Situational Peer Dynamics and Crime Decisions

Objectives To investigate how peer dynamics, specifically interpersonal conversations between a potential offender and a peer, contemporaneous with a crime opportunity, influence perceptions of sanction certainty and social costs. Methods Data are analyzed from randomized experiments and hypothetical vignettes embedded within a nationwide, online survey ( n = 1,275). Vignettes were presented for three distinct crime opportunities, drunk driving, fighting, and insurance fraud. Results The findings suggest that respondents adjust two core decision-making perceptions—the perceived certainty of being legally sanctioned and perceived social costs such as stigma or embarrassment—in accord with the content of verbal communications from peers. There is evidence for this both between and within subjects. Conclusions The study underscores the importance of accounting for both physical and social features of the situational context for crime in models of offender decision making. Implications are drawn regarding the social milieu for offender decision making, and the broader criminological relevance of choice principles.

Teacher Practices, Peer Dynamics, and Academic Enablers: A Pilot Study Exploring Direct and Indirect Effects Among Children at Risk for ADHD and Their Classmates

Establishing a positive peer climate in elementary school classrooms is an important goal for educators because peer dynamics are thought to affect academic learning. Thus, it is important to (a) understand the relationship between children's peer dynamics and academic functioning, and (b) identify teacher practices that influence both peer processes and academic outcomes. In this pilot study, we explored whether specific teacher strategies that promote positive behaviors in children and positive peer dynamics influence children's better academic enablers, as well as whether they do so indirectly via improving peer sociometric ratings. Such teacher strategies may be particularly relevant for supporting children who demonstrate impairment in both social and academic domains, such as children at risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Thus, we also examined whether these relationships differ for children with elevated ADHD symptoms and peer problems (i.e., target students), relative to classmates (i.e., non-target students). Participants were 194 children in the classrooms of 12 teachers (grades K-4) who participated in an open-trial pilot study of the school-based version of the Making Socially Accepting Inclusive Classrooms (MOSAIC) program. In the fall and spring of a school year, we assessed children's sociometric ratings received from peers, and academic enabler skills as rated by teachers. Throughout one academic year, we obtained assessments of teachers' use of MOSAIC strategies (observed and self-reported). Results showed that, after accounting for fall academic enablers, the teacher strategy of CARE time (involving one-on-one interaction with the student to build the teacher-student relationship) was positively associated with spring academic enablers. However, findings did not support the hypothesized indirect effect of peer sociometric ratings on the relationship between teacher strategy use and academic enablers, or the moderated indirect effect by target student status. Implications for future research and classroom interventions are discussed.

Predicting the Session of an P2P IPTV User through Support Vector Regression (SVR)

Scalability and ease of implementation make Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure an attractive option for live video streaming. Peer end-users or peers in these networks have extremely complex features and exhibit unpredictable behavior, i.e. any peer may join or exit the network without prior notice. Peers' dynamics is considered one of the key problems impacting the Quality of Service (QoS) of the P2P based IPTV services. Since, peer dynamics results in video disruption to consumer peers, for smooth video distribution, stable peer identification and selection is essential. Many research works have been conducted on stable peer identification using classical statistical methods. In this paper, a model based on machine learning is proposed in order to predict the length of a user session on entering the network. This prediction can be utilized in topology management such as offloading the departing peer before its exit. Consequently, this will help peers to select stable provider peers, which are the ones with longer session duration. Furthermore, it will also enable service providers to identify stable peers in a live video streaming network. Results indicate that the SVR based model performance is superior to an existing Bayesian network model.

Multiracial, Mixed-Race, and Biracial Identities

Scholarship designed to ask questions about the meanings of, identities of, and experiences of the offspring of interracial unions has been around for almost a century but has only seriously and significantly developed since the 1990s. From the early days of theorizing such experience from the counselor’s chair, psychological models planted early seeds, yet the ground of multiracial experience was one fundamentally wrapped up with institutions, social structures, political movements, histories and stories, racialization and microaggressions, family and peer dynamics, and other important social, cultural, economic, historical, collective, and political realities. Multiracial scholarship developed early on from an interest in understanding how the offspring of interracial unions, whether white/black, black/Asian, Latinx/white, and so on, develop understandings of themselves, as well as how others influence that understanding; thus, identity was a crucial starting point. Appearances, phenotype, and the sociocultural models of racial classification and the role that these play in the complex process of multiracial identity formation, development, maintenance, and change have become staple research questions. The racial demographics of race and multiraciality, along with the politics of census categorization and the tracing of such demographic and policy shifts over time, have provided more-macro contexts that have played into the ways we both study and, therefore, understand multiraciality. In the 2010s, scholars really began to move outside the black-white binary, more intersectionally and transdisciplinarily, and across national and historical contexts to develop an even more nuanced and complex theoretical and empirical understanding of multiraciality. From early-21st-century developments in critical mixed-race theory to the political importance of multiraciality in social movements, and from the role of multiraciality in popular culture and marketing to the potential and pitfalls of multiraciality and its politics dismantling ideas of race, realities of racism, and the pursuit of racial and social justice, scholarship on multiraciality has given us deeply important understandings.

Sharing Knowledge and “Microbubbles”: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in US Political Journalism

This article examines the peer-to-peer dynamics of Washington political journalists as Communities of Practice (CoPs) to better understand how journalists connect to and learn from each other and establish conventional knowledge. We employ inductive computational analysis that combines social network analysis of journalists’ Twitter interactions with a qualitative, thematic analysis of journalists’ work histories, organizational affiliations, and self-descriptions to identify nine major clusters of Beltway journalists. Among these are an elite/legacy community, a television producer community inclusive of Fox producers, and CNN, as its own self-referential community. Findings suggest Washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.

Fluid identity play: A case study of a bilingual child’s ethnic identity construction across multiple contexts

Informed by positioning theory as well as a nexus of multimembership, the year-long case study examined how a 7-year-old Korean American bilingual child, Meeso, constructed her ethnic identity across different educational contexts. Data were collected through observations of Meeso’s interactions with her monolingual and bilingual peers and teachers. Discourse analysis revealed that Meeso constructed fluid ethnic identity positionings depending upon how she desired to position herself and to be positioned by others. We also identified that the social context, language proficiency, and peer dynamics were related to the process. Based on the findings, we discuss the roles of context, language, and peer interaction for bilingual students’ ethnic identity development.

Creating Classroom Communities in Linguistically Diverse Settings: Teacher-Directed, Classroom-Level Factor Effects on Peer Dynamics

Employing a social capital framework, this study investigates teachers’ role in influencing the peer dynamics between English learners (ELs) and their non-EL peers. Participants include 713 students (211 EL students). Observed teacher-student interaction quality and teacher self-reports of their peer network management were used to operationalize the teacher-directed, classroom-level factors. Peer nominations of friendships within the classroom were used to operationalize students’ same-language-status (bonding capital) and cross-language-status (bridging capital) friendships. Multilevel models reveal teachers’ reported practices and observed interaction quality account for a small proportion of the variance in students’ bridging and bonding relationships at the classroom level overall, but with differential effects for EL and non-EL students. For example, in classrooms with greater reported use of bonding practices, EL students reported more bonding and fewer bridging friendships in the fall, and showed relatively less fall-to-spring growth in bridging friendships. Implications for future research and teacher training are discussed.

The economy of trust: communication technologies and social bonding process

The objective of this work is to present the economy of trust as a social bonding process, which would characterize, in the perspective adopted in this study, a communication process. The practices that individualizes the so-called economy of trust remember the customary exchanges and borrows between neighbors, family members and acquaintances that start to happen among strangers and requiring trust in someone completely unknown, constituting, in that way, experiences of exchange of goods and services starting from unusual relations. This study uses bibliographical review and the results of a research carried out over four years by the author of this article, whose methodology used for data collection mainly participant observation and in-depth interviews. The text begins by analyzing the economy of trust as a communicational phenomenon. It then approaches the context in which the phenomenon exists to finally present the proposal of the economy of trust, which according to the results obtained in the research concerns a particular process of social bonding that presupposes three characteristics: the peer-to-peer dynamics, driven by digital technologies of communication; the construction of trust between strangers and the perception that there is an abundance of resources and not scarcity.