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Health care policymakers have cited transportation
barriers as key obstacles to providing health care to
low-income suburbanites, particularly because suburbs have
become home to a growing number of recent immigrants
who are less likely to own cars than their neighbors. In a
suburb of New York City,we conducted a pilot survey of low
income, largely immigrant clients in four public clinics, to
find out how much transportation difficulties limit their
access to primary care. Clients were receptive to the opportunity
to participate in the survey (response rate = 94%).
Nearly one-quarter reported having transportation problems
that had caused them to miss or reschedule a clinic
appointment in the past. Difficulties included limited and
unreliable local bus service, and a tenuous connection to a
car. Our pilot work suggests that this population is willing to
participate in a survey on this topic. Further, since even
among those attending clinic there was significant evidence
of past transportation problems, it suggests that a populationbased
survey would yield information about substantial
transportation barriers to health care.

Objective:To determine clinical characteristics, demographics and short-term outcomes of neonates diagnosed with fetomaternal haemorrhage (FMH).

Design:The authors analysed the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, 1993 to 2008. Singleton births diagnosed with FMH were identified by International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) code 762.3. Descriptive, univariate and multivariable regression analyses were performed to determine the national annual incidence of FMH over time as well as demographics and clinical characteristics of neonates with FMH.ResultsFMH was identified in 12 116 singleton births. Newborns with FMH required high intensity of care: 26.3% received mechanical ventilation, 22.4% received blood product transfusion and 27.8% underwent central line placement. Preterm birth (OR 3.7), placental abruption (OR 9.8) and umbilical cord anomaly (OR 11.4) were risk factors for FMH. Higher patient income was associated with increased likelihood of FMH diagnosis (OR 1.2), and Whites were more likely to be diagnosed than ethnic minorities (OR 1.9). There was reduced frequency of diagnosis in the Southern USA (OR 0.8 vs the Northeastern USA).

Conclusions: Diagnosis of FMH is associated with significant morbidity as well as regional, socioeconomic and racial disparity. Further study is needed to distinguish between diagnostic coding bias and true epidemiology of the disease. This is the first report of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in FMH, which may represent disparities in detection that require national attention. 

The present research examined how a group's gender composition influences intragroup evaluations. Group members evaluated fellow group members and the group as a whole following a shared task. As predicted, no performance differences were found as a function of gender composition, but judgments of individuals’ task contributions, the group's effectiveness, and desire to work with one's group again measured at a 10-week follow-up were increasingly negative as the proportion of women in the group increased. Negative judgments were consistently directed at male and female group members as indicated by no gender of target effects, demonstrating that men, simply by working alongside women, can be detrimentally affected by negative stereotypes about women. Implications for gender diversity in the workplace are discussed.

The Obama administration's budget proposal for fiscal year 2013 (FY 2013) strengthens the national economy by investing in schools, communities and safety net programs. The FY 2013 budget also includes a number of important investments in infrastructure that will spur much needed job growth in a time of economic uncertainty for many working and low-income families. It is critical that such investments take into account the persistently high unemployment in communities of color, and target spending to increase the economic security of the communities most impacted by the "Great Recession." Additionally, the budget includes important changes to the tax code that will lay the foundation for a fairer and more equitable economy.

The Institute of Medicaid has identified equity as a key dimension of quality. Recently, Massachusetts’ Medicaid program (MassHealth) took the unusual step of linking pay-for-performance (P4P) to the reduction of racial/ethnic disparities for hospital care.  We report on early experience with the program, describing the challenges of implementing an ambitious program in a short time frame, with limited resources.  Our findings raise questions about whether P4P as currently constituted is a suitable tool for addressing disparities in hospital care.

Prior researchers have deployed the Vietnam-era draft lottery as an instrument to estimate causal effects of military service on health and earnings. However, household and residential outcomes may be more sensitive to the psychological effects of military service. Using 2SLS analyses of the 2000 Census and the 2005 American Community Survey, we find mixed results for residential stability, housing tenure, and extended family residence. While in the ACS white veterans are less mobile, veteran status has no effect on homeownership. Veteran status reduces extended family living for whites in the Census but increases it for ACS veterans of "other" races.

Objective:Obesity is an enormous public health problem and children have been particularly highlighted for intervention. Of notable concern is the fast-food consumption of children. However, we know very little about how children or their parents make fast-food choices, including how they respond to mandatory calorie labeling. We examined children's and adolescents' fast-food choice and the influence of calorie labels in low-income communities in New York City (NYC) and in a comparison city (Newark, NJ).
Design:Natural experiment: Survey and receipt data were collected from low-income areas in NYC, and Newark, NJ (as a comparison city), before and after mandatory labeling began in NYC. Study restaurants included four of the largest chains located in NYC and Newark: McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and Kentucky Fried Chicken.Subjects:A total of 349 children and adolescents aged 1-17 years who visited the restaurants with their parents (69%) or alone (31%) before or after labeling was introduced. In total, 90% were from racial or ethnic minority groups.
Results:We found no statistically significant differences in calories purchased before and after labeling; many adolescents reported noticing calorie labels after their introduction (57% in NYC) and a few considered the information when ordering (9%). Approximately 35% of adolescents ate fast food six or more times per week and 72% of adolescents reported that taste was the most important factor in their meal selection. Adolescents in our sample reported that parents have some influence on their meal selection.
Conclusions:Adolescents in low-income communities notice calorie information at similar rates as adults, although they report being slightly less responsive to it than adults. We did not find evidence that labeling influenced adolescent food choice or parental food choices for children in this population.

The stakes of political conflict involve contending values and issue definitions as well as policy. Welfare reform was the most important change in American domestic policy since civil rights. Its significance hinges crucially on how participants understood the issue, but existing research fails to resolve what their perceptions were. Most accounts suggest that welfare reform was an ideological contest concerning the proper scope of government, but there are other views. This study gauges the welfare agenda rigorously by coding speakers in congressional hearings on the basis of how they framed the issue and the position they took on it during the six chief episodes of welfare reform that occurred between 1962 and 1996. The reform efforts aroused four distinct divisions. Over time, positions moved rightward, but more important, the dominant issue changed: The ideological debate about government was overtaken by a more practical debate about how to manage welfare. This is the first study to track the substantive meaning of any issue in Congress over an extended period of time using hearing witnesses and a preset analytic scheme.

This summary of legislative action pertinent to the Network's federal policy priorities assesses how noteworthy acts and trends in Congress affect the lives of women of color, their families, and communities. Covering the areas of economic security, social equity, and immigration, the brief provides updates on the status of reproductive rights, job creation, safety net programs, and the DREAM Act, among other topics. The Network's assessment of the policy implications indicates that although the federal legislative landscape offers some progressive opportunities for women of color, obstacles to their advancement loom large amongst ongoing budget and deficit reduction negotiations.

Research suggests advances in students’ multicultural competence following multicultural counseling training. Increasingly, however, multicultural counseling courses have emphasized self awareness, which has increased the affective demands of these courses and student resistance to learning the material. This paper proposes a pedagogical model to enhance multicultural counseling training that attends both to content and process variables that may impact classroom learning. Its fundamental premise is that psychological safety, the belief that the classroom is safe for taking interpersonal risks, must be present for increasing knowledge and awareness around the charged, and often taboo, topics of race and culture in multicultural counseling training. The model integrates research from psychology, education, and management, including identity threat, culture-centered teaching practices, racial identity, and learning frames. The authors conclude with implications for classroom teaching.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the amount of money emigrants sent home soaring to new highs, governments around the world began searching for ways to capitalize on emigration for economic growth, and they looked to nations that already had policies in place. Morocco and Mexico featured prominently as sources of "best practices" in this area, with tailor-made financial instruments that brought migrants into the banking system, captured remittances for national development projects, fostered partnerships with emigrants for infrastructure design and provision, hosted transnational forums for development planning, and emboldened cross-border political lobbies.

In Creative State, Natasha Iskander chronicles how these innovative policies emerged and evolved over forty years. She reveals that the Moroccan and Mexican policies emulated as models of excellence were not initially devised to link emigration to development, but rather were deployed to strengthen both governments' domestic hold on power. The process of policy design, however, was so iterative and improvisational that neither the governments nor their migrant constituencies ever predicted, much less intended, the ways the new initiatives would gradually but fundamentally redefine nationhood, development, and citizenship. Morocco's and Mexico's experiences with migration and development policy demonstrate that far from being a prosaic institution resistant to change, the state can be a remarkable site of creativity, an essential but often overlooked component of good governance.

This paper examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.  We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places, but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for employment. To explain the role of local institutions in shaping differences in skill development experience and opportunities, we draw on the concept of tacit skill, a term that is rarely incorporated into studies of the labor market participation of less educated immigrants. We argue that innovative pathways that Latino immigrant workers have created to develop tacit skill can strengthen advocacy planning efforts aimed at improving employment opportunities and working conditions for marginalized workers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike.

Objective: To report experimental impacts of a universal, integrated school-based intervention in social–emotional learning and literacy development on change over 1 school year in 3rd-grade children's social–emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. Method: This study employed a school-randomized, experimental design and included 942 3rd-grade children (49% boys; 45.6% Hispanic/Latino, 41.1% Black/African American, 4.7% non-Hispanic White, and 8.6% other racial/ethnic groups, including Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American) in 18 New York City public elementary schools. Data on children's social–cognitive processes (e.g., hostile attribution biases), behavioral symptomatology (e.g., conduct problems), and literacy skills and academic achievement (e.g., reading achievement) were collected in the fall and spring of 1 school year. Results: There were main effects of the 4Rs Program after 1 year on only 2 of the 13 outcomes examined. These include children's self-reports of hostile attributional biases (Cohen's d = 0.20) and depression ( d = 0.24). As expected based on program and developmental theory, there were impacts of the intervention for those children identified by teachers at baseline with the highest levels of aggression ( d = 0.32–0.59) on 4 other outcomes: children's self-reports of aggressive fantasies, teacher reports of academic skills, reading achievement scaled scores, and children's attendance. Conclusions: This report of effects of the 4Rs intervention on individual children across domains of functioning after 1 school year represents an important first step in establishing a better understanding of what is achievable by a schoolwide intervention such as the 4Rs in its earliest stages of unfolding. The first-year impacts, combined with our knowledge of sustained and expanded effects after a second year, provide evidence that this intervention may be initiating positive developmental cascades both in the general population of students and among those at highest behavioral risk.

This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for employment. To explain the role of local institutions in shaping differences in skill development experience and opportunities, we draw on the concept of tacit skill, a term that is rarely incorporated into studies of the labor market participation of less educated immigrants. We argue that innovative pathways that Latino immigrant workers have created to develop tacit skill can strengthen advocacy planning efforts aimed at improving employment opportunities and working conditions for marginalized workers, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.

Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility—the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities—have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9–12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago—the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity.

In 2005, immigrants exceeded 12% of the US population, with the highest concentrations in large metropolitan areas. While considerable research has focused on how immigrants affect local wages and housing prices, less research has asked how immigrants fare in US urban public schools. Previous studies find that foreign-born students outperform native-born students in their elementary and middle school years, but urban policymakers and practitioners continue to raise concerns about educational outcomes of immigrants arriving in their high school years.

The authors use data on a large cohort of New York City (NYC) public high school students to examine how the performance of students who immigrate during high school (teen immigrants) differs from that of students who immigrate during middle school (tween immigrants) or elementary school (child immigrants), relative to otherwise similar native-born students. Contrary to prior studies, their difference-in-difference estimates suggest that, ceteris paribus, teen immigrants do well compared to native-born migrants, and that the foreign-born advantage is relatively large among the teen (im)migrants. That said, their findings provide cause for concern about the performance of limited English proficient students, blacks and Hispanics and, importantly, teen migrants. In particular, switching school districts in the high school years - that is, student mobility across school districts - may be more detrimental than immigration per se. Results are robust to alternative specifications and cohorts, including a cohort of Miami students.

This brief analyzes retirement readiness among racial and ethnic minority women using measures of wage disparities and gaps, wealth accumulation and labor segmentation. This brief recommends strategies at local, state and federal levels to ensure the economic security of women of color in retirement.

Purpose

This study investigates the degree to which the racial composition of the school environment may influence the body mass index (BMI) of children aged 10 to 18 years. This research may be viewed as extending prior work that has found that the prevalence of risk behaviors among nonwhite adolescents is influenced by exposure to white adolescents.

Methods

This research used data from the Survey of Adults and Youth, which was conducted as part of the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Urban Health Initiative. The study population for this analysis is comprised of parent and child respondents in the 2004 to 2005 survey wave who lived in one of the five program cities: Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Richmond. We constructed two-level school random effects models and added school and census tract-level variables that describe the racial composition of the residential community and the school attended.

Results

Black and Hispanic adolescent girls who attend schools with a mostly nonwhite student body have higher BMIs than do their white counterparts. However, black girls in predominately white schools do not have higher BMIs than white girls. Further, black and Hispanic girls whose schoolmates are predominately white have significantly lower BMIs than black and Hispanic girls in schools where fewer than half the students are white. These associations are not found among boys, and are net of a broad variety of individual, household, and group level characteristics.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that the BMI of minority adolescent girls is influenced by the norms of the social environment.

The timing of this volume could not be more opportune. It is based on a 2007 conference to honor the work of Karl "Chip" Case, who is renowned for his scientific contributions to the economics of housing and public policy. The chapters analyze risk in the housing market, the regulation of housing markets by government, and other issues in U.S. housing policy. Chapters investigate derivative markets; the role that home equity insurance can play in reducing risk; the role that the regulation of government-sponsored enterprises has played in extending credit to home purchasers in low-income neighborhoods; and the growth in the market for subprime mortgages. The impact of local zoning regulations on housing prices and new construction is also considered. This is a must read during a time of restructuring our nation’s system of housing finance.

 In March 2009, The Network in collaboration with the New York Women's Foundation will release a new report on women living in poverty in New York City.  The dynamic study will include qualitative data as well as narratives from women about the impact of poverty on communities and families.  The report will help inform funding priorities for the Foundation.

Leadership studies focusing on race–ethnicity provide particularly rich contexts to illuminate the human condition as it pertains to leadership. Yet insights about the leadership experience of people of color from context-rich research within education, communications and black studies remain marginal in the field. Our framework integrates these, categorizing reviewed studies according to the effects of race–ethnicity on perceptions of leadership, the effects of race–ethnicity on leadership enactments, and actors' approach to the social reality of race–ethnicity. The review reveals a gradual convergence of theories of leadership and theories of race–ethnicity as their relational dimensions are increasingly emphasized. A shift in the conceptualization of race–ethnicity in relation to leadership is reported, from a constraint to a personal resource to a simultaneous consideration of its constraining and liberating capacity. Concurrent shifts in the treatment of context, power, agency versus structure and causality are also explored, as are fertile areas for future research.

Purpose – Recent years have witnessed a national policy shift towards involving state and local police in enforcing US federal immigration laws. Critics argue that involving local police in enforcing immigration law will decrease Latino(a) and immigrant residents' willingness to report crime and their cooperation with the police, and will also increase racial profiling and negatively impact documented and undocumented residents. This paper aims to examine Latino(a) residents' perceptions of the police before and after an extended local controversy about involving police in enforcing immigration laws in Costa Mesa, California.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports findings of a before-and-after study in the Westside area of the City of Costa Mesa, California. Methods include Spanish and English language telephone surveys of Latino(a) and non-Latino(a) residents in the Westside (n=169 respondents before and n=91 respondents after), conducted in 2002 and in 2007.

Findings – In survey responses, Latino(a) residents report that they are more likely to be stopped by the police in 2007 compared to 2002. Latino(a) respondents also have more negative perceptions of the police, find the police less helpful, feel less accepted in the community, and say that they are less likely to report crimes after the controversy, compared to before.

Originality/value – The findings show the importance of policies that encourage cooperation with and trust of the police. These results can help inform cities about the potential impacts of involving local police in immigration enforcement.

Racial disparities are a ubiquitous feature of the US medical landscape, with health care delivery substantially segregated by race/ethnicity. Recent evidence from hospitals,1-3 nursing homes,4-5 and physicians' offices6 suggests that those caring for minority patients do not perform as well as those who care for nonminority patients, on average. This evidence is troubling but hardly surprising because the limited resources of those who care for the poor have helped to create and sustain racial disparities. As the United States enters an era of accountability in health care, it is time to consider these familiar circumstances from a new perspective.

Structural equation modeling was used to compare 6 competing theoretically based psychosocial models of the longitudinal association between life stressors and depressive symptoms in a sample of early adolescents (N= 907; 40% Hispanic, 32% Black, and 19% White; mean age at Time 1 = 11.4 years). Only two models fit the data, both of which included paths modeling the effect of depressive symptoms on stressors recall: The mood-congruent cognitive bias model included only depressive symptoms to life stressors paths (DS→S), whereas the fully transactional model included paths representing both the DS→S and stressors to depressive symptoms (S→DS) effects. Social causation models and the stress generation model did not fit the data. Findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for mood-congruent cognitive bias in stressors–depressive symptoms investigations.

Segregation: The Rising Costs for America documents how discriminatory practices in the housing markets through most of the past century, and that continue today, have produced extreme levels of residential segregation that result in significant disparities in access to good jobs, quality education, homeownership attainment and asset accumulation between minority and non-minority households.The book also demonstrates how problems facing minority communities are increasingly important to the nations long-term economic vitality and global competitiveness as a whole. Solutions to the challenges facing the nation in creating a more equitable society are not beyond our ability to design or implement, and it is in the interest of all Americans to support programs aimed at creating a more just society.The book is uniquely valuable to students in the social sciences and public policy, as well as to policy makers, and city planners.

Leading housing researchers build upon decades of experience, research, and evaluation to inform our understanding of the nations rental housing challenges and what can be done about them. It thoughtfully addresses not only present issues affecting rental housing, but also viable solutions.

The goal of this book, the first in a series, is to bring policymakers, practitioners, and scholars up to speed on the state of knowledge on various aspects of urban and regional policy. What do we know about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, or experiments on key social and economic problems facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas? What can we say about what works, what doesn’t, and why? And what does this knowledge and experience imply for future policy questions?

The authors take a fresh look at several different issues (e.g., economic development, education, land use) and conceptualize how each should be thought of. Once the contributors have presented the essence of what is known, as well as the likely implications, they identify the knowledge gaps that need to be filled for the successful formulation and implementation of urban and regional policy.

This paper offers new empirical evidence about the prospects of lower-income, US urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. Using the Neighborhood Change Database, which offers a balanced panel of census tracts with consistent boundaries from 1970 to 2000 for all metropolitan areas in the US, evidence is found of a significant shift in the fortunes of lower-income, urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. There was a notable increase in the 1990s in the proportion of lower-income and poor neighbourhoods experiencing a gain in economic status. Secondly, in terms of geographical patterns, it is found that this upgrading occurred throughout the country, not just in selected regions or cities. Finally, it is found that the determinants of changes in lower-income, urban neighbourhoods shifted during the 1990s. In contrast to earlier decades, both the share of Blacks and the poverty rate were positively related to subsequent economic gain in these neighbourhoods during the 1990s.

The authors use a rich data set on New York City public elementary schools to explore how changes in immigrant representation have played out at the school level, providing a set of stylistic facts about the magnitude and nature of demographic changes in urban schools. They find that while the city experienced an overall increase in its immigrant representation over the 5 years studied, its elementary schools did not. Although the average school experienced little change during this period, a significant minority of schools saw sizable shifts. The change does not mirror the White flight and 'tipping' associated with desegregation but rather suggests a tendency to stabilize, with declines in immigrant enrollments concentrated in schools with larger immigrant populations at the outset. The authors also find that changes in the immigrant shares influence the composition of the school's students, and that overall school demographic changes do not mirror grade-level changes within schools.

American politics is most notably characterized by the heated debates on constitutional interpretation at the core of its ever-raging culture wars, and the coverage of these lingering disputes is often inundated with public-opinion polls. Yet for all their prominence in contemporary society, there has never been an all-inclusive, systematic study of public opinion and how it impacts the courts and electoral politics. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of American public opinion on the key constitutional controversies of the 20th century, including desegregation, school prayer, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, gay rights, assisted suicide, and national security, to name just a few. With chapters focusing on each issue in-depth, the book utilizes public-opinion data to illustrate these contemporary debates, methodically examining each one and how public attitudes have shifted over time, especially in the wake of prominent Supreme Court decisions. The chapters join the “popular constitutionalism” debate between those who advocate a dominant role for courts in constitutional adjudication and those who prefer a more pluralized constitutional discourse. Each chapter also details the gap between the public and the Supreme Court on these hotly contested issues and analyzes how and why this divergence of opinion has grown or shrunk over the last fifty years.

In this paper, we consider neighborhood selection as a social process central to the reproduction of racial inequality in neighborhood attainment. We formulate a multilevel model that decomposes multiple sources of stability and change in longitudinal trajectories of achieved neighborhood income among nearly 4,000 Chicago families followed for up to seven years wherever they moved in the United States. Even after we adjust for a comprehensive set of fixed and time-varying covariates, racial inequality in neighborhood attainment is replicated by movers and stayers alike. We also study the emergent consequences of mobility pathways for neighborhood-level structure. The temporal sorting by individuals of different racial and ethnic groups combines to yield a structural pattern of flows between neighborhoods that generates virtually nonoverlapping income distributions and little exchange between minority and white areas. Selection and racially shaped hierarchies are thus mutually constituted and account for an apparent equilibrium of neighborhood inequality.

This article examines the extent to which family wealth affects the Black–White test score gap for young children based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (aged 3–12). This study found little evidence that wealth mediated the Black–White test scores gaps, which were eliminated when child and family demographic covariates were held constant. However, family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers and a stronger association with school-aged children’s math than on their reading scores. Liquid assets, particularly holdings in stocks or mutual funds, were positively associated with school-aged children’s test scores. Family wealth was associated with a higher quality home environment, better parenting behavior, and children’s private school attendance.

For decades, social scientists have relied on sibling correlations as indicative of the effect of “global family background” on socioeconomic status. This study advances this line of inquiry by drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze racial differences in siblings' labor market and socioeconomic outcomes. We find that African Americans have lower sibling correlations in labor market earnings and family income than whites. Across the life course, African American siblings move toward greater resemblance than whites. These findings suggest that the effect of family background on socioeconomic outcomes is weaker for African Americans than for whites. Volatility in earlier career stages may suppress the effect of family background on labor market outcomes, and this dynamic is especially pronounced for African Americans who lack resources to insulate themselves from volatile events.

How fair are this country's urban housing markets and how effective has the government been at what it is charged to do in ensuring open and diverse housing options for this country's minority groups? Fragile Rights within Cities: Government, Housing, and Fairness offers a rich, multi-disciplinary assessment of the complex interface of housing, fairness, and government programs aimed at enforcing one of this nation's hallmark civil rights laws - the right to fair and open housing.

Although the No Child Left Behind Act was intended to help "all students meet high academic standards," it is focused on subgroups of low-achieving students. The authors analyze the possible impact of the legislation's requirement for performance reporting by racial subgroup in light of the considerable racial segregation in U.S. schools. In particular, using data on elementary and middle schools in New York State, the authors show that the schools are so highly segregated that more than half are too homogeneous to report test scores for any racial or ethnic subgroups. In addition, they show that the racial achievement gap is greatest across segregated schools rather than within integrated ones. The authors analyze the characteristics of schools that are and are not accountable for subgroups, finding that urban schools and large schools are particularly likely to be accountable, and conclude with implications for the reach of the law and for incentives for school segregation.

We examine the size and distribution of the gap in test scores across races within New York City public schools and the factors that explain these gaps. While gaps are partially explained by differences in student characteristics, such as poverty, differences in schools attended are also important. At the same time, substantial within-school gaps remain and are only partly explained by differences in academic preparation across students from different race groups. Controlling for differences in classrooms attended explains little of the remaining gap, suggesting little role for within-school inequities in resources. There is some evidence that school characteristics matter. Race gaps are negatively correlated with school size - implying small schools may be helpful. In addition, the trade-off between the size and experience of the teaching staff in urban schools may carry unintended consequences for within-school race gaps.

Increasing the representation of Spanish-speaking study participants requires development and dissemination of reliable and valid translated scales. In the current study the construct validity was assessed of the Spanish version of the Crisis in Family Systems-Revised, a measure of contemporary life stressors, with a convenience sample of 377 parents interviewed in a study of childhood asthma, although over half of the respondents did not have children with asthma. Most respondents were foreign-born women between 20 to 60 years old (M = 35, SD = 7). 52% had not completed high school or its equivalent, and 55% reported a household income of $15,000 or less. For a subsample of 25 respondents test-retest reliability was .86 over 2 wk. Reporting more life stressors was associated with greater depressive symptomatology, poorer physical and mental health function, and lower household income. These relationships support the construct validity of the test in Spanish. This study provided strong evidence that this version is a valid and reliable measure of life stressors for a Spanish-speaking population living in the United States.

Bronx Health REACH, a coalition of community- and faith-based groups, health care providers, and an academic institution, recently examined the causes of racial and ethnic health disparities in the southwest Bronx and identified separate systems of care for uninsured and publicly insured patients, who are predominantly people of color, and those with private insurance. We found evidence that patients are sorted into segregated pathways of care, a system of medical apartheid in which differential care contributes to disparities in health care and health outcomes.

Research on fear of crime typically examines the perceptions of those who fear, emphasizing women’s experiences of vulnerability in public space. In this paper, I invert this practice to examine instead men’s experiences of being feared in public spaces. Drawing on interviews with 82 male college students, I use a social constructionist approach to examine how men’s experiences of being feared interact with men’s formation of racial identities and the racialization of public places. Fear is a key mechanism for justifying and maintaining race privilege and exclusion. The experience and interpretation of being feared (or not feared) in public space intersects with men’s construction of gender and race identities, and the ways that men assign racial meanings to public places. This paper examines these processes and proposes strategies for challenging fear and the exclusion it supports.

Abstract The U.S. faces rising rates of overweight and obesity. Active living-urban planning and design to promote physical activity?has emerged as a strategy to combat growing obesity. The active living movement initially targeted mostly middle-class, suburban communities. In this article, I argue that planning for active living must especially address low-income, Black, and Latino communities, where obesity and related health risks are greatest and resources least available. First I review the problem of obesity and related health conditions among low-income, Black, and Latino populations in the U.S., and identify the role of insufficient physical activity in this problem. I then examine physical environment and other factors that shape opportunities for physical activity in low-income communities and communities of color. Finally, I identify strategies that may help to promote active living in urban settings to better serve these communities. Abstract The U.S. faces rising rates of overweight and obesity. Active living-urban planning and design to promote physical activity?has emerged as a strategy to combat growing obesity. The active living movement initially targeted mostly middle-class, suburban communities. In this article, I argue that planning for active living must especially address low-income, Black, and Latino communities, where obesity and related health risks are greatest and resources least available. First I review the problem of obesity and related health conditions among low-income, Black, and Latino populations in the U.S., and identify the role of insufficient physical activity in this problem. I then examine physical environment and other factors that shape opportunities for physical activity in low-income communities and communities of color. Finally, I identify strategies that may help to promote active living in urban settings to better serve these communities.

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in U.S. housing policy, a role typically justified by the claim that their housing investments produce significant neighborhood spillover benefits. However, little work has actually been done to measure these neighborhood impacts. This paper compares the neighborhood spillover effects of city-supported rehabilitation of rental housing undertaken by nonprofit and for-profit developers, using data from New York City. To measure these benefits, we use increases in neighboring property values, estimated from a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We study the impacts of about 43,000 units of city-supported housing completed during the 1980s and 1990s, and our sample of property transactions includes nearly 300,000 individual sales. We find that both nonprofit and for-profit projects generate significant, positive spillover effects. This finding in itself is significant, given the widespread skepticism about the impact of subsidized housing on neighborhoods. We also find some differences across sectors. First, the impact of nonprofit housing remains stable over time, whereas the effect of for-profit housing declines with time. Second, while large for-profit and nonprofit developments deliver similar benefits, in the case of small projects, for-profit developments generate greater impacts than their nonprofit counterparts. These differences are consistent with theoretical predictions. In particular, in the presence of information asymmetries with respect to housing quality, the nondistribution constraint should lead nonprofits to deliver more durable housing, by softening incentives to shirk on quality and maintenance. Meanwhile, the fact that scale makes a difference to nonprofit impacts may reflect the capacity problems often faced by smaller nonprofits.

Public schools across the United States are educating an increasing number and diversity of immigrant students. Unfortunately, little is known about their performance relative to native-born students and the extent to which the "nativity gap" might be explained by school and demographic characteristics. This article takes a step toward filling that void using data from New York City where 17 percent of elementary and middle school students are immigrants. We explore disparities in performance between foreign-born and native-born students on reading and math tests in three ways�using levels (unadjusted scores), "value-added" scores (adjusted for prior performance), and an education production function. While unadjusted levels and value-added measures often indicate superior performance among immigrants, disparities are substantially explained by student and school characteristics. Further, while the nativity gap differs for students from different world regions, disparities are considerably diminished in fully specified models. We conclude with implications for urban schools in the United States.

This chapter considers whether effects of antipoverty policy on children's school performance differ by ethnicity, and if so, why. We explore several hypotheses: those that derive from human capital theory, theories about family structure and family process, and person-environment fit theory. A major finding is that, in addition to the role of human capital, we find evidence to support the hypothesis that person-environment fit matters. That is, the fit between policy contexts and personal values and goals, such as motivation to pursue one's own education, appears to play a role in explaining differences by race and ethnicity in effects of welfare and employment policies on children.

LaRue Allen, Yael Bat-Chava, J. Lawrence Aber, and Edward Seidman find that the emotional benefit of racial pride for black adolescents is higher in predominantly black neighborhoods than in racially mixed environments.

Federal social program evaluation has blossomed over the past quarter century. Despite this growth, there has been little accompanying public debate on research ethics. This essay explores the origins and the implications of this relative silence on ethical matters. It reviews the federal regulations that generally govern research ethics, and recounts the history whereby the evaluation of federal programs was specifically exempted from the purview of those regulations. Through a discussion of a recent evaluation that raised ethical concerns, the essay poses - but does not answer - three questions: (1) Are there good reasons to hold federal social program evaluations to different standards than those that apply to other research?; (2) If so, what ethical standards should be used to access such evaluations?; and (3) Should a formal mechanism be developed to ensure that federal social program evaluations are conducted ethically?

In this article, I reflect on how my white racial identity shaped and, in turn, was shaped by my dissertation data collection. I identify specific choices and experiences in the research interviews that were influenced by my race, using data both from my own journal as well as feedback about my interviews from two informants of color. I also trace how conducting the interviews and writing about them in my journal affected how I make meaning of my racial identity. I offer these reflections as a contribution to two conversations, both related to exploring and learning about race. First, my discussion of how being white influenced my study contributes to important dialogues about how researcher identities reverberate through the research process. Second, my consideration of the change in my racial identity suggests implications for those interested in learning from and about race. Specifically, it suggests that whites must claim a voice on race in order to contribute meaningfully to cross-racial learning.

The Collaborative raises three areas in which more dialogue would be useful. First, they express a desire for more data about how I was seen by my informants of color. They use that point to raise broader questions about validity: How can I, as a white person, know what is not being said by my informants of color? How can I be sure that my informants were candid with me, given the ‘strong taboos that prohibit revealing oneself . . . to the white world'? Second, they point out that my dissertation research was not emancipatory or mutual: it was a relatively traditional qualitative design, with a clear demarcation between researcher and researched. Finally, they raise the concept of ‘critical humility' and the spirit of inquiry in doing this work. I will address each of these areas in turn.

Although analyses of state school finance systems rarely focus on the distribution of funds to students of different races, the advent of racial discrimination as an issue in school finance court cases may change that situation. In this article, we describe the background, analyses, and results of plaintiffs' testimony regarding racial discrimination in Campaign for Fiscal Equity Inc. v. State of New York. Plaintiffs employed multiple regression and public finance literature to show that New York State's school finance system had a disparate racial impact on New York City students. We review the legal basis for disparate racial impact claims, with particular emphasis on the role of quantitative statistical work, and then describe the model we developed and estimated for the court case. Finally, we discuss the defendants' rebuttal, the Court's decision, and conclude with observations about the role of analysis in judicial decision making in school finance.

This report presents data on computer access, Internet use, and factors associated with health information seeking on the Internet among a sample of youths aged 15 to 30 years in New York City. Findings from street intercept surveys indicate substantial computer access at home (62%) and frequent (everyday or a few times a week) Internet use (66%). Fifty-five percent of the sample reported seeking health information on the Internet, which was associated with positive beliefs about getting a health checkup and frequent Internet use.

Public-sector organizations tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse than private-sector organizations, leading to the challenge of enhancing heterogeneous work group effectiveness. Recent work suggests that a group's "diversity perspective," or set of beliefs about the role of cultural diversity, moderates diverse group performance. One perspective, the integration and learning perspective, argues that heterogeneous groups function better when they believe that cultural identities can be tapped as sources of new ideas and experiences about work. However, simply holding the integration and learning perspective may not be sufficient. Research on general group learning has shown that it requires particular behaviors and cognitive frames. This article integrates recent work on diversity perspectives with long-standing research on team learning to propose a conceptual model of learning in culturally diverse groups. It suggests that both the integration and learning perspective and more generic learning frames and skills must be present.

In many urban areas in the United States, immigrant children and the children of immigrants are transforming local schools. Immigrant children face - and pose - significant challenges to these schools, challenges that are in many ways greater than those of earlier waves of immigrants. There is, however, relatively little existing research investigating the ways urban public school systems treat and are influenced by the increasing numbers of immigrant children. Using an extraordinarily rich, student-level panel data set covering all 850 of New York City's elementary and middle schools for 5 years, linked to institutional information on the schools themselves, we study the experience of one large urban school system. Given the extraordinary size and diversity of the immigrant population in New York City, we can consider separately subgroups of immigrants whose experiences in and impacts on urban schools systems are likely to differ greatly. This is particularly important for drawing lessons for other urban areas that face flows of immigrants from specific countries of origin.

Our project contains a cross-sectional and a time series component. To start, we examine the characteristics of the schools and districts attended by New York City's immigrant children, including the extent to which the teachers and resources of different groups of immigrant children differ from each other and from the typical native-born student. We examine the degree to which they are segregated within the city's districts and schools - and investigate the extent to which segregation differs between elementary and middle schools. This is particularly interesting because of the strong link between elementary school choice and residential location and the weaker link (and greater degree of choice) at the middle school level.

We will also focus on the "receiving" schools from the perspective of the native-born students, particularly minority and poorer students. While the presence of recent immigrants brings some supplemental federal funding, and additional resources are typically directed at students with Limited English Proficiency, the net resource impact on the schools and their students is poorly understood.

In the second component of our project (exploiting the time-series nature of our data) we will examine changes in school composition over time. Do specific characteristics drive patterns of change? At the school level, we will assess whether and how the presence of native-born students changes in response to changes in the share of students who are immigrants, children of immigrants, and those with limited English proficiency. By tracking the movement of children from one school to another, we can investigate the characteristics of the origin and destination schools (such as population composition and school resources) that appear to affect mobility and identify groups most sensitive to these factors. Are urban school districts in high immigrant areas likely to suffer from more middle-class flight? To what extent does the response depend upon the socioeconomic characteristics of the immigrants - their race, ethnicity, language proficiency, and/or country of origin? This second piece moves beyond a cross-sectional assessment of the resource allocations and impacts associated with immigration, to suggest how these impacts will change over time for other urban districts receiving immigrant children and, perhaps, the issues and problems that policymakers to consider in formulation policy responses.

As the HIV/AIDS epidemic enters its third decade, rates of infection continue to rise in ethnic minority populations. Though the prevalence of HIV among Asian and Pacific Islander (A&PI) gay men remains to be clearly documented, research has shown that these men engage in relatively high rates of HIV risk behavior. The social discrimination that minority gay men experience may impact their HIV risk behavior and mental health (Diaz & Ayala, 2001). This article examines the experiences of and response to social discrimination among A&PI gay men, and their links to HIV risk behaviors. The study analyzes 166 narrative episodes of discrimination, as well as data on HIV risk obtained from in-depth interviews with 23 A&PI gay men. Results showed that A&PI gay men experience types of discrimination across a variety of contexts. Homophobia and anti-immigrant discrimination were linked to confrontation and social network-based responses whereas discrimination based in stereotypes of passivity / submission were linked with self-attribution. A&PI gay men who used confrontational, social network-based or avoidance response types showed less HIV risk than those who did not. Conversely, A&PI gay men who responded to discrimination with self-attribution showed greater HIV risk behaviors. These findings indicate that experiences of social discrimination and responses to discrimination may impact A&PI gay men's well-being and health.

As we enter the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black U.S. citizens between the ages of 25-44. Black MSM have the highest incidence of AIDS in the U.S. Research is needed on the individual and contextual factors that place these men at risk. This study asks: 1) What are the profiles of social network and social/political group involvement for Black MSM? 2) Do levels of peer norms, AIDS knowledge, self-efficacy, and AIDS ethnocentrism differ for Black MSM according to their social networks and social activity? 3) Does HIV-risk differ for Black MSM according to their social involvement? METHODS: The sample consisted of 318 Black MSM. The average age was 31 years old, and 88% of the participants were single. 33% of the sample reported engaging in sexual behavior with both men and women. Measures included age, education level, make-up of social networks (race, sexual orientation), participation in social/political groups of Black gay, White gay and heterosexual types, levels of condom efficacy, peer norms, AIDS knowledge and AIDS ethnocentrism and number of instances of unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) in the past 6 months. Data were analyzed using cluster analysis, regression analysis and ANOVA. RESULTS: Men who were active in social/political groups were less likely to engage in UAI than men who were not active. This effect was mediated by higher condom efficacy and lower AIDS ethnocentrism. The study also showed that men with largely Black and gay networks reported higher UAI than men with White gay social networks. CONCLUSION: Results show that different social patterns among Black MSM can lead to different outcomes regarding HIV-risk. These findings will inform AIDS prevention efforts for Black MSM, and promote use of a framework that incorporates both individual and contextual factors in understanding HIV-risk.

The possibility of paying reparations to black Americans as restitution for the legacy of slavery has made a recent comeback in the popular discourse. If and when this debate moves toward actual policy, there will be many details to be worked out on how to arrive at the "right" number. Implicit in each of these details is a set of assumptions not just about the meaning of race and the legacy of slavery but about how opportunity in America is structured by birth and background more generally. Putting these assumptions on the table is important if we are to have a fruitful debate about how to rectify inequities of the past.

New Urbanism is increasingly applied to revitalize diverse urban neighborhoods. New Urbanism relies on an ideal of “community” that makes its suitability for these contexts questionable. This article examines the use of New Urbanism to revitalize neighborhoods with diverse populations, investigating the following concerns: (1) physical changes may not be the best solutions for the social problems that often face such neighborhoods, (2) New Urbanist ideas may have different meanings to different groups of neighborhood residents, (3) New Urbanist neighborhood renovation may displace low-income residents, and (4) New Urbanist participatory design processes may not accommodate diversity. The article presents findings from a case study of the Westside of the city of Costa Mesa, California. Recommendations suggest alternative planning and design strategies to support and reinvigorate diverse, urban neighborhoods.

This reader uses an alternative approach to gender at work to provoke new thinking about traditional management topics, such as leadership and negotiation.Presents students with an alternative conceptual approach to gender in the workplace. Connects gender with other dimensions of difference such as race and class for a deeper understanding of diversity in organizations. Illustrates how traditional images of competence and the ideal worker result in narrow ways of thinking about work, limiting both opportunity and organizational effectiveness. Provokes new ways of thinking about leadership, human resource management, negotiation, globalization and organizational change.

This reader uses an alternative approach to gender at work to provoke new thinking about traditional management topics, such as leadership and negotiation. Presents students with an alternative conceptual approach to gender in the workplace. Connects gender with other dimensions of difference such as race and class for a deeper understanding of diversity in organizations. Illustrates how traditional images of competence and the ideal worker result in narrow ways of thinking about work, limiting both opportunity and organizational effectiveness. Provokes new ways of thinking about leadership, human resource management, negotiation, globalization and organizational change.

Public agencies have the mandate to consider the plurality of values, concerns and voices of the larger population in their work, as well as to include a wide variety of citizens in their workforce. When diversity is pursued as an organizational objective, more efficient management and the democratic values of responsiveness and representation in public administration are both said to be better achieved.

Demography is not destiny. While groups of color - Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans - have emerged as New York City's new majority, large segments of the groups remain burdened by many of the historical problems associated with disadvantaged minorities. This report highlights the problems faced by lower-income women of color, especially single mothers. Often bypassed during the economic boom of the 1990s, these women have found that employment opportunities have all but evaporated in the current economic malaise. The elimination of federal welfare entitlements have only served to exacerbate these problems. To read more click on the link below.

This study on welfare reform contends that race and gender coalesce through historic and contemporary government, policy and market failures to deny benefits and jobs to women of color while blaming them for their condition. It is divided into three sections: the first addresses national policy trends with an emphasis on race and gender, the second looks at New York City, and the third offers recommendations. The report was published in the National Urban League's State of Black America, 2003.

The tension between ascribed and achieved status pervades much of sociology, sometimes as a latent theme and sometimes manifest. The articles in this issue of Sociological Forum revisit this tension through the lens of race and ethnicity. They examine contexts varying widely from adolescents in the United States to upper-caste Muslims in India. The specific issues they address are also diverse: the relationship between race, democracy, and equal opportunity; deviant behavior among teenagers of different ethnic groups; intermarriage among whites and minorities in contemporary U.S. society; the strategic commonalities between the Deaf, gay and white supremacist movements; and finally, the tension between modernization, economic development, and finally, the tension between modernization, economic development, and caste/racial identity. Yet, the articles also share a broader common theme; each concerns the paradoxes that emerge when ascribed racial or ethnic identity collides with powerful forces that represent the conditions of achieved position.

Immigrant children represent a large and growing proportion of school children in the United States, especially in urban areas. An estimated 10.4 percent of the U.S. population is now foreign-born (the highest percentage since 1930); and in central cities, the proportion has risen to 16 percent (Lollock 2001; Schmidley and Gibson 1997). Yet we know surprisingly little about the experience or isolation levels of foreign-born students. While there is considerable research on the degree to which racial minorities are isolated in U.S. schools and on the disturbing consequences of this segregation, there is no parallel research concerning immigrants.
The goal of this paper is to begin to examine this issue, looking at evidence from New York City. In particular, we address two main questions. First, how segregated are immigrant students in New York's schools and how does that segregation vary across groups with differing language skills and from different regions of the world? Second, to the extent we do see segregation, how different are the schools attended by immigrant children (either overall or from particular regions) in terms of student characteristics, teachers, and funding levels?
New York City is an especially apt place to study immigrant students because the city's public schools educate so many immigrants, from such a broad range of countries (over 200), speaking a great diversity of languages (over 120). In addition, we have been able to assemble an extraordinarily detailed data set, which allows us to exploit the richness that New York City's student body provides.
The paper is organized as follows. In the first section we review the literature on school segregation and explore the ways in which segregation might affect immigrant students. In section two we describe our data and provide a brief statistical portrait of immigrant students in New York City. In section three, we lay out the methods and hypotheses to be explored in this paper, while in section four we present our analysis of segregation of immigrant students. Section five concludes.

This collection of original manuscripts-representing a cross-section of the timeliest scholarship in public personnel administration-explores the theme of "problems and prospects" in public personnel administration. The contributions are organized into four broad sections: The Setting, The Techniques, The Issues, and Reform and the Future. Section One focuses primarily on the social, political, economic, and legal trends that have served as catalysts in the transformation of public personnel administration. Section Two is composed of selections that summarize developments in the practice of HRM, with special emphasis on emerging personnel techniques and the ways that traditional approaches to the staffing function are being revised. Section Three discusses and suggests responses to some of the most troublesome or pervasive issues in modern personnel management. The final section assesses the probable trends in the field's future, and analyzes the efficacy of recent reform efforts. For human resource personnel looking to broaden their perspective in the field.

Much research has shown that even after controlling for income, African Americans suffer from drastically lower net worths than their white counterparts; these differences in net worth have important implications for the overall well-being of blacks and whites. If not directly from labor market disadvantages-i.e., income differentials-then from what does this racial gap in wealth arise? The current study assesses two complementary accounts of this race difference in asset holdings. The first, the historical legacy thesis, suggests that net wealth differences in the current generation are largely a result of discrimination in past generations; that is, they can be traced to the "head start" that whites have enjoyed in accumulating assets and passing them on. The second theory, the contemporary dynamics thesis, holds that current dynamics of institutional racism in the housing and credit markets are more responsible for the gap. The current study tests the relative impact of multi-generational forces and contemporary property and credit dynamics by using two-generational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. It finds that parental wealth and income levels and inheritance all have a significant impact on the wealth levels of the current generation net of respondent socioeconomic characteristics; however, parental wealth and inheritance fail to explain the black-white gap. Further, this study shows that even predicting net worth from that same family's net worth five years prior (also controlling for savings during the interim), there remains a significantly negative effect of African American race. However, breaking out initial net worth into asset types shows that it may be different investment types and returns that explain the difference in asset accumulation over a five-year period.

Jane Jacobs has recently become the most popular, pop sociologist around. There has been a spiked resurgence of media interest in her 1961 urban studies classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This may be due partly to the recent release of her new book, The Nature of Economies. But there is probably something more to it. For journalists, Jacobs' account of the neighborhood life of New York City's Greenwich Village of the 1950s seems to induce nostalgic longings for a greater sense of community. The bustling, narrow streets Jacobs describes were filled with both small shops and tenement residences, with hoards of pedestrians engaged in both business and sociability, and with strangers and lifelong inhabitants alike. This apparent chaos was actually a ballet of multitudes and Jacobs uncovered the latent order that undergirded the community.

Bringing together new articles and essays from the controversial Berkeley conference of the same name, "The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness" presents a fascinating range of inquiry into the nature of whiteness. Representing academics, independent scholars, community organizers, and antiracist activists, the contributors are all leaders in the "second wave" of whiteness studies who collectively aim to combat the historical legacies of white supremacy and to inform those who seek to understand the changing nature of white identity, both in the United States and abroad. The editors not only raise provocative questions about the intellectual, social, and political goals of those interested in the study of whiteness but assess several of the topic's major recurrent themes: the visibility of whiteness (or the lack thereof); the "emptiness" of whiteness as a category of identification; and conceptions of whiteness as a structural privilege, a harbinger of violence, or an institutionalization of European imperialism.

Non-profit and for-profit organizations are both engaging with the opportunities and challenges of a demographically diverse workforce. However, their different missions, structures and constituencies can result in varied approaches to addressing difference. This paper, based on broader dissertation research, compares the intentions and experiences of two small organizations, a for-profit and a non-profit, both of which reemphasize inclusion as a guiding principle. However, they manifest these principles in very different ways, with divergent implications for their employees' experiences at work.

In the waning decades of the 20 century, New York City was transformed from a magnet for U.S.- and Caribbean-born blacks to the center of the Diaspora of people of African descent. From Ethiopia to Panama, from Ghana to Brazil, immigrants of African descent streamed into the city's neighborhoods, enriching black culture with their languages and religions, and extending the range of black political interests.

The first Status of Women of Color Report originated out of the need to provide data and research focusing on women of color. By drawing attention to the trends seen in income, unemployment, welfare, and incarceration for women of color in New York city , this report summarizes their achievements and lack of it during the 1990's.

In the absence of universal coverage and an effective primary care delivery system for vulnerable populations, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are the ultimate safety net for many patients. This is especially true in New York City, where nearly 75 percent of ED visits in 1998 were for nonemergent care, or for emergent care that could have been treated in a doctor's office.1 Another 7 percent of visits required care in the ED, but were for potentially preventable conditions such as acute flare-ups of asthma or diabetes. New Yorkers who rely on EDs lack continuity in their health care and end up using costlier services. Why do so many patients depend on hospital emergency departments for primary care? Do they seek emergency care immediately, or do they have time and opportunity to obtain care at a doctor's office or neighborhood clinic? Do these patients have a usual source of care other than the ED? Do they have any contact with the health care system prior to their ED visit? Does insurance status, race, ethnicity, national origin, or gender have an influence on ED use?

To answer these questions, the Center for Health and Public Service Research at New York University conducted face-to-face interviews with 669 emergency department patients ages 18 to 55 at four hospitals in the Bronx.

In this article, the author argues that any consideration of race and formal philanthropic activity must consider the issue of wealth differences; it is in the area of wealth that the greatest degree of racial in equality exists, with Black families owning about one eighth the assets of White families. In addition to this empirical rationale for investigating the role of net worth in accounting for Black-White differences in philanthropic activity, the author provides a theoretical argument, distinguishing between the role of income and that of wealth in giving. The author concludes by arguing for a new research agenda that links the burgeoning literature on race and wealth to that on race and philanthropy.

This paper explores the relationship between racial segregation and racial disparities in the prevalence of low birth weight. The paper has two parallel motivations. First, the disparities between black and white mothers in birth outcomes are large and persistent. In 1996, 13 percent of infants born in the United States to black mothers weighed less than 2,500 grams (5.5 pounds, or low birth weight), compared with just 6.3 percent of all infants born to white mothers. And the consequences may be grave. Low birth weight is a major cause of infant mortality and is associated with greater childhood illness and such developmental disorders as cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, epilepsy, chronic lung disease, learning disabilities, and attention deficit disorder. 1 Given the strong connection between race and residence in this country, it seems plausible that residential location may shape these differentials.

Second, while there is a growing literature on the costs of racial segregation, it has largely focused on economic outcomes such as education and employment. This paper aims to develop a fuller understanding of the costs of racial segregation by considering birth outcomes as well as such behaviors as tobacco and alcohol use among pregnant mothers. As Glaeser emphasizes (in his paper in this volume), information, ideas, and values are often transmitted through face-to-face interaction, and thus their transmission may be blocked by segregation. This includes information related to job openings and may include information and norms related to behavior and care during pregnancy.

Adopting in large part the methodology of David Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, the paper thus examines how levels of racial segregation affect the birth outcomes of black mothers. 2 It examines influences on both black and nonblack mothers in an attempt to identify the differential effect of segregation on black mothers.

This paper outlines the race-based, neighbourhood projection hypothesis which holds that, in choosing neighbourhoods, households care less about present racial composition than they do about expectations about future neighbourhood conditions, such as school quality, property values and crime. Race remains relevant, however, since households tend to associate a growing minority presence with structural decline. Using a unique data-set that links households to their neighbourhoods, this paper estimates both exit and entry models and then constructs a simple simulation model that predicts the course of racial change in different communities. Doing so, the paper concludes that the empirical evidence is more consistent with the race-based projection hypothesis than with other common explanations for neighbourhood racial transition.

The rapid rise in immigration over the past few decades has transformed the American social landscape, while the need to understand its impact on society has led to a burgeoning research literature. Predominantly non-European and of varied cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, the new immigrants present analytic challenges that cannot be wholly met by traditional immigration studies. Immigration Research for a New Century demonstrate show sociology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, and other disciplines intersect to answer questions about today's immigrants. In Part I, leading scholars examine the emergence of an interdisciplinary body of work that incorporates such topics as the social construction of race, the importance of ethnic self-help and economic niches, the influence of migrant-homeland ties, and the types of solidarity and conflict found among migrant populations. The authors also explore the social and national origins of immigration scholars themselves, many of whom came of age in an era of civil rights and ethnic reaffirmation, and may also be immigrants or children of immigrants. Together these essays demonstrate how social change, new patterns of immigration, and the scholars' personal backgrounds have altered the scope and emphases of the research literature,allowing scholars to ask new questions and to see old problems in new ways. Part II contains the work of a new generation of immigrant scholars, reflecting the scope of a field bolstered by different disciplinary styles. These essays explore the complex variety of the immigrant experience, ranging from itinerant farmworkers to Silicon Valley engineers. The demands of the American labor force, ethnic, racial, and gender stereotyping, and state regulation are all shown to play important roles in the economic adaptation of immigrants. The ways in which immigrants participate politically, their relationships among themselves, their attitudes toward naturalization and citizenship, and their own sense of cultural identity are also addressed. Immigration Research for a New Century examines the complex effects that immigration has had not only on American society but on scholarship itself, and offers the fresh insights of a new generation of immigration researchers.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of two strategies�communication and condom skills training�for increasing condom-protected sex in a sample of 510 high-risk women ages 17 to 61. Baseline and 3- and 6-month postintervention interview data were gathered in three cities participating in a randomized trial of a six-session, group skill-building intervention. This analysis was conducted for the entire sample and for six subgroups categorized by age, single or multiple partners, and history of childhood sexual abuse. The dependent variable was the odds ratio of protected sex acts at each follow-up. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate effects for two intervention pathways. The pathway through condom skills increased the odds of protected sex for the intervention group (2 difference = 35, df = 2, p < .05) as well as for all subgroups. The pathways through communication were significant for the intervention group (2 difference = 23, df =3, p < .05) but fully effective only for participants under 30 and participants who reported childhood sexual abuse. The effectiveness of both pathways diminished at 6 months. WINGS demonstrates that condom skills training can increase protected sex for a heterogeneous group of women. Further research needs to examine how such skill training translates into use of condoms by male partners. To increase the duration of intervention effects, booster sessions may need to be incorporated.

What is more important--race or class--in determining the socioeconomic success of the blacks and whites born since the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s? When compared to whites, African Americans complete less formal schooling, work fewer hours at a lower rate of pay and are more likely to give birth to a child out of wedlock and to rely on welfare. Are these differences attributable to race per se, or are they the result of differences in socioeconomic background between the two groups?Being Black, Living in the Red demonstrates that many differences between blacks and whites stem not from race but from economic inequalities that have accumulated over the course of American history. Property ownership--as measured by net worth--reflects this legacy of economic oppression. The racial discrepancy in wealth holdings leads to advantages for whites in the form of better schools, more desirable residences, higher wages, and more opportunities to save, invest, and thereby further their economic advantages.Dalton Conley shows how factoring parental wealth into a reconceptualization of class can lead to a different future for race policy in the United States. As it currently stands, affirmative action programs primarily address racial diversity in schooling and work--areas that Conley contends generate paradoxical results with respect to racial equity. Instead he suggests an affirmative action policy that fosters minority property accumulation, thereby encouraging long-term wealth equity, or one that--while continuing to address schooling and work--is based on social class as defined by family wealth levels rather than on race.

Proposes an elaborated action-learning framework that decomposes action-learning method into the three components of argument, practice, and outcome. Illumination of multiple facets of change; Analysis of the interaction of the three methods in significant change processes; Application of the framework to a case of gay and lesbian workplace advocacy; How the different action-learning methods work together to create change in an organization.

This edited collection examines joint efforts by Latinos and African Americans to confront problems faced by populations of both groups in urban settings (in particular, socioeconomic disadvantage and concentration in inner cities). The essays address two major issues: experiences and bases for collaboration and contention between the two groups; and the impact of urban policies and initiatives of recent decades on Blacks and Latinos in central cities.

Part of a special section on stable racial integration. A study was conducted to examine the extent and stability of racial integration in the U.S. Findings indicated that although integrated neighborhoods containing blacks and whites are considerably less stable than more homogeneous communities, a majority remains integrated over time. In addition, integration appears to be growing more viable, with racially integrated communities having a higher probability of being stable during the 1980s than the 1970s.

Focuses on the author's idea of applying lessons learned from the experience of stable integrated neighborhoods to strengthen cities. Theories that explain why some mixed neighborhoods remain integrated; Testing the theory; Policy implications; How the real story about America's neighborhoods is less pessimistic and more dynamic than they tended to believe.

This paper examines empirically the effect of spatially concentrated poverty on minority youth employment and the role of "access" in youth labor markets. A model, in which information about jobs travels through social networks, links labor market outcomes and residential concentration of poverty. The empirical work uses U.S. Census employment data for the largest MSAs, in 1970 and 1980. The key findings are that, although concentration appears to have had no effect on black youth unemployment in 1970, the results for 1980 support "concentration effects" on unemployment for both black and hispanic youth. These effects are sizeable on average, and quite large in some cities.

Examines the importance of job access via networks for the employment of urban youth in the U.S. Usefulness of social contacts in job referral; Proxies for labor market contacts; Determinants of youth labor market outcomes.