Gretchen Thompson

Can Online Courses Deliver In-Class Results?: A Comparison of Student Performance and Satisfaction in an Online versus a Face-to-Face Introductory Sociology Course.

This study uses a quasi-experimental design to assess differences in student performance and satisfaction across online and face-to-face (F2F) classroom settings. Data were collected from 368 students enrolled in three online and three F2F sections of an introductory-level sociology course. The instructor, course materials, and assessments were consistent between the two delivery formats. The investigators compare student satisfaction and student performance on midterm exams and an integrating data analysis assignment. Ordinary least squares regression is used to evaluate the effect of the different course settings, independent of a number of demographic and control variables. Results indicate that differences in student performance between the two settings may be accounted for by the presence of a selection effect and that student satisfaction does not significantly differ across the two settings. These findings are interpreted to mean that when online courses are designed using pedagogically sound practices, they may provide equally effective learning environments.

Agricultural Trade Dependency and the Threat of Starvation: A Cross-National Analysis of Hunger as Unequal Exchange

Hunger represents a persistent problem in less developed countries (LDCs). Comparative sociological research debates the role of exports in influencing hunger, as export specialization can be a means to development as well as dependency. We consider the severity of hunger as an outcome of unequal exchange relationships, utilizing a measure of agricultural export flows. The results reveal that agricultural export flows to high-income countries elevate the severity of hunger in LDCs, net of other important modernization, food production, and military factors. Thus, the concept of unequal exchange is relevant in explaining cross-national patterns in hunger, and suggests that inequalities in food distribution are paramount in contributing to threatening levels of hunger in LDCs.

Sociology of the Prison Classroom: Marginalized Identities and Sociological Imaginations behind Bars.

The authors use sociology of the college classroom to analyze their experiences as feminists teaching sociology courses in the “unconventional setting” of prison. Reflective writing was used to chronicle experiences in the classes. They apply the concepts of doing gender, interaction order, and emotion work to the prison classroom. Based on their analysis, the authors examine the challenges and opportunities for critical education in prison. They aimed to use their teaching efforts to reach out to marginalized students and develop students’ sociological imaginations to assist them through the challenges of confinement and reentry. The authors’ analysis has implications for both prison education and higher education more broadly. They conclude that the success of prison education is dependent on establishing democratic classrooms that can enable students to see themselves as something more than inmates.

Testing the Importance of Family Solidarity, Community Structure, Information Access, and Social Capital in Predicting Nutrition Health Knowledge and Food Choices in the Philippines

This study investigates the influence of family solidarity, community structure, information access, social capital, and socioeconomic status on the extent of nutrition and health knowledge (NHK) among primary household meal planners. In turn, we pose the question: does this knowledge influence dietary decision making? Data are taken from a survey determining socioeconomic impacts of vitamin A fortified peanut butter on Philippine households. Questions on the relationships of nutrition to health were selected to construct a knowledge index on which household respondents could be ranked. We then tested hypotheses regarding what types of individual, family-level, and community structural characteristics would predict performance on this index. The results indicate that the strongest predictors of NHK come from sociological theory related to family solidarity and community centrality, in addition to information accessibility and household income. Our findings also indicate that NHK influences dietary choices with regard to the purchase of a vitamin fortified staple food product, which is essential when addressing nutritional deficiency problems in developing countries.

Intensity of food deprivation: The integrative impacts of the world system, modernization, conflict, militarization and the environment:

US and world military expenditures have increased dramatically in the last decade. Some cross-national treatments identify positive impacts of military spending on a range of domestic outcomes, while many others point to the converse. We review the literature and then focus on under examined relationships, including the impact of military expenditures on the intensity of food deprivation worldwide. We employ a structural equation modeling technique that permits synthetic analyses of direct and indirect impacts of a range of factors specified by the theories. We find world-system context indirectly matters a great deal to the intensity of food deprivation in nations, both in our sample of developed and developing nations, and of developing countries only. So do intra-national and international conflicts, especially insofar as they impact national modernization and military spending. While modernization is moderately enhanced by military spending for our cross-national sample of developed and developing countries, it is not for the sample of developing countries only. This may point to military technology’s spill over effects on other sectors of the economy, but solely for developed nations. For the world over, national modernization, itself a consequence of global power and dependency, directly reduces the intensity of food deprivation, while military expenditures directly heighten it. These differential relationships lead us to advocate for a more synthetic theorizing in studies of food security and hunger, while accounting for global circumstances that produce both similar and different consequences in richer and poorer countries.