Suchergebnisse

This study advances research on the mental health impacts of disasters by examining how a mainstay of the sociological literature, community attachment, influences negative affective states such as anxiety and fear stimulated by a technological disaster. Survey data were collected in three coastal Louisiana parishes (counties) geographically proximate to the BP oil spill of 2010 while the oil was still flowing. The data reveal that community attachment is associated with higher levels of negative affect. This finding holds for those tied to the fishing and seafood industry, those tied to the oil industry, and those having no immediate links to either industry. These results highlight that although community attachment is essential for community resilience, it can also be disruptive to individual well-being when technological disasters occur in communities dependent on renewable and natural resources.

In the fall of 1995, the authors were approached by the US Department of Justice and asked to conduct a social demographic research and analysis on the fourth congressional district of Louisiana. The fourth district had been a majority African American district since redistricting was done by the state legislature in 1992. They were asked to develop a research report and to testify for the United States in ongoing litigation. Their involvement was motivated by a number of social justice concerns that were articulated by Judge Higinbotham(1995: 668). Focuses primarily on the analytical approach to key issues and on the statistical results provided in the testimony. Recounts also interaction with the Justice legal team and some experiences in depositions and in federal court. Begins with a chronology of events leading up to the work and those that transpired after completion of research and testimony. (Original abstract - amended)

The demography of a local population is a central aspect of applied social science research. Although birth and death rates influence a population, the key contributing factor influencing the demographics of a locality is almost always internal migration—the movement of persons between U.S. regions, states, and localities. Current definitions of internal migration used by the U.S. Census Bureau are limited because confidentiality restrictions require that detailed current and former place of residence geographic information be suppressed in publicly available files. In this paper we report the results of our work with confidential versions of the 1990 and 2000 decennial census microdata to develop an improved measurement of migration in order to develop a profile of internal migration in the United States. We perform our analysis for two contrasting time periods, 1985–1990 and 1995–2000. Our interest here is to assess the stability of the profile of migrants during a time period of economic contraction and expansion. Using confidential internal versions of the 1990 and 2000 Census long-form microdata, we estimate logistic models of the likelihood that individuals will migrate. The geographic detail in the internal Census data permits us to measure migration in ways that are not possible with public-domain Census data on persons. We develop migration definitions that distinguish between local residential mobility likely associated with life course transitions from migration out of the labor market area that may be driven more by employment and other socioeconomic considerations. Using logistic modeling, we find that the same individual attributes predict migration reasonably well during both periods. We also compute some illustrative probabilities of migration that show temporal stability in migration predictors could be lessened by certain changes in population composition.

AbstractA key theoretical concept in the study of technological disasters is "recreancy," which refers to perception that institutional actors have failed to carry out their responsibilities in a manner that engenders societal trust. Using household survey data from the Community Oil Spill Survey (COSS) to assess recreancy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we analyze four waves of the COSS collected between 2010 and 2013 to explore respondents' perceptions of blame and distrust in relation to key institutional actors associated with the disaster, paying special attention to the influence of time and employment in natural resource occupations. We show that BP is clearly viewed as the principal responsible party at fault for the disaster and that the odds of blaming BP and the federal government have held relatively steady over time, while the odds of blaming state government increased over time. We find high levels of distrust of BP and the federal government, but show that odds of being distrustful of both institutional actors was significantly lower three years after the spill. Fishing households were significantly more likely to blame and be distrustful of institutional actors, a finding that is strongly consistent with theoretical expectations.