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Framed within recent developments in genre theory, this paper examines personal storytelling as practiced by working-class children and their families. Although both working-class and middle-class children encounter versions of oral storytelling that embody a personal perspective, these versions privilege different slants on experience. Drawing on a program of research that spans several decades and two European American working-class communities, we attempt to characterize the working-class slant on its own terms, not simply as a departure from a middle-class standard. We conclude that the working-class slant encourages children to see that they have the right and resources to narrate their own experiences in self-dramatizing ways, but that the right to be heard and to have one’s point of view accepted cannot be taken for granted.

Racial identity means different things to members of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. However, while the study of race and politics is often the study of White racial attitudes (Dawson & Cohen, 2003), research on racial identity almost always refers to non-White identity. This article addresses this hole in the literature by examining the extent and effects of White identity. We compare White identification and Black identification using National Election Studies data and examine the relationships between racial identity and racial and political attitudes. This study adds a missing case to the study of racial identity, tests how well the theories about the concept travel across cases, and highlights the need for more frequent studies of the racial identity of all groups.

It is commonly believed that a fortunate right-hand side b can significantly reduce the sensitivity of a system of linear equations Ax = b. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that this is not true when the system is solved (in floating point arithmetic) with Gaussian elimination or the QR factorization: the error bounds essentially do not depend on b, and the error itself seems to depend only weakly on b. Our error bounds are exact (rather than first-order); they are tight; and they are stronger than the bound of Chan and Foulser.We also present computable lower and upper bounds for the relative error. The lower bound gives rise to a stopping criterion for iterative methods that is better than the relative residual. This is because the relative residual can be much larger, and it may be impossible to reduce it to a desired tolerance.

The study investigates European American and Taiwanese grandmothers '