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We discuss a recent effort of institutional resistance in the context of the 2008–2011 Apostolic Visitation of U.S. women religious motivated by Vatican concerns about perceived secularism and potential lack of fidelity among Catholic sisters. We examined the process of and women’s responses to the Visitation to shed light on the institutional work associated with productive resistance and the role of identity and emotions in transforming institutions.

At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis – a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever – even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

– Lisa Miller, Female Troubles, Newsweek, May 27, 2010

At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis – a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever – even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

Flexible scheduling in school libraries is supported by the American Association for School Libraries (AASL) and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Support is based on the constructivist theory of learning and posits increased learning, collaboration, and visitations by classes, small groups, and individuals to the availability of resources during the time of need, yet there is no direct evidence to support flexible scheduling. The quantitative study sought to examine the relationship between media center scheduling on students’ academic achievement, teacher and media specialist collaboration, and class visitation in an elementary school. The researcher utilized an experimental posttest-only control group design. The point-biserial correlation was utilized to identify any relationship between groups who utilized the media center on a fixed versus a flexible schedule and criterion-referenced test scores. No significant relationship was found between scheduling patterns, student achievement, and collaboration. However, the research supported increased number of visitations by classes on a fixed schedule.

It is generally accepted that repeat visitation represents an attractive, cost-effective market segment for most destinations. Given such importance, an analytical model is proposed and tested. Our model prescribes a direct, causal relationship between pull motivations, travel satisfaction, intention of repeat visit, and repeat-visit behavior. Two hundred and two survey questionnaires are collected using a systematic sampling technique. Factor Analysis is employed to reduce 14 motivational attributes to five factors. The results of the logistic regression analysis reveal that the factor ‘local food and beverages’ and tourists’ overall satisfaction level are insignificant predictors of repeat visitation. However, the rest of the variables such as climate, attractions, and facilities are significant. Implications of the results for both researchers and practitioners are discussed.

This paper investigates why mothers are losing to fathers in contested child custody battles that have occurred between 1980 and 2003. It employs quantitative, qualitative, and contextual strategies to understand the complex set of forces involved. The findings suggest that single mothers and children are increasingly trapped in a war zone between cost conscious policymakers ideologically opposed to the welfare state, angry fathers shouldering the burden of a shift from public to private transfers of funding in the form of child support, religious zealots intent on turning back the clock to a mythical patriarchal Eden, and the legal doctrine of gender neutrality reflecting these political forces.

Nature plays an important role in tourism experiences with more people seeking leisure activities in outdoor settings. Tourism management can facilitate a reduction of impacts and enhancement of experiences but requires sensitivity to individual markets to be effective. This chapter investigate stakeholders’ perspectives for managing Chinese tourism to Wet Tropics. Specifically, it aims to determine overall thoughts as well as individual attitudes toward different futures. Guided by the concept of saturation of ideas in qualitative data, 18 in-depth interviews were conducted with stakeholders in north Queensland. Findings indicate that they are optimistic toward all futures but have different plans for and concerns about individual tourism markets.

This study focuses firstly on the importance for forecasting accuracy of allowing for intervention events in the modeling process. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) models are therefore estimated both with and without intervention effects (the September 11, 2001 events) using data for the period 1990–2001. These models are used to generate forecasts for 2002 and the first part of 2003, and forecast accuracy is assessed using mean absolute percentage error and root mean square percentage error. The second focus of the study is to examine the impacts on tourism demand of the major crises that occurred during the period 2001–2003. The chosen US metropolitan destination is New York City, which was severely affected by the September 11 events, and within New York the US Metropolitan Museum of Art is selected, as this is a very well-known and visited destination for which seasonal data are available over the period 1990–2003. The artificial neural networks (ANNs) and SARIMA forecasts are compared with forecasts generated by the much simpler automatic Holt-Winter's seasonal double exponential smoothing model as well as two naïve forecasting models to ensure that minimum performance standards are being met.

This research constructs the critical predictors of visitation that shall allow the practitioners to foresee the visitation in the years to come through secondary data. For this study, tourist arrival data associated with the most popular forest park (i.e., Xiton Forest Park) in Taiwan along with relevant socio-economic data are utilized. This research adopts a group of analytical procedures involving correlation analysis, regression, and curve estimation analyses. The results show that the number of holiday per month and the average monthly rainfall have positive and negative correlations, respectively, with the visitation. Meanwhile, average monthly temperature and monthly gross domestic product per capita show a positive correlation in all three analytical methods and therefore are regarded as the primary predictors of tourist arrival. Consequently, this study provides managerial implications to increase the tourist arrivals to the forest park.

In this article, I examine the role of judicial narratives in constructing, constraining, and delimiting the boundaries of social scientific and expert knowledge – specifically, in the context of gay and lesbian parents’ custody and adoption cases. Examining not only the judicial narratives in appellate cases over the last fifty years in the United States, but also expert reports and briefs obtained from attorneys in these cases and interviews with judges, attorneys and litigants, I investigate the role of judicial narratives in adjudicating between competing social scientific claims about sexuality and child welfare, constructing expertise, and ultimately deciding what is valid knowledge and what is not. I focus specifically on the ways in which judges credit and discredit social scientific evidence, experts, and knowledge claims. The power of legal actors and particularly judges to police the boundaries of knowledge and expertise in the context of the custody case and the judicial narrative is complicated by the observation that this form of social scientific knowledge is not only the object acted upon and shaped by these power dynamics, but is also itself a source of power and legitimation.

Over 2 million individuals are incarcerated in the US criminal justice system. More than half of incarcerated Americans are also parents of minors. Parental incarceration can lead to a higher risk of mental illness and enduring trauma in children, as well as other problematic cognitive, developmental, and educational outcomes. Examining parental incarceration through a racial equity lens is critical, as people of color make up 67% of the incarcerated population despite making up only 37% of the US population. Further, gender-related equity issues pose important challenges for families with incarcerated parents. Here, we discuss prison-based psychosocial interventions designed both to build parenting skills and to improve parent well-being within a racial and gender equity lens. We hypothesize that effective services in these areas are essential components in a broad strategy designed to mitigate the potential negative effects suffered by families and children of incarcerated parents of color as a result of their imprisonment.