Michael D. Grimes

Public Support for Environmental Protection New Evidence from National Surveys

The amount of support given environmental protection relative to that given ten other problem areas did not decline between 1973 (immediately prior to the “energy crisis”) and 1978. Analysis of the sources of public support for environmental protection revealed that only age had a substantial independent effect (β = −.168) on environmental priority scores.

Outdoor recreation and environmental concern: A reexamination of the Dunlap‐Heffernan thesis∗

The hypothesis proposed by Dunlap and Heffernan (1975) that involvement in outdoor recreational activities leads to greater concern with the natural environment is reassessed in this article. In contrast to earlier research, the findings suggest that recreationally active respondents do not differ greatly from inactives in levels of environmental concern. Tests of a multivariate model that included not only the recreational activity measure but also several other sociopersonal variables suggested by earlier research to be important predictors of environmental concern (including socioeconomic status, age, and place of residence) also proved disappointing. Not only were the total explained variances small, but the recreational activity variable proved to be one of the least powerful predictor variables in the model. The conclusions question the suggestion voiced by Dunlap and Heffernan (1975) that outdoor recreationalists may constitute a valuable constituency for efforts to stimulate public support for env...

Paradigm Shifts in Family Sociology? Evidence From Three Decades of Family Textbooks

This article explores paradigm shifts in family sociology from the 1960s to the 1990s using a thematic content analysis of 7 multiple-edition texts. Two competing views on theoretical developments are examined. David Cheal claims that challenges posed to structural functionalist hegemony resulted in theoretical pluralism and an end to this hegemony. Dorothy Smith argues that Parsons theoretical assumptions are so deeply embedded in the discourse of family sociology that they continue to govern major issues and debates. As late as the 1990s, we found that structural functionalism continued to frame many topics and debates in the majority of texts even when new concepts and more critical literature were added. Notable exceptions were textbook treatments of African American families and gender issues. This suggests that the relative success of social movements in institutionalizing their goals may be an important factor in determining paradigm shifts.

Response Bias in Sex-Role Attitude Measurement.

The widespread use of survey research by social scientists as a means for generating data has prompted an examination of the interview situation for sources of bias. Two potential aspects of the interview have been of particular interest to analysts — dissimilarities between interviewers and subjects on key sociopersonal variables and the nature of the subject matter of the interview. This study examines the impact of sex differences between interviewers and subjects on responses to a sensitive subject-matter area — sex-role orientations — in a telephone interview situation.

Class, Self-Perception, and Racial Group Identification Among African Americans

This paper examines the saliency of class location for African Americans employing Barreras (1979) model of multi-racial/ethnic capitalist societies. It employs data from the National Survey of Black Americans to test hypotheses linking class location to two important consequences of the life chances of members of the African-American minority: self-perception and racial group identification. Wrights (1985) exploitation-based model of the class structure of advanced capitalist society is employed to measure class location. The results reveal that class location is a significant predictor of both self-perceptions and levels of racial group identification among African Americans.

Critical Issues in the Analysis of Social, Economic, and Cultural Impacts of Energy Extraction and Development of Local Areas

This paper discusses critical conceptual and methodological issues in the analysis of social, economic, and cultural impacts of energy extraction and development to the local communities and areas surrounding the sites of such development. After briefly reviewing the genesis of impact assessment and its relevance for local areas, the paper presents and discusses three groups of issues: (1) site-specific issues — choice of a unit of analysis, choice of variables to represent the environment (s), the “timeliness” of the indicators, and the problem of using data from different sources; (2) technology-specific issues — characterizing the scope of the energy development, estimating the pace of the development, and estimating the impact of different energy development technologies; and (3) the impact parameter problem — the problem of determining the parameters within which the impacts are to be assessed and compared. Both suggestions for improving the quality of impact assessment and the policy implications of...