CSUN Faculty Publications and Research
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.2/308
2024-03-28T12:56:53ZWandering White Eye
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/225299
Wandering White Eye
Tara, Boutin
Prose Poetry
2023-12-06T00:00:00ZFRAGILE
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/225291
FRAGILE
Boutin, Tara
Castillo, Xavier
2023-11-10T00:00:00ZCOVID-19 in Los Angeles: A Multivariate Analysis of Disease Infection Rates
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/224437
COVID-19 in Los Angeles: A Multivariate Analysis of Disease Infection Rates
Graves, Steven M.; Nichols, Petra
By the time the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, Los Angeles was already showing troubling signs of what was to come. Cities with international airports, significant tourist economies, and ample jet-setting populations quickly ascended to the top of case and morbidity counts. Los Angeles County, with its exposure to international tourism and massive population, easily outpaced all counterparts in the U.S. for both cases and deaths. Los Angeles County's vast spatial extent, enormous population, complex ethnic diversity, and deep economic disparities make it an ideal laboratory for the study of human behaviors. The ample and trustworthy COVID-19 data make it an excellent location for statistical modeling of infection rates. Our neighborhood-level analysis offers a powerful perspective into the causal associations that county- or state-level analyses cannot. Using COVID-19 case rate data from the LA Public Health Department and 2018 Census block group data, we constructed a series of statistical models measuring the association between COVID-19 infection rates, ethnicity, income, housing, household density, and a host of socioeconomic variables. Our exceptionally robust data model (Adjusted R2 = 0.93) demonstrates that neighborhood housing characteristics were the most statistically significant factor associated with elevated neighborhood case rates, followed by income and ethnicity (percent Hispanic and Asian) characteristics. Implications for both public policy and methodology are discussed
2021-01-01T00:00:00ZSocial Learning Theory and Community Organizing
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/222737
Social Learning Theory and Community Organizing
ben Asher, Moshe
The past two decades of community organizing around issues of racial, political, and economic justice confirm that grassroots practice for social change, notwithstanding local and national successes, has not harnessed citizen action into a movement that can substantively redistribute power in American society. There are at least three chronic problems: (1) funding arrangements, particularly the vagaries of top-down sponsorship; (2) formal organizational structuring, the legal rubric to institutionalize direct citizen action in corporate and government decision-making; and (3) systematic technology for organizers, based on scientific knowledge of human behavior. It is the formulation of suitable technology for influencing behavior and com-munity organizations that is the present focus.
It is sometimes difficult, especially for organizers, to appreciate the inadequacies of the existing knowledge base for training new community practitioners. The wonder is that so much has been achieved with so little. It is a testimonial to the inordinate dedication of the members of the profession. The curriculum consists of anecdotal accounts passed on by colleagues, ideological rhetoric mixed with disjointed rules of practice, less than compelling attempts to apply social science research and casework or groupwork principles, useless conceptual overviews of practice, and all too rarely, a fragment of well-developed technology, such as those for mass mobilization and grant acquisition.
These are at best shaky underpinnings for a profession that aspires to sustain if not shape and direct basic changes in the policies and institutions of the state. Medical practitioners have more sophisticated technology for transplanting a single heart. Then, of course, their profession is more than 2,000 years old and organizing is not yet 100.
There is an uncomplicated link between systematic technology for organizers and more effective organizing. Contemporary organizing is without an empirically based paradigm for understanding and predicting social behavior. For understanding behavior, the best available guide to practice is the Alinsky dictum to pay attention to self-interest. My goal here is to lay the groundwork for organizing technology based on social learning theory. Social learning provides a scientific framework for analyzing human behavior, but more importantly, it serves as the foundation of concepts and procedures for changing social behavior in organizational life.
2021-01-01T00:00:00Z