Evaluating mediation and moderation effects in school psychology

Abstract

Forgiveness and related constructs (e.g., repentance, mercy, reconciliation) are ripe for study by social and personality psychologists, including those interested in justice. Current trends in social science, law, management, philosophy, and theology suggest a need to expand existing justice frameworks to incorporate alternatives or complements to retribution, including forgiveness and related processes. In this article, we raise five challenging empirical questions about forgiveness. For each question, we briefly review representative research, raise hypotheses, and suggest specific ways in which social and personality psychologists could make distinctive contributions.

Description

Specifically, based on treadmill of production theory the authors hypothesize that coal companies are more likely to increase political donations and lobbying efforts prior to the conclusion of any state enforcement effort (administrative, civil, or criminal violation). In addition, and consistent with treadmill of production theory, the authors hypothesize that the probability of environmental enforcement will be lower for coal companies that are more embedded in the treadmill of production and higher for companies less embedded in the treadmill. To test these hypotheses, a case-crossover design is used that allows for comparisons within companies by looking at treadmill-related characteristics at the time of the violation and at randomly chosen points in time before and after that violation. The authors discovered that while lobbying efforts and level of embeddedness in the treadmill were unrelated to state enforcement, political donations significantly increase for companies just prior to the conclusion of an enforcement event (odds ratio = 6.36). It is also discovered that corporate restructuring is related to environmental enforcement. The article concludes by offering insights into alternative analysis and uses of treadmill of production theory as it relates to green criminology. In this article we apply a developmental psychology analysis to sex offender laws and policies for adolescents to examine how such laws and policies, derived primarily from downward extension of adult criminal predatory sexual offender statutes and policies, serve the early identification of predators, constraint of such behavior, and/or engagement in rehabilitation. This focus is framed within advances in the past 20 years in the understanding of neurobiology and the social development of adolescence and in the understanding of the makeup of the population potentially coming under juvenile sex offender regulations. We find a significant mismatch between the prevailing laws and policies and the scientific knowledge about adolescents' development and the intended service to public safety. We provide suggestions from the attending empirical knowledge for increasing differentiation in the understanding of and treatment of adolescents and adult offenders. We also suggest heterogeneity, or subgroup differences, within the adolescent population now considered offenders are an important contributor to the mismatch. We discuss the benefits of structuring policies and laws so they are grounded in a developmental understanding of behavior, which will likely lead to a reduction in recidivism and an increase in public safety. Employing a content analysis of sociology, political science, and criminology and criminal justice journals from 1964 to 1996, we explored trends in authorship. The data revealed that multiple authorship is now a common form of journal scholarship in the social sciences and is especially prevalent in criminology and criminal justice journals. The analysis showed that the dominant form of authorship among females is collaboration with at least one male. It also appears that multiple authorship is less widespread for theoretical articles and more common among empirical articles using more sophisticated quantitative techniques. While safety crimes far outweigh crimes of ‘conventional’ violence, British criminology continues to operate with rather narrow definitions of violence which exclude these. The aim of this paper is to examine the key ways in which occupational injury and death remain excluded by criminological definitions of violence. To do so, we review briefly three recent examples of approaches to, or discussions of, violence. Our discussions of each point to the general conclusion that criminological definitions of violence still fail to recognize offences against workers and the public arising out of work. The paper concludes by speculating on the preconditions for any such recognition, before noting frameworks for studying violence within which safety crimes, or corporate violence, are coherently accommodated. His study examines to what extent new and emerging data sources or big data have been empirically used to measure key theoretical concepts within environmental criminology. By means of a scoping review, aimed at studies published between 2005 and 2018, insight is provided into the characteristics of studies that used big data sources within environmental criminology. The type and extent of big data sources used, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of these data sources, are synthesized. After the selection procedure, 84 studies were included for further analysis. Although the number of studies increased each year, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of studies since 2014. The findings suggest that most studies used administrative data or user-generated content as one type of research data. However, innovative data sources (automated and volunteered data) have gained in importance in recent years. Also, most studies are of a descriptive or predictive nature, predominantly conducted by computational (social) scientists. Since these approaches pay little to no attention to mechanisms that bring about social outcomes, an alternative philosophical framework is proposed. We put forward a scientific realist approach as a solution to integrate data-driven and theory-driven research. This approach responds to recent calls to move towards an ‘analytical criminology’. The results are discussed within this framework, and translated into avenues for future research.