This article uses the National Election Study to consider how stereotypes about Latinos influence white support for welfare. It shows that whites' stereotypes about Latino work ethic grow more positive as the size of the Latino population increases, suggesting positive effects of contact. Moreover, the effect of whites' stereotypes about Latino-but not black-work ethic on support for welfare is contingent on ethnic context. In areas with few Latinos, the lazier whites think Latinos are, the less whites want to spend on welfare. However, in areas that are disproportionately Latino the more hardworking whites think Latinos are (controlling for whites' stereotypes about blacks), the less whites want to spend on welfare as well. This last result, this article argues, is the product of a social comparison between black and Latino work ethic.

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This article argues that rampage school shootings in American public schools can be understood as instances of organizational deviance, which occurs when events created by or in organizations do not conform to an organization's goals or expectations and produce unanticipated and harmful outcomes. Drawing on data from qualitative case studies of two schools that experienced shootings, the authors show how the organizational structure, environment, and culture of these schools led to the loss of information about socially or emotionally troubled students, information that might otherwise have led to some form of intervention or help for these students. Implications for educational policy and practice are discussed.

Using a data set of public and private relief spending for 295 cities, this article examines the racial and ethnic patterning of social welfare provision in the United States in 1929. On the eve of the Depression, cities with more blacks or Mexicans spent the least on social assistance and relied more heavily on private money to fund their programs. Cities with more European immigrants spent the most on relief and relied more heavily on public funding. Distinct political systems, labor market relations, and racial ideologies about each group's proclivity to use relief best explain relief spending differences across cities.

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The authors examine rampage shootings in American high schools after 2002 and consider whether factors identified in their prior research on rampages from 1974 to 2002 account for the more recent cases. The authors find that the five factors—social marginality, individual predisposing factors, cultural scripts, failure of the surveillance system, and availability of guns—remain important features. The authors then contrast these high school shootings with the recent spate of college rampage shootings that resemble the high school cases in some ways but differ in others. College shooters are older and therefore typically further along in the development of serious mental illness.

This article considers five methodological challenges in studying rare events such as school shootings. Drawing on the literature on causal analysis in macro-historical and other small-N research, it outlines strategies for studying school shootings using qualitative case studies and illustrates these strategies using data from case studies of two rampage school shootings: Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, and Westside Middle School outside Jonesboro, Arkansas. Strengths and limitations are discussed as well as lessons for studying rare events.