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Dysfunctional work environments are characterized by the presence of psycho-social risks, such as workplace bullying (WB): hostile, systematic, and planned behaviors toward other workers in order to get them to leave the organization they work for. The aims of this study are (1) to analyze the prevalence of WB in a sample of teachers and (2) to determine the relationship between socio-demographic and socio-labor variables in relation to three study groups: teacher victims of WB, violent behaviors, and null or low violence. The sample consists of 3442 teachers working in publicly regulated educational centers located in the province of Valencia (Spain). Estimated frequencies, cross-tabulations, and effect sizes were analyzed using SPSS 24. The following results were obtained: (1) 12.26% were potential WB cases, and (2) potential victims of WB were not influenced by the socio-demographic and socio-labor variables proposed. The results obtained did not make it possible to determine a single profile of a teacher victim of WB. It is recommended that training protocols be developed to help teachers recognize and manage WB more effectively. This will improve their health, well-being, and performance in educational centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research suggests that victimization risk is higher among urban residents. Violence against women is a notable exception in this trend. While the literature does indicate that rural women are at equal risk for violent victimization, it does not differentiate between types of non-urban spaces (exurbs, suburbs, small towns, dispersed rural). We use a five-category measure of rural-urban location articulated land use to disentangle victim–offender relationship distribution using a female victim sample from the 1996–2005 United States National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In the most rural areas (dispersed rural locations), women are most likely to be victimized by friends or acquaintances. The proportion of women victimized by strangers in dispersed rural locations is very low. As urbanicity increases, so does the proportion of women victimized by strangers. The findings indicate that victim–offender relationships may be dictated by proximity. In dispersed rural locations, there are comparatively fewer people unknown to the victim than in central city locations. Consequently, proximity dictates that offenders in dispersed rural locations are unlikely to be strangers. The articulated land use measure ensures that the differences between types of rural and suburban locations are identified. Future research should consider the impact of proximity on rural victimization and increased specificity in rural measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives : Individual- and school-level factors associated with youth being stopped, searched, or arrested in school are identified. Correlates of community-based contact are also examined. Methods : Longitudinal student surveys and corresponding school-level data come from 21 middle and high schools in 6 districts in St. Louis County, Missouri. Multilevel multinomial logistic regression was used to assess factors related to a three-category dependent variable, distinguishing youth with: (1) no police contact, (2) in-school contact, and (3) out-of-school contact. Independent variables capture student-level demographics, behavior, experiences, and perceptions and school-level characteristics and practices. Results : Factors associated with in-school contact include substance use, peer associations, prior contact, and prior school sanctions. Odds of school-based contact also increase when youth are less aware of school rules and perceive greater disorder. Among school-level characteristics, only officers responding to school problems is significantly associated with in-school contact. Conclusions : There is some consistency in individual-level factors associated with police contact across locations, particularly related to prior sanctions, but findings highlight potential mechanisms that vary across contexts. This study also provides evidence that some schoolwide responses may contribute to youth's likelihood of having police contact in school, but solutions should consider the fluidity of contact in schools and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people constitute the largest minority group in the United States, and disability discrimination is prohibited under federal law. Nevertheless, disability has received limited attention in the sociology of discrimination. We examine disability discrimination in an important gatekeeping interaction: access to public education. In an audit study of more than 20,000 public schools, we sent emails to principals from fictitious prospective parents asking for a school tour, varying the child's disability status and gender and the parent's race. Principals were significantly less likely to respond when the child had a disability, especially when the email came from a Black (rather than White) parent. A survey experiment with 578 principals revealed possible mechanisms. Principals viewed disabled students as more likely to impose a significant burden on schools, but disabled Black students faced an additional disadvantage due to stereotypes of their parents, who were perceived to be less valuable future members of the school community in terms of fundraising, volunteering, and other forms of engagement to support the school. Our results highlight that discrimination against people with disabilities begins long before the labor market and illuminate how the intersection between disability and race shapes inequalities in educational access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preparing young people for citizenship requires significant change in our public schools, including a commitment to preparation of the education workforce for today's diverse learners and paying more attention to culture and identity in what is taught. Schools should be designed and organized in ways that help students understand the obligations that members of a society owe one another. Policy can be an important lever in promoting changes that foster civic reasoning and engagement: curriculum policies can support civic reasoning and discourse within and across subject areas, assessments can support civic reasoning through competency-based approaches, and well-designed graduation requirements can reinforce attention to civic learning. This article describes various frameworks to guide policy development, each with the potential to prepare young people more fully for citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass shootings in the U.S. elicit strong reactions and often are followed by demands for preventive or ameliorative policy action. Often, however, little change is made to policy, and the cycle of tragedy and passionate discourse is left to start anew. We assess the efficacy of a range of specific policies that may help to prevent mass shootings or mitigate their harms: we review empirical evidence on their effectiveness and consider arguments that both proponents and opponents of these policies bring to bear on the public discourse. We conclude that extant evidence and policy ideas that are on the table now can, in fact, point to a productive way forward: we argue for a proactive, layered approach to policy implementation that minimizes risks and impacts and capitalizes on effective interventions that enjoy broad public support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that the development of cognitive and social skills in preschool predicts school readiness in kindergarten. However, most longitudinal studies are short-term, tracking children's development only through the early elementary school years. This study aims to investigate the long-term impact of preschool predictors, intelligence, and mothers' education on grade six school performance. This study presents the results of an eight-year-long longitudinal study. The sample includes 202 Hungarian children (89 boys) from a disadvantaged region of southeastern Hungary. The independent variables were the preschool measures: DIFER (Diagnostic System for Assessing Development), a widely used, standardized school readiness test that measures cognitive and social skills; the Raven intelligence test; and socioeconomic status. The dependent variables in grade six were: National Standardized tests in math and reading (NABC, National Assessment of Basic Competencies) and school grades (GPA). Cronbach's alpha reliability of each test is above 0.76. Correlations and a series of multiple regressions were used for analysis. All three independent variables have significant predictive power for school performance in sixth grade. DIFER skills were the best predictors for reading achievement, intelligence for math achievement, and GPA was best predicted by mothers' education. The results show that developing preschool skills, mothers' education and IQ in preschool are essential to long-term learning success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives : Using the cumulative disadvantage theoretical framework, the current study explores whether school suspension and expulsion provide an indirect path through which race and ethnicity affect the likelihood of experiencing arrest, any incarceration, and long-term incarceration in adulthood. Methods : To address these issues, we use data from Waves I, II, and IV of the Add Health survey (N = 14,484), and we employ generalized multilevel structural equation models and parametric regression methods using counterfactual definitions to estimate direct and indirect pathways. Results : We observe that Black (but not Latinx) individuals are consistently more likely than White persons to experience exclusionary school discipline and criminal justice involvement. However, we find a path through which race and Latinx ethnicity indirectly affect the odds of adulthood arrest and incarceration through school discipline. Conclusions : Disparate exposure to school suspension and expulsion experienced by minority youth contributes to racial and ethnic inequalities in justice system involvement. By examining indirect paths to multiple criminal justice consequences along a continuum of punitiveness, this study shows how discipline amplifies cumulative disadvantage during adulthood for Black and, to a lesser extent, Latinx individuals who are disproportionately funneled through the "school-to-prison pipeline." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law enforcement officers (often called school resource officers or SROs) are an increasingly common feature in schools across the United States. Although SROs' roles vary across school contexts, there has been little examination of why. One possible explanation is that SROs perceive threats differently in different school contexts and that the racial composition of schools may motivate these differences. To investigate this possibility, this study analyzes interviews with 73 SROs from two different school districts that encompass schools with a variety of racial compositions. Across both districts, SROs perceived three major categories of threats: student-based, intruder-based, and environment-based threats. However, the focus and perceived severity of the threats varied across districts such that SROs in the district with a larger proportion of White students were primarily concerned about external threats (i.e. intruder-based and environment-based) that might harm the students, whereas SROs in the district with a larger proportion of Black students were primarily concerned with students themselves as threats. We consider how these results relate to understandings of school security, inequality among students, racially disparate experiences with school policing, and school and policing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed evidence on the relationship between school closure and COVID-19 prevalence could reflect focus on large-scale levels of geography, limited ability to address endogeneity, and demographic variation. Using county-level Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 data through June 15, 2020, two matching strategies address potential heterogeneity: nearest geographic neighbor and propensity scores. Within nearest neighboring pairs in different states with different school closure timing, each additional day from a county's first case until state-ordered school closure is related to 1.5 to 2.4 percent higher cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita (1,227–1,972 deaths for a county with median population and deaths/capita). Results are consistent using propensity score matching, COVID-19 data from two alternative sources, and additional sensitivity analyses. School closure is more strongly related to COVID-19 deaths in counties with a high concentration of Black or poor residents, suggesting schools play an unequal role in transmission and earlier school closure is related to fewer lives lost in disadvantaged counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Social scientists have devoted much theoretical and empirical attention to studying the correlates of bullying perpetration and victimization. Much less attention has been devoted to studying race differences in the correlates of bullying behaviors despite the importance of these when designing effective and focused prevention and intervention programs. Methods: Utilizing data from the 2009 to 2010 Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study in the United States, this study applies Bronfenbrenner's ecological model to bullying in order to examine how various interrelated systems are associated with bullying perpetration, victimization, and their concordance in a nationally representative sample of adolescents. Results: Findings shown important similarities, as well as some differences, across race in how key parental and peer relationships relate to aspects of involvement in bullying. Directions for future research are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The low sensitivity and false-negative results of nucleic acid testing greatly affect its performance in diagnosing and discharging patients with coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Chest computed tomography (CT)-based evaluation of pneumonia may indicate a need for isolation. Therefore, this radiologic modality plays an important role in managing patients with suspected COVID-19. Meanwhile, deep learning (DL) technology has been successful in detecting various imaging features of chest CT. This study applied a novel DL technique to standardize the discharge criteria of COVID-19 patients with consecutive negative respiratory pathogen nucleic acid test results at a "square cabin" hospital.Patients and Methods: DL was used to evaluate the chest CT scans of 270 hospitalized COVID-19 patients who had two consecutive negative nucleic acid tests (sampling interval >1 day). The CT scans evaluated were obtained after the patients' second negative test result. The standard criterion determined by DL for patient discharge was a total volume ratio of lesion to lung <50%.Results: The mean number of days between hospitalization and DL was 14.3 (± 2.4). The average intersection over union was 0.7894. Two hundred and thirteen (78.9%) patients exhibited pneumonia, of whom 54.0% (115/213) had mild interstitial fibrosis. Twenty-one, 33, and 4 cases exhibited vascular enlargement, pleural thickening, and mediastinal lymphadenopathy, respectively. Of the latter, 18.8% (40/213) had a total volume ratio of lesions to lung ≥50% according to our severity scale and were monitored continuously in the hospital. Three cases had a positive follow-up nucleic acid test during hospitalization. None of the 230 discharged cases later tested positive or exhibited pneumonia progression.Conclusion: The novel DL enables the accurate management of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and can help avoid cluster transmission or exacerbation in patients with false-negative acid test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence is a leading cause of death among U.S. adults under age 45. There are also 3.3 million living violence victims, most of whom forgo formal health care when injured. We developed and tested a framework to understand why. We argue that violence victims must consider their need for care and three situational factors of victimization that may serve as barriers for care seeking: the victim's relationship to the offender, their victimization history, and the offense committed (sexual vs. nonsexual). In analyses of 9,912 violent victimizations from 8,635 participants in the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1993 to 2017, we found that injury severity and situational factors of victimization independently and interactively predict formal health care use. Even when serious injury occurs, victimizations involving known offenders, repeat victimizations, and sexual violence are less likely than their counterparts to result in formal health care use. We discuss the implications of these findings for victims and health care providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do school security policies affect how safe parents perceive schools to be, and do they influence parental choice behavior? We address these questions using data from a survey that asked U.S. parents to evaluate hypothetical schools whose security systems and student body racial composition were systematically varied, along with other school characteristics. Results indicate that parents identify schools with intensified security measures as less safe. Furthermore, parents are less willing to enroll their children in schools perceived as unsafe, schools with heightened security, and schools with high black enrollment. We discuss the implications of these findings for educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ecological systems and social capital perspectives, this study uses the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort to investigate links between early nonparental caregiver beliefs about early academic skills and children's math and reading achievement in kindergarten with special attention to the children from Latino/a immigrant households. Regression analyses revealed that nonparental caregiver beliefs were associated with academic achievement at kindergarten entry and that types of alignment or misalignment between nonparental caregiver and parental beliefs were differentially associated with math achievement but not reading. Notably, the association between nonparental caregiver beliefs and children's academic achievement was more consequential for children from Latino/a immigrant households. Results suggest that having nonparental caregivers with low early academic skills beliefs may be especially detrimental for children from Latino/a immigrant households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School violence is a significant problem for educators in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and has been recognized as a pervasive problem which affects many individuals. This study analyzed the experiences (characteristics and frequency) of educators in four SIDS in the Caribbean regarding their exposure to school violence. Three hundred self-administered questionnaires were randomly distributed to teachers in Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago regarding the character and frequency of violence at schools. After the data were cleaned, 120 questionnaires were found to contain valid data. Quantitative analyses of these questionnaires revealed a wide range of violent acts at schools in the Caribbean. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents reported having witnessed five or more acts of school violence per month, 33% witnessed three to four acts of school violence per month, and 29% witnessed one to two acts of school violence per month. Weapons of choice for these violent acts included knives, bottles, belts, bottles, fists, and feet. The use of firearms was hardly ever witnessed by the respondents. Analyses also indicated that children as young as 5 years old were involved in school violence; however, there was a concentration of violence at schools perpetrated by students aged 11-15. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study maps 'locally situated' (Twine and Gallagher 2008), contours of whiteness as cultural practice and institutional discourse by examining how white college faculty, staff, and administrators respond to multiracial educational environments and multicultural ideals. Drawing on in depth interviews with thirty white administrators, faculty, and staff, this study finds that these white educators adhered to an intermittent form of color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2009) that enabled them to hold fast to the fiction that race has no meaning in their lives, yet remains the single-most defining dimension of the lives of people of color. This analysis identifies five contextually-embedded manifestations of everyday racism and microconstructions of white supremacy: 1) Whites subscribe to a view of racism as an individualized phenomenon, 2) Whites take a color-blind position regarding race in their daily lives, 3) Whites claim, 'people of color see race, but I do not,' 4) Whites only see race as relevant when called to articulate diversity discourse, 5) Whites see race primarily as a black/white binary. Article concludes with implications of findings for critical multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction for the periodical " Humboldt Journal of Social Relations" is presented in which editor discusses articles within the issue including higher education, racism, and faculty relationship.