American Behavioral Scientist Research Articles

Beyond the Rings: Exploring the Cultural and Behavioral Impact of the 2024 Paris Olympics

The Olympic Games stand as a pinnacle of human achievement, captivating global attention for over a century. Beyond the remarkable athletic displays, they serve as a rich tapestry for studying the intricate interplay of psychology, sociology, politics, and behavior. The forthcoming 2024 Paris Olympics offer a unique lens to probe deeper into these phenomena, serving as a catalyst for cutting-edge research across disciplines. This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist aims to illuminate the multifaceted dimensions of the Games, exploring their profound implications on human behavior, performance, identity, media, culture, and statecraft.

Environment and Social Inequality

The American Behavioral Scientist ( ABS) was one of the first significant journals to publish a special issue on environmental justice (EJ). The influential volume, published in 2000, bore the title Advances in EJ: Research, Theory, and Methodology. The volume contained classic EJ theoretical essays such as Taylor’s “The rise of the EJ paradigm” and Pellow’s “Environmental inequality formation.” ABS has published other influential EJ scholarship since then.

Moving from Offline to Online: How COVID-19 Affected Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have faced a lot of challenges related to their daily work. This article introduces a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, which particularly focuses on methodological challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a brief review of the literature as well as the studies in this issue, we argue that the pandemic has sparked significant methodological innovations with respect to design, data collection, study documentation, and scholarly collaboration. We distinguish two types of innovations, both conceptualized as the outcome of an unprecedented external shock. First, “methodological compromises” that enabled data collection during the pandemic, but are inferior to established approaches. These methodological compromises, therefore, may be abandoned in post-pandemic times. Second, there are also “methodological game changers” that are superior to classic approaches and thus may prevail in the long run. Regardless of the type, we call scholars in the social and behavioral sciences to systematically test, compare, and evaluate the methodological innovations brought to us as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 Communication and Media: The First Pandemic of the Digital Age

This issue of American Behavioral Scientist marshals case studies of online media platforms such as Zoom, YouTube, and Twitter and digital hardware systems such as virtual reality technology to assess the often unexpected interactions between the pandemic and digital technologies. The issue leads with a case study of Zoom to examine the largely successful efforts which Zoom made in the wake of the pandemic to resolve unanticipated privacy and security problems afflicting the suddenly ubiquitous and indispensable platform. Subsequently, the issue charts the growing tensions between competing proprietary and open-source institutional logics during the pandemic. In the next section, articles consider the spread of covid-related information on YouTube and news outlets to take a comparative angle of vision both internationally and in terms of the dynamics of media production and reception in different cultural and societal environments. Variation is also key to the articles in the last section where research focuses on persistent digital usage gaps. Here the articles touch on the socioeconomic factors driving differentiated knowledge about the pandemic, as well as the relatively low uptake of digital technologies among older adults in housing facilities. Finally, we also learn about the effect of the social isolation and anxieties of the pandemic on the uptake of a new form of digital hardware, virtual reality equipment. To conclude this discussion of media during the first pandemic of the digital age, the issue closes with an eye to visualizations tools needed for the future. These contributions take the measure of how the pandemic intersected with digitized communications and media in varied and, at times, unequal ways, as well as lessons applicable to future crises.

Organizational and Institutional Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This issue of American Behavioral Scientist deals with the various ways in which different kinds of organizations cope with the manifold challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, these articles map the challenges and opportunities encountered by a variety of organizations in a major public health crisis. The first section of the issue takes up the theme of adaptive crisis response in relation to two different kinds of organizations. This section begins with a comprehensive overview of U.S. nonprofit organizations’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second article expands on the theme of communication practices in organizations using digital communication platforms which facilitate constructive forms of disagreement or “creative conflict.” Both of these articles indicate the potential positive outcomes of entrepreneurial organizational response. In the next section, we turn to organizational responses hampered by digital inequalities. The first article addresses digital inequalities and eLearning during the pandemic in the country of Pakistan. The next article also uses a digital inequalities framework to probe infrastructural inadequacies faced by the criminal justice system in terms of hindrances to external communication for incarcerated populations during the pandemic. This pair of articles underscores the importance of infrastructure as a necessary element of successful crisis response. The third section of the issue continues with case studies of carceral institutions with the first article offering insight into strategies used by incarcerated people to generate a sense of normality despite pandemic disruptions. Finally, the issue closes with an article revealing the delicate balancing act which rural U.S. law enforcement carried out when competing imperatives made it extremely difficult to manage public health and public safety simultaneously.

Why We Hate‐Watch: The Role of Nostalgia and Investment in WWE Viewership

Why We Hate‐Watch: The Role of Nostalgia and Investment in <scp>WWE</scp> Viewership

Digital Automation and AI: Trajectories and Cultures in and Outside the Workplace

This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist brings together seven contributions that explore different facets of the two overarching themes connected to digital automation. The first section of the issue delves into the complex ways in which digital automation interacts with preexisting social and economic institutions, specifically professions, markets, and formal organizations. The second section includes contributions that explore the cultural side of digital automation in terms of time and humanness. The issue concludes with an examination of the complex entanglement of digital automation and the covid-19 pandemic as they reshape the post-automation/post-pandemic economic landscape, including labor markets, jobs, consumption, and economic growth.

My Back to the Future Moment for Terrorism

This article, with the benefit of hindsight, analyzes the accuracy (and inaccuracy) of my February 2001 article in the American Behavioral Scientist seeking to answer, “what is the future of terrorism?” I discovered that Shakespeare had it right, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, But in ourselves if we are underlings.” There are two major factors that produce and sustain international terrorism—state sponsorship of individuals and groups that carry out terrorist acts and the actions of nation states that create an aggrieved class that is inspired to use violence to try to achieve political objectives or simply to avenge a perceived wrong. The conclusion reached in 2001 remains valid—Prevention and preparation can pay important dividends in deterring terrorism. But a government’s response must be tempered with reason and prudence. Security and law enforcement policies must reflect the values and the vision that protect and uphold freedom.

Deliberative Play

This article introduces a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist in which scholars of public deliberation address the theme of “Deliberative Play” from different conceptual and empirical approaches. Here I introduce the concept of deliberative play against a background of philosophical accounts of deliberative action, the theory of metacommunication, and trends in the study of public deliberation that are endeavoring to reduce the gap between normative theories and the empirical realities of deliberative democratic practice. Articles in the special issue address several aspects of deliberative play: how storytelling activities accomplish deliberative play in online forums (Black, Wolfe, and Han); how facilitators can cue and maintain the deliberative play frame during facilitated deliberative discussions (Sprain); how playful exchanges are enabled by the structure of New England town meetings and what they accomplish (Townsend and Milburn); how alternative scenarios for action presented with pros and cons by expert consultants influence deliberative play in online discussions in Poland (Przybylska, Bucholc, and Mazur); and how online discussion interfaces would benefit from applying principles of game design (Gastil). The concluding section reflects on the results of these studies and their implications for further investigations of deliberative play.

The Nexus of Carcerality and Access and Success in Postsecondary Education

This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist focuses on college preparation, access, and success for individuals impacted by carceral systems and practices in K-12 and higher education. Carcerality is (in)formal rules that center discipline, punishment, and control of individuals. Most recently, the embodiment of carceral practices has become more visible throughout the educational system, particularly for students of color. Attitudes, practices, and policies shape how K-12 and higher education students are perceived and treated as risks. In turn, these attitudes and policies lead to decisions about whether students merit investments that increase the likelihood of success in the education system. In the face of these structural barriers, students resist and overcome these policies and the systemic underinvestment in their education. This volume of articles centers the interconnection between education and criminal (in)justice to understand how both fields interact and position minoritized students in the social, academic, and behavioral margins. Articles explore the experiences of system-impacted students in K-12, higher education, theoretical application of risk, the impact of carceral laws and policies on educational access, and response to practices and policies that can counter carceral efforts in education systems.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The Multifaceted Impact of COVID-19: Health, Emotions, Well-Being, and Risk Assessment

Analyzing diverse and rich data on the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue of the American Behavioral Scientist offers important insights into health and risk assessment in a time of unprecedented crisis in the 21st century. This issue explores health, emotions, and well-being vis-à-vis the pandemic and its societal impacts. Across the articles, we see the complex ways that this global health crisis has consequences for individuals and groups as they engage in risk assessment and grapple with the secondary effects of the pandemic. Within this issue, we observe the importance of information exchange, networks and relationships, emotional and economic well-being, and risk perception. All of these phenomena converge in the myriad ways that the COVID-19 pandemic forces people to reevaluate everyday activities in consequential life realms. As the issue as a whole illuminates, human emotions and risk assessment are powerful forces that prompt practices and behaviors even in a time of public health crisis.

Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers: The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype

The purpose of this special issue is to offer new perspectives on fan cultures which respond to changes and controversies that have happened since the last American Behavioral Scientist special issue on fandom was published, in 2005. But the aim of my contribution is to argue that, sadly, derisive-gendered discourses like ‘fangirls’, ‘groupies’ and ‘shippers’ are still alive and well. Returning to the kind of research conducted in the 1980s – when women’s experiences of feminized popular cultures began to be taken seriously – reminds us that their pleasures are no less derided or controversial four decades on. My findings also suggest that the enduring presence of older stereotypes within teen drama fandoms – particularly the ‘groupie’ – signals the agility of sexism, as the term can now be understood as more of a generational designation rather than a medium-specific one. This article is the product of three years of qualitative empirical research with ‘teen girl’ fandoms of three popular television shows: Pretty Little Liars, Revenge and The Vampire Diaries. The data it discusses includes Skype audio and video interviews, written interviews conducted via email and Facebook Messenger, along with overt social media observations.

Where life and leisure intersect: exploring the outdoors as a site of contradictory experiences for person’s living in poverty

ABSTRACT For individuals experiencing poverty and homelessness, acting out their lives in public spaces can be complicated, as their very existence might be viewed as a transgression of a spaces’ conceptualization [Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. London: Blackwell.]. Within this paper, through the work of Henri Lefebvre and Don Mitchell, I examine the ways in which representations of public outdoor spaces in cities impact the lived experiences of those who engage with the sites as a means of survival. Through this work, I argue that the right to be is reliant on an individual’s ability to acceptably (re)produce spaces as they were conceived, or to otherwise be forced to exist in marginal spaces [Mitchell, D., and N. Heynen. 2009. “The Geography of Survival and the Right to the City: Speculation on Surveillance, Legal Innovation, and the Criminalization of Intervention.” Urban Geography 30 (6): 611–632. doi:10.2747/0272-3638.30.6.611; Snow, D., and M. Mulcahy. 2001. “Space, Politics, and the Survival Strategies of the Homeless.” American Behavioral Scientist 45 (1): 149–169. doi:10.1177/00027640121956962]. The empirical insights in this work emerged from nine months of field work at Start Me Up Niagara, a community centre in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, which works with people experiencing poverty and homelessness.

The Chinese Economy From the Underside: Funny Money and Institutional Transformation in the Xi Jinping Era

This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist examines the irregular transactions and informal institutions that constitute the essential underside of the Chinese economy. Contributors with a range of disciplinary backgrounds explore shadow banking, social welfare and rural development by private enterprise, NGO financing, the credit/debt cycle of informal international trade, and offshore investment by Chinese state-owned enterprises. The question posed by all contributors is as follows: How, in China through the 2010s, do irregular or nonlegal financial transactions influence political authority? Institutions, the rules and norms by which we live, are found to be key. This “Introduction” sketches the conceptual links between money, rules, and ruling in the context of the heightened authoritarianism and institutional formalization of the 2010s—the Xi Jinping era.

Index to Titles and Authors/Editors of Books Reviewed

Index to Titles and Authors/Editors of Books Reviewed

Exhibitions of Impact: Introducing the Special Issue

The Exhibitions of Impact (EOI) special issue of American Behavioral Scientist consists of six articles from authors in communication studies and rhetoric, public health, medicine and bioethics, memory studies, and art therapy. Each article profiles some exhibition or memorial related to a pressing social issue, including gun violence, racist terrorism, domestic violence, religious fundamentalism, corporations selling harmful products, and how society treats those regarded as cognitively and behaviorally different. First, examples from today’s headlines show a global outcry over racist monuments and artifacts, and a global pandemic, which casts doubt on the future of exhibitions. Historical examples and explanatory concepts are introduced, with a focus on public exhibitions which issue suggestions or commands, brazenly or in more indirect ways. A look at medical and health exhibits makes explicit how exhibitions try to get us to do something while being informative. While summaries of each article show the topics are diverse, racism and health inequities emerge as underlying themes. After considering performative exhibits, there is a call for a bioethically informed exhibition studies, capable of navigating the wide variety of exhibits out there, and able to express allyship while troubleshooting urgent problems.

An Unequal Pandemic: Vulnerability and COVID-19.

This collection sheds light on the cascading crises engendered by COVID-19 on many aspects of society from the economic to the digital. This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist brings together scholarship examining the various ways in which many vulnerable populations are bearing a disproportionate share of the costs of COVID-19. As the articles bring to light, the unequal effects of the pandemic are reverberating along preexisting fault lines and creating new ones. In the economic realm, the rental market emerges during the pandemic as an economic arena of heightened socio-spatial and racial/ethnic disparities. Financial markets are another domain where market mechanisms mask the exploitative relationships between the economically vulnerable and powerful actors. Turning to gender inequalities, across national contexts, women represent an increasingly vulnerable segment of the labor market as the pandemic piles on new burdens of remote schooling and caregiving despite a variety of policy initiatives. Moving from the economic to the digital domain, we see how people with disabilities employ social media to mitigate increased vulnerability stemming from COVID-19. Finally, the key effects of digital vulnerability are heightened because the digitally disadvantaged experience not only informational inequalities but also aggravated bodily manifestations of stress or anxiety related to the pandemic. Each article contributes to our understanding of the larger mosaic of inequality that is being exacerbated by the pandemic. By drawing connections between these different aspects of the social world and the effects of COVID-19, this issue of American Behavioral Scientist advances our understanding of the far-reaching ramifications of the pandemic on vulnerable members of society.

The art of youthful restraint: negotiating youth-adult relations in digital media literacy

ABSTRACT Scholarship on youth digital media literacy programs has focused on how adults practice restraint as a means of allowing young people to exercise agency in decision-making experiences. Yet youth also practice restraint, as we found in a digital storytelling program involving 16 early adolescents (ages 11–14) from economically precarious communities who worked with 18 adult mentors trained in discussing systemic and racial injustices in the context of trauma-informed practices. Building on a framework of critical youth studies, our ethnographic data reveals how youth deployed their own version of restraint that is simultaneously defensive and agentive. We argue that this is a form of empowerment that needs to be better understood in the contexts of actual practices of youth/adult media co-production, and in relation to support for the development of critical, participatory and collaborative, and expressive competencies (Mihailidis, P., and B. Thevenin. 2013. “Media Literacy as a Core Competency for Engaged Citizenship in Participatory Democracy.” American Behavioral Scientist 57 (11): 1611–1622). Restraint is thus presented as a strategy of empowerment that youth develop in relation to digital media literacy and youth voice, especially for young people from populations historically marginalized and frequently misunderstood in media and in public life.

COVID-19 Communication Ecologies: Using Interpersonal, Organizational, and Mediated Communication Resources to Cope With a Pandemic.

Information and communication resources are needed for individuals to cope with a public health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. These resources include interpersonal, organizational, and mediated communication, which collectively constitute a communication ecology. This interdisciplinary special issue of American Behavioral Scientist focuses on applications of a communication ecology perspective to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each article in this issue examines one or more specific aspect of COVID-19 communication ecologies to expand understanding of how a variety of communication resources can foster individual and collective coping with a global public health crisis. Insights from this issue can inform ongoing response to COVID-19 and planning for future public health crises.