Over the past decade, tiny houses and the lifestyle they promote have become a world-wide phenomenon, with the trend especially impactful in the United States. Given their broad appeal and increasing prominence within popular culture, it is surprising how little research exists on them. To help to better understand what motivates people to adopt this lifestyle, this paper presents insights from an exploratory study in the United States and offers the first contours of a new conceptual framework. Situating the lifestyle within the larger economic and cultural forces of our times, it argues that going “tiny” is seen by tiny house enthusiasts as a practical roadmap to the Good Life: A simpler life characterized by more security, autonomy, relationships, and meaningful experiences. The paper ends with a brief discussion of broader implications and directions for future research.

Past research on the tiny house movement has primarily focused on understanding the individual motivations behind adopting the tiny house lifestyle. While some studies have suggested that tiny housers do entertain an interest in community, no systematic research exists that examines the actual complexities of this phenomenon. To make first inroads into this body of literature, twenty-four community-oriented tiny housers were interviewed about their ideal community. Interview questions ranged from definitions of community to specific ideas of the nature of community characteristics. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then coded in NVivo 12.0. Four main themes and eleven subthemes emerged from the qualitative content analysis. Select themes were then subjected to a subsequent quantification analysis in order to refine and deepen the theoretical understanding. The findings of this exploratory study suggest that a majority of tiny housers desire to be part of more cohesive and collaborative communities. While stressing the importance of community, tiny housers also expressed concerns over privacy. To explain the findings, the paper offers a set of arguments situated in the broader socio-cultural texture of our time.

Research on drug courts over the past decades has focused primarily on individual predictors of success and/or has examined the effectiveness of various judicial as well as therapeutic intervention strategies. To broaden our understanding of recovery as it occurs within the context of social networks, the following paper discusses the application of a new network-based framework of recovery capital. Participants in a small rural southeastern Adult Drug Court filled out a series of questionnaires and participated in a number of semi-structured interviews that assessed the availability of network-based recovery capital. The findings of this exploratory study suggest that participants possess restrictive resource portfolios and tend to over-rely on therapeutic (artificial) networks for support. Select implications for future research and treatment interventions are discussed.

Examining the extant literature on hate crimes shows that there has been an evolutionary process of Hate Crime legislation (HC). Similar to other social movements such as civil rights, the hate crime movement also had various waves which eventually lead to the passage of legislation. By and large, however, HC research has focused on victims and offenders of hate crimes as well as motivations of bias. Moreover, less research has been done on the media's portrayal and coverage of HC. Since the media is a noted influencer in social issues (Culotta, 2002;Quisenberry, 2001), we sought to answer how the news media are reporting incidences of hate crimes -particularly LGBTQ+-and compare them with official crime statistics reported by law enforcement agencies. In order to answer these questions, our research utilized a qualitative content analysis using QSR NVivo 12.0 to identify potential themes and trends which may be overlooked in simple quantitative methods. Our dataset comes from the Hate Crime Index ("ProPublica," 2018), for the month of June 2018. Official FBI data is also utilized for comparison, spanning from 2012 to 2016. Our results suggest that the media reports HC within an overall internal Agenda Setting Orientation. During analysis, two main themes were identified that show the (i) media report both the failures and challenges of law enforcement in dealing with HC issue and, (ii) that media highlights various best practices some agencies engage in. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.