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call for papers: nonprofit management for social change

ASPA's Section on Nonprofit Management has issued a call for papers for a symposium to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic research and practice might embrace its interdisciplinarity by developing theories and methodological approaches to challenge traditional ways of understanding and address wicked problems facing communities today. We invite you to submit original manuscripts on methodological approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic studies that embrace interdisciplinarity in a number of ways. Please see the attached for more details.

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PAQ Articles

When Government Transparency Risks Reinforcing Racist Stereotypes and Residential Segregation

Thomas Craemer
PAQ, Vol. 45 No. 1, 51-78 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.37808/paq.45.1.3

Transparency requires that online government information be both numerically accurate and ‘cognitively accessible’ to members of the public. This paper provides a normative critique of various crime-data presentation formats informed by the literature on cognitive biases with regard to quantitative information. The analysis finds that interactive crime maps often apply (1) relative scaling, (2) arbitrary rate-magnification, (3) context-free absolute numbers, (4) ratios of small proportions, and (5) wrong baselines of comparison. These formats risk portraying non-White and/or Hispanic urban areas as ‘high crime’ in absolute rather than relative terms. This may discourage cautious (White) individuals from visiting, doing business in, or relocating to such neighborhoods, thus reinforcing residential segregation. Proportional scaling may provide an easy solution: In 2017, New York City emerges as a safe zone with regard to violent crime. Proportional scaling is easy to implement and it may help prevent inadvertent reinforcement of racist stereotypes and residential segregation.

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