the role that economic and political inequality, organizational networks, and undemocratic decision making play in producing specific environmental outcomes, including global warming, topsoil loss, and agricultural pollution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black/white gaps in cognitive skills are considerable by adolescence and even early childhood, but when and why do they emerge? We address this question by comparing black and white infants' mental skills at two points in time (9 and 24 months) with the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studyâ?”Birth Cohort of 2001. We find virtually no black/white difference in cognitive skills at nine months of age but sizeable gaps at twenty-four months. This pattern suggests that policies aimed toward reducing the black/white gap should target this very early period of life. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because movements face distinct challenges in different phases, we expect predominant organizational forms to shift across phases (Minkoff 1994). While all phases confront strategic dilemmas (Jasper 2004), they can be particularly acute in emergent phases when collective actors seek to initiate and accelerate opportunity spirals. Organizational innovation can be particularly important at those junctures (Clemens 1993). This research identifies the specific strategic challenges that characterize such an emergent phase and how leaders attempted to resolve them through organizational innovation - i.e. the design and promotion of a new model to facilitate movement transition. Empirically, the research presents a case study of widespread mobilization around issues of race relations during World War II, known collectively as the civic unity movement, based on the promotion of local race relations committees (RRCs) in hundreds of American cities. I trace the processes by which the RRC model was designed and promoted by a hub of movement leaders in Chicago. I identify two central strategic dilemmas that they confronted, related to compromised opportunities of the war era: first, the needs to simultaneously promote political legitimacy and political opposition; and, second, the need to cultivate state commitment while mobilizing to make claims upon it. I explain the way that the RRC model was designed to resolve those dilemmas so as to facilitate movement development and transition. Findings add to and revise our understanding of the relationship between organizational models, strategic choice, and movement development. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the influence of hazardous industrial facilities on psychological distress among individuals living in the Detroit, Michigan metropolitan area. It is observed that social contexts directly influence the socioeconomic positions of individuals. It is then translated into individual-level health behaviors. Detroit residents view toxic facilities as a big problem and do not feel like living in close proximity to these facilities. This increasing concern for environmental equality and a desire to leave areas associated with industrial production suggests that proximity to toxic facilities will be interpreted as a stressor that can deeply affect psychological well being.

This article presents information on the measurement of pollution proximity in environmental inequality research. Although the methodological techniques researchers have used to make this determination improved considerably over time but researchers still face several critical methodological challenges. Environmental inequality researchers have studied the distribution of social groups around a variety of environmental hazards including hazardous waste sites, manufacturing facilities and others. Most studies support the hypothesis that lower income and minority neighborhoods are disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards.

This note presents a rationale for integrating attention to research methods into diversity breadth requirement courses – an emphasis that contrasts with the dominant focus on experiential modes of learning in such courses. It also presents several strategies for doing so, including: an introductory lecture linking stereotypes to sample biases and spurious correlations; a brief discussion of course material presentation; and a description of a semester project that uses qualitative interviews to explore issues of identity formation. The basic argument is that research methods can be presented as a model for systematic inquiry and critical thinking about issues of race/ethnicity, class and gender – rather than as a set of research-specific "tools" – and as such,offer useful models for students in learning about diversity beyond the course that help to fulfill the common goals of such requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "acting white" hypothesis suggests that black adolescents put forth little effort toward schooling because they fear sanctions from their peers. The black peer group, the argument goes, eschews educational goals as a way of maintaining a distinct black identity; doing well in school threatens that identity. The merits of the "acting white" hypothesis, however, are disputed among scholars because of key methodological issues. Drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we introduce a better way to gauge "sanctioning" among peers and we directly measure the racial composition of students' peer groups. The results contradict the "acting white" hypothesis, showing that black students enjoy greater popularity among peers when they are academically successful than when they are not. Indeed, the gain in popularity associated with academic success appears stronger for black students with all-black peer groups than for black students with all-white peer groups. We discuss the implications for understanding black/white gaps in educational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Present draft is based on preliminary analyses. . . . Research describing the macro-organizational structure of the Civil Rights movement has focused on organizational distinctions in terms of issue and tactical orientation, how those distinctions align along a political dimension, and ultimately their significance for movement development and outcomes. That research has been shaped by patterns observed in the mature and declining phases of the movement. In contrast, we know relatively little about such structures in the preliminary (pre-mass mobilization) phase. This research extends macro-organizational analysis temporally backward, prior to the era of mass mobilization, to analyze issue and tactical patterns (orientation, specialization, and political alignment) within the field of intergroup relations ? a coordinated field of formal organizations "concerned with the improvement of racial, religious, ethnic or cultural relations in the United States." This analysis is based on programmatic information on a subset of 445 independent organizations listed in a directory compiled by the American Council on Race Relations in 1949. Patterns confirm the expected issue and tactical truncation of the "radical" end of the political spectrum, but also suggest the potential for a field of "facilitating" organizations that have potentially important implications for an emerging movement, and which complicate any simplistic political distinctions among organizations. Concluding discussion focuses on implications for understanding political and social movements generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on studies of single-parent families, some pundits and scholars have suggested that fathers and mothers play unique and important roles in the socialization of their children. However, these conclusions have been drawn from studies that were not designed to test whether fathers and mothers parent differently; rather, studies that compare single-mother families to two-parent families have been used to support claims of important sex-based differences in parenting. However, results that show that children in single-mother families tend to fare worse than those in two-parent families may be due to the absence of a second parent, regardless of that parent?s sex, rather than the specific absence of a father?s sex-typed parenting. In this paper, we describe two possible explanations for potential sex-based parenting behaviors: the individualist and structuralist perspectives. The individualist perspective posits that sex differences in behavior are largely driven by immutable characteristics within men and women, while the structuralist view argues that gendered contexts are the primary generator of behavior differences. We test these theories and extend knowledge about the behaviors of single parents and their children?s outcomes by comparing single mothers and single fathers in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten Cohort). Results suggest that although there are small differences in the parenting behaviors of single mothers and single fathers, these differences do not necessarily follow the predictions of the individualist perspective (that fathers are better disciplinarians, etc.) and do not necessarily translate to deficits for the children in one family type versus the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By now, the growth in obesity among American children over the last several decades and the potential health risks associated with childhood obesity have become well documented. Although some critics have implicated schools as contributing to this health problem, it is unclear whether these attributions are appropriately directed. We address this issue by estimating children?s growth in BMI (Body Mass Index) when school is in session (during the academic year) versus when it is not (during the summer), using a national sample of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. We find that, during the summer, children?s monthly BMI gain is three times as large, and nine times as variable, as during the school year. This suggests that not just average BMI, but also the gaps between normal and overweight children, grow fastest when school is not in session. Although most BMI differences are not associated with race or class, we do find that the black-white BMI gap grows more slowly when school is in session than when it is not. We conclude that when it comes to the problem of childhood obesity, the most important problems, and the most important interventions, must have their effects when school is not in session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To many it is obvious which schools are failing?those whose students perform poorly on achievement tests. But this method of evaluating schools mixes school (e.g., teachers) and non-school (e.g., home and neighborhood) influences in unknown ways. We introduce a new measure, ?impact,? designed to separate school and non-school contributions to learning. Our measure of school ?impact? is straightforward ? the degree to which schools increase their students? rates of learning when school is in session versus when it is not. Assessing school ?impact? with data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of 1998-98, we show how conclusions about which schools are failing are altered substantially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 15-20 years a steadily increasing number of researchers have investigated the relationship between neighborhood demographic composition and environmental hazard presence. However, relatively few researchers have attempted to determine why the distribution of social groups around environmental hazards takes the form that it does or why some studies find strong evidence of environmental racial inequality while others do not. One possible explanation for why some studies find strong evidence of environmental racial inequality while others do not is that environmental racial inequality levels vary from one location to another. In order to see if this is the case, I compare environmental racial inequality levels in 14 major metropolitan areas in the United States, holding the unit of analysis, type of hazard, type of region, and comparison population constant across metropolitan areas. Correlation analyses demonstrate that environmental racial inequality levels do vary across metropolitan areas and regions of the country. Thus, after presenting these analyses, I test hypotheses that make predictions about the determinants of this variation. Finally, I use metropolitan area tract maps to identify additional factors that may play a role in shaping urban environmental racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that the conclusions environmental inequality researchers draw vary according to the definitions of environmental inequality they employ and that researchers can use a single set of results to test for the existence of multiple forms of environmental inequality. In order to illustrate these points, I set forth five definitions of environmental inequality, discuss the kinds of evidence we must obtain in order to determine whether each form of environmental inequality exists, and show how conclusions drawn from several recent environmental inequality studies, including my own, vary depending on the definition of environmental inequality we employ. My goal is not to show that any one definition is superior to the others; nor am I trying to generalize from the studies reported here to a broader set of research findings. Instead, my goal is to a) show that we can use a single set of results to address a variety of environmental justice concerns and b) demonstrate that our interpretations of environmental inequality research have been too narrowly focused on one set of environmental inequality outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their relatively poor school performance, blacks offer surprisingly pro-schooling answers to a wide range of survey questions. Mickelson's solution is that attitudes are multidimensional (i.e., abstract and concrete) and that when we focus on attitudes that matter for educational success (concrete), the paradox is resolved. This explanation has shaped scholars' views for more than a decade and prompted many to view blacks' positive attitudes with skepticism. But we describe several problems with this explanation and we clarify how an error in logic--using a group-level paradox to infer attitude/behavior inconsistency at the individual-level--has led to the current confusion. We then use the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to replicate the group-level paradox, showing that eighth grade black students expect to graduate college at a rate comparable to their white counterparts, yet are less likely to have done so twelve years later. But at the individual-level black students' reported expectations are useful predictors of future achievement. There is no need to view blacks' reports to survey researchers with skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audubon Wyoming's Community Naturalist Program is revolutionizing the way Conservation Education is taught. Our Community Naturalists provide a "classroom without walls" that gives Wyomingites tangible education focusing on environmental issues, as well as developing potential solutions for addressing these environmental issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interesting problem that arises when studying urban environmental inequality is that industrial facilities produce jobs as well as pollution, leading some researchers to ask whether industrial facilities are socially desirable, socially undesirable, or both, and whether the pollution burdens and employment benefits of industrial activity are borne by the same individuals, neighborhoods, and social group. Although these are important questions, no study that I am aware of has attempted to determine whether industrial facility employment or pollution is a stronger predictor of neighborhood demographic composition. This paper addresses this shortcoming in the literature by asking whether industrial facility pollution or employment is a stronger predictor of neighborhood racial composition in the Detroit metropolitan area in 2000. Results indicate that industrial facility pollution, proximity, and employment are all statistically significant predictors of the percentage of blacks in a tract. The strength of the association between air pollutant concentration levels and percent black is virtually the same as the strength of the association between factory employment opportunities and percent black. However, both of the facility proximity indicators used in this study are more strongly associated with percent black than is industrial employment opportunities. Moreover, it is likely that the variable used to measure employment opportunities overestimates the industrial employment opportunities available to blacks. Thus, although Detroit's black neighborhoods experience both employment benefits and pollution burdens from local industrial activity, the pollution burdens appear to outweigh the employment benefits. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study combines micro-level data on families with children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with neighborhood-level industrial hazard data from the Environmental Protection Agency to examine both the association between family structure and residential proximity to neighborhood pollution and the micro-level, residential mobility processes that likely lead to differential pollution proximity across family types. Results indicate the existence of significant family status differences in household proximity to industrial pollution in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1987 and 2005, with single-mother families experiencing neighborhood pollution levels that are on average 49% greater than those experienced by married-parent families and 39% greater than those faced by single-father families. This pollution gap persists with controls for socioeconomic resources, sociodemographic characteristics, and householder race/ethnicity. Examination of underlying migration patterns further reveals that single-mother families move into neighborhoods with significantly higher pollution levels than do married parent families, that immobile single-mother families live in neighborhoods that experience more dramatic pollution increases than do other immobile families with children, and that family status differences in proximity to neighborhood pollution are maintained more by these mobility and immobility differences than by family status variations in the likelihood of moving out of polluted neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links individual- and household-level data from the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) with neighborhood-level environmental hazard data derived from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) in order to determine whether regional differences in environmental inequality exist at the household level. The data cover nearly every metropolitan area in the contiguous U.S. from 1990-2005, we divide the contiguous U.S. into nine regions, and we use Geographic Information System (GIS) software to weight the potential impact of each TRI facility inversely according to geographic distance. Results indicate that the existence and magnitude of environmental racial inequality, as well as the role that race, income and other household characteristics play in shaping this inequality, vary in important ways across the nine regions of the country. This has important implications for environmental inequality and public health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]