This study analyzed parents' perceived reasons for placing their children with visual impairments in residential or public schools. It found that children were more likely to be placed in residential schools for reasons related to their education and well-being and in public schools for reasons related to the parents' needs.

This study examined the perceived essential behavioral leadership qualities necessary for effective leadership by principals and superintendents in schools for students with visual impairments. The findings suggest that people-oriented leadership qualities are perceived to be better suited for effective leadership than are job-centered qualities in these schools.

This study comprehensively investigated the differences in response patterns of interview respondents by race, gender, and race-gender of both respondents and interviewers, to assess the impacts of response inconsistencies on data quality during survey interviews. The study focused only on Blacks and Whites in various interview phily matches. Interviewees ( N = 491) responded to fully structured, closed-ended questions through direct interviews on support for affirmative action, and support for the 2009 America’s Affordable Health Choices Act as dependent variables. Findings showed various amounts of response differences to both dependent variables by differences in race, gender, and race-gender of respondents, vis-à-vis those of the interviewers’, thereby constituting various amounts of data inconsistencies. The effects of race, gender, and race-gender of both interviewers and respondents constitute potential nonrandom errors that must be controlled in interview survey research, otherwise, research findings and conclusions may diverge from true relationships between variables.

Underpinned by the assumption that people would support affirmative action based on self-interests, and/or when they have high job security not to be threatened by the policy, this study investigated the likelihood that workers would differentially support affirmative action by their demographic attributes. Analyses of three demographic models-social, organizational, and combined(social plus organizational)-were used to determine predictors of support for affirmative action. Findings of the third (combined) model indicated that organizational tenure (an organizational demographic variable) and educational completion (a social demographic variable), respectively, were the two strongest predictors of support for affirmative action. This study suggested that factors of achievement, rather than race-ethnicity or gender, were the strongest predictors of support for affirmative action. This finding may be useful to personnel and human resources leaders in designing programs for employee acceptance of affirmative action programs.Keywords affirmative action support, social demography, organizational demography 2 SAGE Open construction contractors, the OFCCP, rather than the contractors, establishes goals and specifies AA good faith steps the contractors must take to increase the utilization of minorities and women in skilled trades in their organizations. These contractors are not required to develop any written AA programs of their own (OFCCP, 2002).The manifest function of AA is to encourage employers to be proactive in hiring and promoting protected classes of people (racial-ethnic minorities, White 1 women, people with disabilities, and the aged) who, collectively, are traditional victims of employment discrimination in American organizations (Kennedy, 1998;Pincus, 2003;Reskin, 1998). In addition to the manifest intent of the policy, one can also argue that AA has additional benefits of proactively preventing discrimination, and increasing organizational diversity to enhance creativity, innovation, and organizational success. To meet their various AA needs, organizations have developed various types of AA programs such as employment quota, an illegal practice, but, which in rare, exceptional, and limited situations had been ordered by the courts to be used temporarily to settle charges of egregious and persistent discrimination situations for which no other remedy was sufficient. For example, in the court case Local 28, Sheet Metal Workers V. EEOC, 478 U.S. 421, 1986, a court ordered a sheet metal union to hire non-Whites on a quota basis because the union had repeatedly defied court orders to stop discriminating against African Americans (Reskin, 1998). Other types of affirmative action practices used by organizations have included government contract set-asides (government programs that mandated that a small proportion of government contracts be set aside for minority contractors), race/ gender-plus policies (the consideration of race and gender, along with important meritocratic factors in hiring and prom...

The introductory sociology course is typically the only course most students take in sociology; hence, the introductory textbook becomes the only sociology textbook they may ever read as college students. The textbook, however, often lacks rigor in explaining concepts. This study focused on the thoroughness of explanations of the relations of substructure and superstructure of society by Karl Max (economic determinism) and Max Weber (ideological determinism) in a sample of introductory sociology textbooks. We found only one textbook to be consistently thorough in explaining both determinisms, and most textbooks were rated as low in their explanations of both concepts. We argue for greater thoroughness in introductory sociology textbooks, especially in the interest of students who participate in online learning and those who may not take another course in sociology and whose impression of the discipline would be framed by the introductory textbook.