Effects Of A Participatory Womens Group On Self-Efficacy: Fill & Download for Free

Many people have a visceral reaction to political attack ads on TV: Not much will prompt a faster change of the channel. But they are difficult to escape during election season and it is doubtful that the 2016 presidential election season will be much different. Political ads became much more negative over the course of the 2012 presidential campaign. Erika Franklin Fowler, an assistant professor of government, noted that 2012 will likely be remembered for its record-setting negativity. Fowler directs The Wesleyan Media Project, which monitors and analyzes televised campaign ads and found that three-quarters of ads aired during the last presidential race “appealed to anger.” A December 2015 report the project released suggests that the 2016 election season had not, at that point, taken an ugly turn — at least not via TV ads. Between Jan. 1, 2015 and Dec. 9, 2015, 84 percent of the 66,203 ads that aired in both parties’ races for presidential nominations focused on promoting a candidate instead of attacking a candidate or comparing one against another.That analysis, however, did not include the negative ads that bombarded Iowa caucus voters in early 2016, or the attack ads targeting Republicans shortly thereafter in New Hampshire. In the days before the 2016 New Hampshire primary, The New York Times described the Republican ads as “downright nasty — as well as expensive.” Journalists writing about the 2016 race can find a searchable and shareable archive of 2016 primary election ads through the Political TV Ad Archive, an initiative funded by a Knight News Challenge grant.The Wesleyan Media Project compiled the following chart to show how political advertising has become distinctly more negative over the past few election cycles:WesleyanMediaProjectIn a May 2013 post for “The Monkey Cage,” a leading political science blog, John Sides of George Washington and Lynn Vavreck of UCLA summarize their research on the 2012 campaign. With regard to advertising, they conclude that ads mattered but only in “very circumscribed ways” and the “effect of ads appeared to decay quickly.” Further, they assert that “back-loading — airing ads close to the election — was actually more effective than front-loading — airing ads early in the campaign — if the goal was to influence voters on Election Day.”Of course, the apparent rising volume and intensity of negative ads may reflect legal changes in how campaigns are funded in a post-Citizens United landscape. A related 2013 study in The Forum by Michael Franz of Bowdoin, “Interest Groups in Electoral Politics: 2012 in Context,” provides additional analysis and data relating to the role of outside groups in the most recent ad wars. In another May 2013 post for “The Monkey Cage,” Franz examines data suggesting that the type and potentially lower quality of ads by outside groups may have played a role in the election. The Romney campaign’s “reliance on outside spending put a significant burden on those groups to produce and air ads that could resonate with voters. They may have done so — we need more research on this — but they may have also produced ads that were far less effective at mobilizing or persuading voters.”From a historical perspective, it is worth considering, too, that increased news media focus on negative advertising itself has helped accelerate this trend, creating a vicious cycle of attack politics driven by political consultants and journalists.With its Flackcheck.org site, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania led an election season effort to scrutinize ads that purvey “political sleaze.” See some of the typical video techniques of political deception and misdirection:Political scientists have long been studying the effects of negative ad campaigns on voter opinion, and many analysts focused on how campaign 2012 was affected. But scholars have complicated the simplistic view that negative ads “work” as a general rule. During the 2012 campaign, the Washington Post wrote about five commonly held “myths” about campaign ads, while the New York Times analyzed the specific circumstances when ads matter and their design and effects. At a deeper level, such ads may work to both “shrink and polarize the electorate,” as the political scientists Shanto Iyengar of Stanford and Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard have long pointed out.Aggregated below are some of the more recent and/or influential academic studies on the topic:________“Attacks Without Consequence? Candidates, Parties, Groups, and the Changing Face of Negative Advertising”Dowling, Conor M.; Wichowsky, Amber. American Journal of Political Science, 2015, Vol. 59. doi: 10.1111/ajps.12094.Abstract: “Prior work finds that voters punish candidates for sponsoring attack ads. What remains unknown is the extent to which a negative ad is more effective if it is sponsored by a party or an independent group instead. We conducted three experiments in which we randomly assigned participants to view a negative ad that was identical except for its sponsor. We find that candidates can benefit from having a party or group ‘do their dirty work,’ but particularly if a group does, and that the most likely explanation for why this is the case is that many voters simply do not connect candidates to the ads sponsored by parties and groups. We also find that in some circumstances, a group-sponsored attack ad produces less polarization than one sponsored by a party. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for current debates about the proper role of independent groups in electoral politics.”“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: How Fact-Checking Influences Citizens’ Reactions to Negative Advertising”Fridkin, Kim; Kenney, Patrick J.; Wintersieck, Amanda. Political Communication, 2015, Vol. 32. doi: 10.1080/10584609.2014.914613.Abstract: “Electoral campaigns are dynamic and an important change in recent elections is the growth of fact-checking; the assessment of the truthfulness of political advertisements by news media organizations and watchdog groups. In this article, we examine the role that fact-checks play in shaping citizens’ views of negative commercials and political candidates. We rely on an Internet survey experiment where we vary people’s exposure to negative advertisements and a follow-up fact-check article (i.e., no fact-check, accurate fact-check, inaccurate fact-check). The results of our experiment show that fact-checks influence people’s assessments of the accuracy, usefulness, and tone of negative political ads. Furthermore, sophisticated citizens and citizens with low tolerance for negative campaigning are most responsive to fact-checks. The fact-checks also sway citizens’ likelihood of accepting the claims made in the advertisements. Finally, negative fact-checks (e.g., fact-checks challenging the truthfulness of the claims of the negative commercial) are more powerful than positive fact-checks.”“Going Positive: The Effects of Negative and Positive Advertising on Candidate Success and Voter Turnout”Malloy, Liam C; Pearson-Merkowitz, Shanna. Research and Politics, January-March 2016. doi: 10.1177/2053168015625078.Abstract: “Given the depth of research on negative advertising in campaigns, scholars have wondered why candidates continue to attack their opponents. We build on this research by considering real-world campaign contexts in which candidates are working in competition with each other and have to react to the decisions of the opposing campaign. Our results suggest that it is never efficacious for candidates to run attack ads, but running positive ads can increase a candidate’s margin of victory. These results are conditioned by two factors: candidates must both stay positive and out-advertise their opponent. Second, the effects of positive advertising are strongest in areas where the candidate is losing or winning by a large margin — areas where they might be tempted to not advertise at all.”“Who’s Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News”Schuck, Andreas R.T.; Vliegenthart, Rens; De Vreese, Claes H. British Journal of Political Science, January 2016, Vol. 46. doi: 10.1017/S0007123413000525.Abstract: “The ability of the news media to mobilize voters during an election campaign is not well understood. Most extant research has been conducted in single-country studies and has paid little or no attention to the contextual level and the conditions under which such effects are more or less likely to occur. This study tests the mobilizing effect of conflict news framing in the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. The unique multi-method and comparative cross-national study design combines a media content analysis (N = 48,982) with data from a two-wave panel survey conducted in twenty-one countries (N = 32,411). Consistent with expectations, conflict framing in campaign news mobilized voters to vote. Since the effect of conflict news was moderated by evaluations of the EU polity in the general information environment, conflict framing more effectively mobilized voters in countries where the EU was evaluated more positively.”“Seeing Spots: An Experimental Examination of Voter Appetite for Partisan and Negative Campaign Ads”Henderson, John A.; Theodoridis, Alexander G. July 2015. SSRN-id2629915.Abstract: “We utilize a novel experimental design to assess voter selectivity to political advertising. We randomly expose respondents to comparable positive or negative ads aired by Democratic or Republican candidates from the 2012 Presidential race and the 2013 Virginia Gubernatorial contest. The experiment closely mirrors real consumption of campaign information by allowing subjects to skip ads after five seconds, re-watch and share ads with friends. Using these measures of ad-seeking behavior, we find little evidence that negativity influences self-exposure to election advertising. We find partisans disproportionately tune out ads aired by their party’s opponents, though this behavior is asymmetric: Republican-identifiers are more consistent screeners of partisan ads than Democrats. The results advance our understanding of selectivity, showing that party source, and not ad tone, interacts with partisanship to mediate campaign exposure. The findings have important implications about the role self-exposure to information plays in campaigns and elections in a post-broadcast era.”“The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment”Lau, Richard R.; Sigelman, Lee; Rovner, Ivy Brown. Journal of Politics, 2007, Vol. 69, Issue 4, 1176-1209. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00618.x.Abstract: “The conventional wisdom about negative political campaigning holds that it works, i.e., it has the consequences its practitioners intend. Many observers also fear that negative campaigning has unintended but detrimental effects on the political system itself. An earlier meta-analytic assessment of the relevant literature found no reliable evidence for these claims, but since then the research literature has more than doubled in size and has greatly improved in quality. We reexamine this literature and find that the major conclusions from the earlier meta-analysis still hold. All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government and possibly overall public mood.”“A Framework for Dynamic Causal Inference in Political Science”Blackwell, Matthew. American Journal of Political Science, April 2013, Vol. 57. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2012.00626.x.Abstract: “Dynamic strategies are an essential part of politics. In the context of campaigns, for example, candidates continuously recalibrate their campaign strategy in response to polls and opponent actions. Traditional causal inference methods, however, assume that these dynamic decisions are made all at once, an assumption that forces a choice between omitted variable bias and post-treatment bias. Thus, these kinds of ‘single-shot’ causal inference methods are inappropriate for dynamic processes like campaigns. I resolve this dilemma by adapting models from biostatistics to estimate the effectiveness of an inherently dynamic process: a candidate’s decision to ‘go negative.'” To simplify the analysis, the study looked only at Democratic candidates in U.S. Senate and Gubernatorial elections from 2002 to 2006. It found that, in contrast to earlier research, that negative advertising could be an effective strategy for challengers, while incumbents were hurt by going negative.“Messages that Mobilize? Issue Publics and the Content of Campaign Advertising”Sides, John; Karch, Andrew. The Journal of Politics, April 2008, Vol. 70, Issue 2, 466-476.Findings: Targeted campaign ads appear to have only a small measurable effect on groups: “In three election years, we found no consistent evidence that messages related to Social Security and Medicare were associated with higher turnout among seniors or that messages related to veterans were associated with higher turnout among veterans.” Groups such as parents did seem to be mobilized by targeted ads, but the effects may be so small as to be extraordinarily expensive to exploit, with diminishing returns. In one media market, it took more than 4,000 ads to make turnout just 6.4% more likely among parents; in a more lightly advertised market, just 322 spots resulted in a 3.8% increased likelihood in turnout. This means that to achieve a further 2.6 percentage points in likely turnout, the “number of newly mobilized parents yields a cost-per-vote of $282. This is roughly 15 times the average cost-per-vote of door-to-door get-out-the-vote efforts.” Because targeted ads appear to have limited effectiveness, they don’t exacerbate differences in turnout rates between groups. “The participatory tendencies of senior citizens and veterans do not increase when campaigns focus on entitlements and veterans’ benefits, respectively.”“Variability in Citizens’ Reactions to Different Types of Negative Campaigns”Fridkin, Kim L.; Kenney, Patrick. American Journal of Political Science, 2011, Vol. 55, Issue 2, 307-325. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00494.x.Findings: Voters’ tolerance for negative campaigns and political rhetoric depends on individual characteristics: Those with a strong party affiliation and a deep interest in the campaign tend to be more tolerant and their impressions of candidates were not as deeply influenced by negativity. Men are more tolerant than women of negative content, while older respondents are less tolerant. Overall, “people who do not like uncivil and irrelevant discourse in negative communication are more responsive to the variation in the content and tone of negative commercials. These messages directly influence their assessments of incumbents and challengers. This finding stands in stark contrast to those people who are unperturbed by messages presented in an uncivil manner.” Three variables — relevance of message, degree of civility and the tolerance level of the voter — interact in complex ways and determine whether or not negative campaigns “work.” In other words, there is no simple, universal answer: In some cases negative campaigns can have substantial effects on voter impressions; in others, the effect is negligible.“The Implicit and Explicit Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: Is the Source Really Blamed?”Carraro, Luciana; Castelli, Luigi. Political Psychology, August 2010, Vol. 31, Issue 4, 617-645. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00771.x.Abstract: “Despite the widespread use of negative campaigns, research has not yet provided unambiguous conclusions about their effects. So far studies, however, have mainly focused on very explicit measures. The main goal of the present work was to explore the effects of different types of negative campaigns on both implicit and explicit attitudes, as well as in relation to two basic dimensions of social perception, namely competence and warmth. Across a series of three studies, we basically showed that not all negative campaigns lead to the same consequences. Specifically, especially personal attacks toward the opposing candidate may backfire at the explicit level…. Overall, it appeared that negative messages decreased the perceived warmth of the source while simultaneously increasing the perceived competence. Results are discussed by focusing on the importance of implicit measures in political psychology and on the crucial role of perceived competence.”“Do Voters Perceive Negative Campaigns as Informative Campaigns?”Sides, John; Lipsitz, Keena; Grossman, Matthew. American Politics Research, 2010, Vol. 38, No. 3, 502-530. doi: 10.1177/1532673X09336832.Findings: Voters tend to separate a campaign ad’s tone from whether they believe it to be informative: many voters will (correctly) perceive a campaign as negative but will also believe that it is providing truthful information. “These dimensions appear to be separate constructs in citizens’ minds.” Voters can accurately perceive whether a campaign is negative, and such judgment is not just a matter of which candidate they prefer. “Public perceptions of negativity do in fact respond to reality.” The degree of a campaign’s negativity as reflected in advertising has little bearing on whether voters believe it is informative. “There was no relationship between the volume of negative appeals and beliefs about whether the candidates were providing useful information or discussing policy issues.”“Comparing Negative and Positive Campaign Messages: Evidence From Two Field Experiments”Arceneaux, Kevin; Nickerson, David W. American Politics Research, January 2010, Vol. 38, No. 1, 54-83. doi: 10.1177/1532673X09331613.Abstract: “Considerable research indicates that personal contact from political campaigns can mobilize people to vote, but little attention has been given to whether the tone of the message matters. Studies of message tone have mostly been confined to mass media campaigns and ignored the growing role grassroots techniques play in contemporary political campaigns. Two randomized field experiments were conducted to determine the importance of message tone in grassroots contact. We find evidence that personally delivered messages can be effective at influencing voting preferences, but neither experiment uncovered a systematic difference between the effects of negative and positive messages on voter turnout or political attitudes.”“The Role of Candidate Traits in Campaigns”Fridkin, Kim L.; Kenney, Patrick, J. Journal of Politics, January 2011, Vol. 73, Issue 1, 61-73. doi: 10.1017/S0022381610000861.Abstract: “We examine how candidates shape citizens’ impressions of their personal traits during U.S. Senate campaigns. We look at the personality traits emphasized by candidates in their controlled communications and in news coverage of their campaigns. We couple information about campaign messages with a unique survey dataset allowing us to examine voters’ understanding and evaluations of the candidates’ personalities. We find that messages from the news media influence people’s willingness to rate the candidates on trait dimensions. In addition, negative trait messages emanating from challengers and the press shape citizens’ impressions of incumbents. In contrast, voters’ evaluations of challengers are unmoved by campaign messages, irrespective of the source or tone of the communications. Finally, we find citizens rely heavily on traits when evaluating competing candidates in U.S. Senate campaigns, even controlling for voters’ party, ideological and issue preferences.”“The Seeds of Negativity: Knowledge and Money”Lovett, Mitchell J.; Shachar, Ron. Marketing Science, 2011, Vol. 30, No. 3, 430-446. doi: 10.1287/mksc.1110.0638.Abstract: “This paper studies the tendency to use negative ads. For this purpose, we focus on an interesting industry (political campaigns) and an intriguing empirical regularity (the tendency to “go negative” is higher in close races). We present a model of electoral competition in which ads inform voters either of the good traits of the candidate or of the bad traits of his opponent. We find that in equilibrium, the proportion of negative ads depends on both voters’ knowledge and the candidate’s budget. Furthermore, for an interesting subset of the parameter space, negativity increases in both knowledge and budget.”“When Does Negativity Demobilize? Tracing the Conditional Effect of Negative Campaigning on Voter Turnout”Krupnikov, Yanna. American Journal of Political Science, 2011, Vol. 55, Issue 4, 797-813. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00522.x.Abstract: “Do negative campaign advertisements affect voter turnout? Existing literature on this topic has produced conflicting empirical results. Some scholars show that negativity is demobilizing. Others show that negativity is mobilizing. Still others show that negativity has no effect on turnout. Relying on the psychology of decision making, this research argues and shows that this empirical stalemate is due to the fact that existing work ignores a crucial factor: the timing of exposure to negativity. Two independent empirical tests trace the conditional effect of negativity. The first test relies on data from the 2004 presidential campaign. The second test considers the effect of negativity over a broader period of time by considering elections 1976 to 2000. Taken together, both tests reinforce that negativity can only demobilize when two conditions are met: (1) a person is exposed to negativity after selecting a preferred candidate and (2) the negativity is about this selected candidate.”“The Influence of Tone, Target and Issue Ownership on Political Advertising Effects in Primary Versus General Elections”Meirick, Patrick C., et al. Journal of Political Marketing, 2011, Vol. 10, Issue 3. doi: 10.1080/15377857.2011.588111.Abstract: “The conventional wisdom in the literature about political advertising effects — e.g., going negative risks backlash, stick to issues your party owns — has been derived from studies of general elections. Much less attention has been paid to primary elections, in which a partisan audience may be receptive to attacks on the opposing party and may judge most issues to be handled better by their own party. This experiment (N = 223) sets out to investigate the roles of tone (positive versus comparative), target (none, primary opponent, or general election opponent), and issue ownership (party-owned issue or unowned issue) in responses to political advertising during primary versus general elections. As predicted, partisans in primary election conditions had lower ad and sponsoring candidate evaluations for comparative ads attacking a primary opponent than for positive ads or comparative ads attacking the eventual general election opponent, but there were no differences between the latter two. Independents in the general election conditions responded more positively to positive ads than comparative ads. Issue ownership had no main effects.”“A Negativity Gap? Voter Gender, Attack Politics, and Participation in American Elections”Brooks, Deborah Jordan. Politics & Gender, 2010, Vol. 6, Issue 3, 319-341. doi: A Negativity Gap? Voter Gender, Attack Politics, and Participation in American Elections.Findings: Men are more likely to be motivated to vote by a negative campaign message. Highly negative campaigns saw the “biggest gender differences: an 88% probability of voting for men and just a 77% probability of voting for women.” In contests with the least amount of negative campaigning, “women are slightly higher than men in terms of predicted probability of going to the polls.” There is a further distinction between “civil” versus “uncivil” (“inflammatory, gratuitous, and divisive”) negative messaging. Comparing men’s and women’s reactions along these lines reveals further gender gaps: “Men are disproportionately mobilized by uncivil negativity as compared to women [and] women appear to be slightly more likely than men to vote after viewing civil negative messages.” After viewing uncivil negative ads, only 9% of men said they would definitely not vote, while 21% of women said they would not.“The Mass Media and the Public’s Assessments of Presidential Candidates, 1952-2000”Gilens, Martin; Vavreck, Lynn; Cohen, Martin. The Journal of Politics, November 2007, Vol. 69, Issue 4, 1160-1175. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00615.x.Abstract: “Media critics blame contemporary news for increasing levels of apathy and ignorance among the electorate. We agree that the amount of policy-oriented information in news coverage of presidential campaigns has declined and the level of news consumption has fallen. Yet, based on 50 years of data on media content and public attitudes, we find that over this period of time Americans have just as much to say about the major-party presidential candidates, what they have to say is more policy oriented, the association of vote choice with policy considerations has strengthened while the association with character considerations has weakened, and factual knowledge about the presidential candidates’ issue positions has not declined. We assess the role of education, party polarization, and paid advertising in explaining trends in Americans’ political knowledge and engagement. We show that the public’s steady level of information and increased focus on policy in presidential politics reflects the high level of policy content in paid ads, which have compensated for the shift of news coverage toward candidate character, scandal, and the horse race

The non-monetary economy represents work such as household labor, care giving and civic activity that does not have a monetary value but remains a vitally important part of the economy.With respect to the current economic situation labor that results in monetary compensation becomes more highly valued than unpaid labor. Yet nearly half of American productive work goes on outside of the market economy and is not represented in production measures such as the GDP.The non-monetary economy seeks to reward and value work that benefits society (whether through producing services, products, or making investments) that the monetary economy does not recognize.[3] An economic as well as a social imperative drives the work done in this economy. This method of valuing work would challenge ways in which unemployment and the labor force are all currently measured and generally restructure the way in which labor and work are constructed in America.The non-monetary economy also works to make the labor market more inclusive by valuing previously ignored forms of work.[4] Some acknowledge the non-monetary economy as having a moral or socially conscious philosophy that attempts to end social exclusion by including poor and unemployed individuals economic opportunities and access to services and goods.[5] Such community-based and grassroots movements encourage the community to be more participatory, thus providing a more democratic economic structures.[6]Much of non-monetary work is categorized as either civic work or housework. These two types of work are critical to the operation of daily life and are largely taken for granted and undervalued. Both of these categories encompass many different types of work and are discussed below.It is important to point the microscope on these two areas because only certain people are very civically engaged and very frequently a certain group of people tend to do housework. Non-monetary economic systems hope to make community members more active, thus more democratic with more balanced representation, and to value housework that is commonly done by women and less valued.Core (or social) economy EditThe social economy refers to the space between public and private sectors (sometimes called the "third sector") occupied by civil society, including community organizations, volunteering, social enterprises, and cooperatives. In academic circles the term represents “a wide family of initiatives and organisational forms – i.e. a hybridisation of market, non-market (redistribution) and non- monetary (reciprocity) economies”.[7] Rather than being fringe activities at the margins of the formal economy, this amounts to a significant level of activity, as a range of studies indicate. UK civil society sector for example employs the equivalent of 1.4 million full-time employees (5% of the economically active population) and benefits from the unpaid efforts of the equivalent of 1.7 million full-time volunteers (5.6% of the economically active population), and contributes 6.8% of GDP.[8]US civil rights litigator and founder of the time bank, Edgar S. Cahn developed the concept of the core economy to describe the informal social networks that he considered the bedrock of society, which he felt were eroding as monetary economies de-legitimized them. The core economy as he defined it consists of social capital, and generates collective efficacy that's of critical importance to the core economy.Collective efficacy: Collective efficacy refers to the effectiveness of informal mechanisms by which residents themselves achieve public order. More specifically, this is the shared vision or fusion of shared willingness of residents to intervene and create social trust (the sense of engagement and ownership of public spaces). An example may be the willingness of residents to intervene in the lives of other residents to counter crime, increase voting, or encourage residents to recycle. These informal mechanisms are what he calls 'social capital', a public good provided by citizens who participate to build up their communities (from raising children and taking care of the elderly to volunteer work). This kind of work is essential to a democratic and stable society.The Critical Importance of the Core Economy: The core economy forms the foundation for a community economy. Unlike a market economy, the core economy relies on specialization reinforced by a "do-it-yourself" attitude that “Builds self-esteem and a voluntary interdependence that replaces involuntary dependence that comes w/ industrial and market specialization”[9] and where self-sufficiency is based upon interdependent family/ community units (instead of a market economy's atomized individual). This model thus purports to reduce and/or eliminate the involuntary dependence that comes with the market economies strict division of labor. It also focuses on alternative distribution mechanisms to pricing, using instead normative considerations like need, fairness, altruism, moral obligation, or contribution.[10]Collective efficacy and social capital are central to two very successful examples of civic-based, non-monetary economies: time banks and local exchange trading systems (LETS). These work systems provide alternative forms of currency that are gained through time spent in the community through community gardening, recycling, repairing leaky faucets, babysitting, and other forms of work. These units of time can be used to ask other members of work systems to do jobs they need or may act as a forum in which special jobs or needs can be communicated and traded. These systems operate to a large degree outside of the monetary economy but do not negate the importance of a monetary economy or ask to a return to bartering systems.[11]Time banks EditA time bank is a community-based organization which brings people and local organizations together to help each other, utilizing previously untapped resources and skills, valuing work which is normally unrewarded, and valuing people who find themselves marginalized from the conventional economy.[12] These are things that family or friends might normally do for each other, but in the absence of supportive reciprocal networks, the time bank recreates those connections. These interactions are based upon the exchange of hours spent on an activity, where time dollars are the unit of measure/ currency. They are traded for hours of labour, and are redeemable for services from other members.[13] There are two main types of bank structure:Neighbor-to-neighbor : These time banks involve individuals in the same neighborhood.Specialized : These time banks either limit membership (for example, students within a school district, or members within an organization) or the scope of activities (like tutoring or babysitting).Benefits of time banks include that:Can provide individuals with services that they might not otherwise be able to access (making up for gaps in social services), such as medical practitioners providing services to individuals without health insurance.[14]Recognizes and promote the value of work (unlike with barter systems, in many cases time banks may be considered exempt from taxation [see final segment])May provide savings to sponsor organizations; for example, in the case of Elderplan, Metropolitan Jewish Health System’s Social HMO (located in Brooklyn, New York. In its Member-to-Member (M2M) program, participants help one another with errands, transportation to medical appointments, minor home repairs, language translation, social visits, etc. A multiyear evaluation of the M2M program released by Elderplan in 2003 showed that time banks could help HMOs deliver long-term care effectively to many elderly patients while postponing their move to nursing facilities. (Although the sample size of the M2M evaluation was too small for statistically significant results, the time bank also appeared to improve members’ mental health and to decrease loneliness.).[15]Vehicle for social change, since benefits include increased self-esteem and confidence, gaining skills, growing social networks and building friendships, getting more involved in the community, and meeting needs – overcoming social exclusion and enabling active citizenshipRedefines value of individuals and their work, since all services are valued equally (and is much more inclusive: the involvement of for instance people with disabilities in community activities through time banking is first of all an effective form of occupational therapy, building confidence and skills, and second, only possible in many cases because of the high levels of support offered)Fosters reciprocityBuilds social capital through relationships, trust, and support networksEnables a broad spectrum of people to meet (and specifically are set up to reach traditionally disadvantaged communities, since participants are usually among the most socially excluded groups in society, and those least-likely to be involved in traditional volunteering)[16]Community building EditThe Household Economy: In 1998 non-profit organization Redefining Progress estimated that housework amounted to $1.911 trillion, roughly a fourth of the U.S. GDP that year.[17] As of 2010, the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that household work would increase GDP by 26%.[18] More than a decade later, household work continues to provide a key source of foundational support to the domestic economy. Such household work includes cleaning, cooking, care giving, and educating children among others.The household economy may incite the idea of an intimate group of individuals that benefit from the work done in the home, a closed household economy. One can argue in numerous ways that the household economy where goods can be traded and services can be shared or traded. This type of economy exists today and benefits the community at large.In extreme cases of survival the open nature of the household economy is most evident. Sharing of foods, clothes items, toiletries, and basic necessities were often shared or exchanged amongst war-torn, impoverished families in East Europe post-communism.[19] Cooking, cleaning, clothes-making, and forms of work may seem to be intuitively thought of as work. Not all work done within the home is seen as work. When labor is enjoyable such as watching movie with one’s children, exercising, or entertaining the activities may not readily be seen as work. Yet an estimated 380 million hours are spent on these types of unpaid activities (work) and 272 million hours per week are spent doing paid work as found in 1992 from a sample of research participants in Australia (these hours are the aggregate hours of all Australians).[20]A large portion of these hours can be attributed to nurturing. Nurturing can take two forms in terms of raising children and cursing the sick, elderly, and infirm both kinds of which both types of work are still moderately gendered types of work.[21] Children represent not only a product of a household but an asset to the community as a whole. In the home, kids may provide help in the form of chores and so are an asset to other members of the household. However, a larger argument can be made that children are a public good. Children are an investment in which time, energy, and money are spent on children so that they can become stable adults who contribute to reducing national debt and contributing to Social Security, thus a public good.[22] Children not only act as economic investments but also have great utility to society as plumbers, mathematicians, sociologists, botanists, postal workers, and whatever profession or products they produce in the future.[23]The products and services produced within a home are open to the non-market economy at large. Society as a whole benefits from this unpaid work whether in a tangible manner or a more abstract, macro scale. The other form of nurturing done within the home, caregiving, also serves as a benefit to society as a whole.Care giving: Care giving refers to providing assistance for those who are elderly, disabled, suffer terminal illness, chronic illness, or are generally frail or in need of assistance. Someone who cares for someone in any of these positions is a caregiver. This kind of assistance is largely unpaid and conducted by friends and/or family of the patient.Care giving often exceeds the nursing tasks that come with caring for someone who is ill or recovering from surgery. Often, caregivers also must clean the occupancy of the patient, provide meals, and speak with medical providers, doctors, among other responsibilities. To put the extent of work performed in the non-monetary economy into context, nearly 80% of labor that keeps seniors out of nursing homes is unpaid labor by families.[24]In 1997, estimates predicted that the value of work produced by caregivers amounted to $196 billion. Current estimates put the value of work at $375 billion for 2007.[25] At the time, only $32 billion spent on formal health care and $83 billion spent on nursing home care by the federal government.[26] According to these statistics, only half as much money is spent on nursing and home health care as is necessary. These numbers do not take into account the financial burden as well as emotion work that is an inescapable part of this work.The same research estimated that in 1997, caregivers would have received $8.18 as the hourly wage by averaging the national minimum wage and the median was for Home Health Aides.[27] As of May 2013, the hourly wage can be estimated at $9.14 when averaging the minimum wage in Florida[28] and the median wage for Home Health Aides.[29] Caregiving requires a large dedication, as much as 22 to 70 hours a week. Most incredible is the number of people performing this work, an estimated 25.8 million people as of 1997.[30]It is also important to note that caregiving has a disproportionate affect on women and white households.[31] The cost of caregiving is exorbitant, nearly 5 times what Medicaid would have spent on long term care, meaning only wealthy families can afford to do this type of in-home care. The intersection of class and race in this phenomenon is an important place to explore as less advantaged families will have to rely on government care, potentially at the risk of having less quality care. These statistics also highlight a differential effect on women, showing that women disproportionately do caregiving work.[32]Understanding the non-monetary economy is important for a number of reasons. Valuing all work changes perceptions of valuable work. Acknowledging a non-monetary economy may potentially change the ways in which the unemployed, poor, women, and other stigmatized persons’ work is valued. It can allow citizens to see their community as a more cohesive, intertwined system that deserves their time and energy. Exploring this economy also exposes numerous areas of help that do not have enough support from the public and private sectors. Education and caregiving in particular highlight were assistance is needed and often not provided.Barter economies EditBarter Economies also constitute an important form of non-monetized interaction, although for the most part this kind of interaction is viewed largely as a temporary fix as an economic system is in transition. It is also usually considered a side effect of a tight monetary policy, such as in a liquidity crisis like that of 1990s Russia where barter transactions in Russia accounted for an astonishing 50 percent of sales for midsize enterprises and 75 percent for large ones.[33]