Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Although collaborative watershed management is increasingly accepted as the dominant paradigm in resource management and environmental policy, research on collaborative watershed organizations has largely ignored the attitudes and behaviors of grassroots stakeholders and the formation and organization of grassroots watershed groups. Instead, the research on collaborative watershed management has remained focused on the study of policy elites or “grasstops” (Graetz and Shapiro 2005) stakeholders, including “interest group leaders, elected officials, bureaucrats, and partnership staff” (Lubell 2004, 341) and on watershed partnerships, defined as a “collection of parties, usually featuring both private and governmental representatives…” (Kenny et al. 2000, quoted in Lubell, et al 2002), i.e. as collaborations among such policy elites (see Leach and Pelky 2001). In this study, we shift this focus to examine the beliefs and behavior of grassroots stakeholders, defined as the “appropriators” (Ostrom 1990) or the “consumers” (Lubell 2004) of natural resources and the formation of grassroots watershed organizations. We utilize the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), which has been fruitfully applied to research on watershed partnerships, and we attempt to adopt the appropriate elements of ACF in conjunction with conceptions of social identity to provide a framework for examining grassroots stakeholders and groups. This study focuses on one grassroots watershed group, which is made up of farmers, in a subwatershed in the Sugar Creek watershed in northeast Ohio, and uses data collected through three different methods to address some of the difficulties in understanding grassroots as opposed to grasstops stakeholders and organizations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper summarizes a content analysis of 426 food advertisements collected during the spring of 2003 from 40 hours of television programming popular with children ages 6-11. Type of food, health claims, meal status, eating locale, and character attributes were coded. In addition, nutritional information for advertised foods was obtained via the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Nutrition Facts label, which has been mandatory on food packaging since May 8, 1994. Snack foods were advertised more frequently than meal foods, and the most frequently represented food categories were convenience foods, sweets, and soft drinks. The most nutritionally unsound foods were found in advertisements aimed specifically at children. Following a 2000-calorie-per-day diet composed entirely of these foods, a child would consume 130 percent of her daily limit of saturated fat, 124 percent of her daily sodium, and 180 grams (almost a cup) of refined sugar, but only 36 percent of her daily fiber and about half of her recommended daily dose of vitamin A. Discussion focuses on the status of foods advertised to general versus child audiences.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Drawing on oral histories gathered from two sugar-worker union leaders in the cane fields of northeastern Brazil, this paper examines the meanings of race, the dynamics of labor conflict, and the social role of personal courage in the context of a politically explosive time and place. In the early 1960s, the sugar region of Pernambuco experienced massive political mobilization and a rapid unionization movement at the same time that Brazil as a whole grappled with broad sociopolitical change. A focal point for national political battles and a worrisome region internationally—John Kennedy had the area in mind when he established the Alliance for Progress—the Northeast of the 60s has much to teach about social and political transformation. This paper views such change from the perspective of two men engaged, literally, at the grassroots—cane cutters and union leaders. Their accounts of politics and the lived experience of race provide a new perspective on this time and place.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Globalization promises to expand markets and provide opportunities at the peril of dislocating local populations from direct ecological feedback with their farm and community. Sociocultural integration occurs at multiple levels such as the household, county, state, and national level and a person’s integration into one or more levels depends on multiple factors that include social networks encompassing local and non-local people. This paper presents results of an exploratory analysis of embeddedness, or integration into increasingly more complex sociocultural levels, to ascertain its effect on conservation use and the impact on local quality of life. Using an ordinal ranking of traditionalism (Kraybill and Hostetler 2001) as a measurement of ethnicity and integration, survey data from four Sugar Creek subwatersheds are used to construct metrics for hypothesis testing using SPSS’s ANOVA component, and key informant interviews contextualize the data as ethnographic examples of the relationships found among the dependent and independent variables.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study investigated factors affecting the relative harm of relationally aggressive acts among adolescent girls. One hundred twenty-seven high-school girls completed a survey in which they described an event where another girl did something to them that was mean or hurtful. Girls also completed measures of the extent to which the aggressive act threatened their positive face, and the extent to which the aggressive act led them to experience negative affect. Results supported the prediction that aggressive acts committed by girls who were more popular than the victim were associated with greater perceived face threat and negative affect than aggressive acts committed by girls who were equally popular or less popular than the victim. In addition, events in which the perpetrator involved other individuals in the commission of aggression were associated with greater perceived face threat and greater negative affect than events in which the perpetrator acted alone. Contrary to predictions, degree of interpersonal closeness between the victim and the perpetrator just prior to the aggressive act was not associated with perceived face threat or degree of negative affect.