One innovative way to help students make sense of survey research has been to create a multifaceted, collaborative assignment that promotes critical thinking, comparative analysis, self-reflection, and statistical literacy. We use a short questionnaire adapted from the Higher Education Research Institute’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s Freshman Survey. In our Research Methods course, students begin by administering the brief questionnaire to a small, nonrandom sample of students at our university. They analyze the data descriptively and compare their “results” to the national trends as part of their required course homework. These data are then quantitatively analyzed throughout all homework exercises the next semester during their statistics course. This collaborative effort bridges methods, statistics, and capstone courses, helping students connect the courses and develop a deeper understanding, awareness and appreciation of the utility of preestablished instruments for collecting primary data and for assessing the meaning of secondary data.

Research consistently shows that students and faculty are generally against expanding access to firearms on campus, and many stakeholders worry about the effects of campus carry laws on student violence, civility, and feelings of safety. We contribute to this literature by investigating how potential changes to campus carry policies affect students' reported commitment to campus activities. Theories explaining fear of crime and social commitment led to hypotheses that predict members of socially disadvantaged groups-specifically women and minority students-would report less favorable attitudes toward gun possession on campus, greater feelings of vulnerability to victimization, and less commitment to the college environment when students or staff may possess guns. Hypotheses received support, and add to the growing literature documenting potential issues that legislators, administrators, and faculty might consider when debating the enactment of campus carry policies.

This research examines college students’ experience, risk perceptions, fear of and preparedness for disasters and differences in female and male views. We conducted focus groups with students about their experience, risk perceptions, fear and preparedness, their reactions to the February 6 th, 2008 Union University tornado. We found that students are generally aware of the risks they face, usually have limited experience with disasters, are not well prepared, could not identify how their university was prepared, adopt fatalistic attitudes about the importance of preparedness and believe the university will take care of them. Also, women were much more likely to report being fearful. Many students were shocked about the Union University tornado and began asking more questions about ways their university is prepared.

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This edited collection is the result of a wealth of research presented at the Southern Sociological Society Annual Conference, which was the first association to hold a major conference (March of 2006) in New Orleans after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Although the exact magnitude of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the gulf coast states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana might be contested, it is widely held as the most destructive disaster in our history. With some 20 special Katrinarelated sessions and 80 critical sociological analyses of this disaster, the authors thought it was necessary and important to bring the best of these together in this edited volume. Part I addresses the framing of hurricane Katrina by recognizing how the disaster was sociologically constructed in the media, the increasing role of the military in disaster response and application of militarism as an ideology, and an examination of the occurrence and framing of crime. Part II is concentrated on evacuation processes and how people made decisions about whether to evacuate or not, use of social capital as a resource for evacuation, and the role of religious organizations in sheltering and providing other disaster relief services. Part III examines reaction to and recovery from Hurricane Katrina in several contexts. The chapters focus on college student reactions to the media representations of race, class, and gender after the disaster, the importance of perceptions and attachments to place as a source of social change, the unique benefit of community-based research in meeting the localized needs of communities that were affected by the hurricanes in local redevelopment plans, and a theoretical examination of the planning process for bringing unique cultural elements back to New Orleans. Part IV addresses institutional change in what we might consider the recovery phase by exam-ining Hurricane Katrina's impact on the future of education, addressing the future of health care and the immediate needs in areas directly impacted, and the role of immigrant labor in rebuilding the gulf coast and its impact on future population and immigration trends.One unique quality of this collection is that the authors call for a "paradigm shift in disaster research and a reorientation and redirection of important research themes throughout the broader discipline of sociology" (p. 1). Past conceptualizations of disasters distinguish between two basic forms by stating that natural disasters produce "therapeutic communities" and are consensus crises accompanied by heightened community cohesiveness and morale while technological disasters lead to "corrosive communities," stigmatizing and dividing community residents by heightening community conflict. More recently, terrorist attacks have been added to this conceptualization. The authors appropriately state that we must abandon such typologies and recognize that all disasters should be viewed as anthropogenic or resulting from human actions and relationships to the environment and that Hurricane Katrina cont...