Journal of Applied Social Science

The Millennium Development Goals of 2000 to 2015 have been replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015 to 2030. How can these global aspirations guide sociologists in bringing our knowledge, skills, and insights to achieve justice and equality of opportunity? This essay relates each of the SDGs to our fundamental expertise.

This study applied an institutional logics framework to examine issues that challenged revitalization efforts in three distressed neighborhoods in an urban Midwest U.S. city. Specifically, it examined whether emergent hybrid (organizational) logics influenced multiple disconnected partnerships and collaborations. Thematic analyses were conducted on data from 39 semi-structured interviews conducted in two phases (n = 11 and n = 28, respectively). The interviewees were from the public, private, academia, and faith-based sectors and included interventions that impacted food insecurity, education, health, the built environment, crime, and substance and alcohol abuse. The findings showed the importance of trust as a hybrid logic impacting collaborations at multiple levels; we link this to additional findings on the level of structural embeddedness in the studied neighborhoods. The findings support the need for public health and community leaders to address gaps in trust/embeddedness in order to improve the success of community interventions. Practitioners and future researchers can apply the concept of hybrid institutional logics in the analysis of neighborhood collaborations, especially when there are multiple collaborations involving partners from different sectors.

This paper explores the role of homophily with respect to demographic attributes on the formation of friendships, focusing on the moderating effect of attribute salience and time effect. To address the research questions, we explored a data set collected from Master of Public Administration (MPA) students in four waves over a period of nearly a year. An actor-based model was employed to test various research hypotheses concerning the longitudinal evolution of a friendship network. As a result, we found that (1) salience of demographic attributes does not moderate the relationship between the attributes and friendship ties and (2) age homophily is associated with friendship formation only in the initial stage.

Early care and education program interventions often focus on providing training, sometimes combined with coaching, to classroom educators. However, such interventions are uneven in their effectiveness. We describe the development of the Ready Educators Quality Improvement Pilot (REQIP), an intervention that integrates two approaches—one that focuses on the workforce through training and coaching at the educator level, and another approach that focuses on the program in which the educators work, through executive coaching for administrators and consultations on the classroom, building spaces, and curriculum materials. Ten center-based programs and over 60 educators participated in a 19-month intervention and evaluation. This article discusses the challenges faced during implementation and implications for practice, results of the evaluation, and implications for other applications of social science.

The attitudes non-members hold toward the Amish—or any ethnic, racial, and religious group—has consequences for that population, from criminal victimization to an ability to exercise human rights. Given their rapid growth and expansion in North America, an effective tool is needed to measure public attitudes toward the Amish. William McGuigan recently led the development of an Attitudes Toward the Amish (ATA) instrument, which was tested in northwestern Pennsylvania. In using the ATA in northeastern Missouri, we encountered problems with the instrument’s operational validity: no significant differences were found in the responses between a university undergraduate population of largely urban/suburban origin and the local rural population when we would otherwise expect differences. We revised the instrument and administered it to the same populations. Of the 16 items in the revised version, 14 were significantly different at the p < .05 level. A factor analysis revealed four components with face validity. Based on these results, we offer the Revised ATA (RATA) as an improved instrument and make recommendations for designing instruments intended to measure attitudes toward outgroups.

The practice of giving certain life domains (such as health, family life) more weight in calculating an overall score, known as importance weighting, has been a subject of debate in subjective well-being (SWB) research for decades. In this paper, we present evidence by analyzing data from 513 Chinese adults to caution readers that findings of importance weighting in the SWB studies should be interpreted carefully. Given the many unsettled issues in assessing importance weighting, findings are often not clear-cut or definitive and overgeneralization can mislead our understanding of well-being. Future research on the topic of importance weighting should acknowledge study assumptions and limitations to avoid potential overgeneralization of findings.

In this study, the causality between poverty reduction and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in Tanzania using time-series data from 1980 to 2014 is investigated. The study attempts to answer one question. Does FDI drive poverty reduction in Tanzania? To answer this question, autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL)-bounds testing approach to cointegration and error correction model (ECM)-based causality model within a trivariate setting was used. The study employs three poverty reduction measures to ensure robustness, namely, household consumption expenditure (pov1), infant mortality rate (pov2), and life expectancy (pov3). The results show that there is a distinct unidirectional causality from poverty reduction to FDI in the short run and in the long run when poverty reduction is measured by household consumption expenditure and life expectancy. A unidirectional causality is confirmed from FDI to poverty reduction in the short run, and no causality is recorded in the long run when infant mortality rate is used as a poverty reduction proxy. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the causal relationship between FDI and poverty reduction in Tanzania is sensitive to the proxy used to measure the level of poverty and to the time span considered.