Abdi M. Kusow

Iowa State University | ISU · Department of Sociology

Somalia has a long history and well known figures who developed unique systems of governance, which allowed economic development, social harmony and political participation long before the colonial occupation. The history of the Jama'a of Baardheere offers one such example. This work part of a larger project exploring the Jama'a system of administr...

Research on prejudice has historically employed Blumer’s group position as a theoretical alternative to Allport’s group conflict in understanding prejudice against members of minority groups. Our purpose in this study is to extend the theoretical parameters of group position into the domain of immigration by defining prejudice in terms of non-immig...

Since Anderson’s now classic, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, an increasing number of researchers have found a significant association between the code of the street and antisocial behavior. Less researched, however, is the relationship between the code of the street and cognate psychological factors. Bu...

The 2016 U.S. presidential election was a watershed event that signaled decreasing political moderation and increasing partisan polarization, authoritarianism, and ethno-nationalism. Iowa, located at the center of the American Heartland, swung to the political right more than any other state. Multivariate regression analysis of county-level data is...

Based on the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data derived from 2001–2013 samples of the American Community Surveys, we examine the impact of region of origin and gender on socioeconomic achievement variation among Arab immigrants in the USA. Region of origin includes North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Sudan), Levant (J...

Reducing the global diseases burden requires effective diagnosis and treatment. In the developing world, accurate diagnosis can be the most expensive and time-consuming aspect of health care. Healthcare cost can, however, be reduced by use of affordable rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs). In the developed world, low-cost RDTs are being developed in many...

Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an array of health, psychiatric, and behavioral problems including antisocial behavior. Criminologists have recently utilized adverse childhood experiences as an organizing research framework and shown that adverse childhood experiences are associated with delinquency, violence, and more chronic/sev...

The social issue of immigrants’ dual loyalty figures prominently in the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries, yet little is known about Americans’ views on the subject. Drawing on data from a nationally representative telephone survey, the authors specifically explored nonimmigrant Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants’ dual loyalty. The results show...

This entry provides a brief and critical analysis of the historical and social organization of Somali society. The entry specifically explores how the development of Somali nationalism and national identity ignored the existence of social diversity and inequality by imposing a hyper-homogenized greater Somalia identity, and how this imposition led...

The purpose of this entry is twofold. First, it provides a brief examination of the theoretical parameters of Goffman's 1963 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identities. Second, it analyzes the extent to which Goffman's original formulation of stigma is still applicable given the changing social values and ethnic demographic composition o...

Sociological research on inequality has increasingly moved beyond the examination of inequalities as they presumably exist to explore the generic narrative processes that perpetuate that inequality. Unfortunately, however, this research remains concentrated on either individual or ideological grand narratives and ignores the fact that the work narr...

Based on in-depth oral interviews carried out in Mogadishu,Somalia, and countries neighboring Somalia in 2009 and 2013,our purpose in this study is to map the nature of prejudice and hate discourse used by Somalis against the Bantu Jareer and the Yibir, Gabooye, and Tumaal communities in Somalia. The hate discourse used against the Yibir, Gabooye,...

Recent studies on Black immigrants in the USA report higher than average socioeconomic and educational attainment for African immigrants. Based on an intra-African immigrant comparison, we examine the generalizability of this finding to African groups of differing countries and regions using data from the 1990 and 2000 5 % U.S. census Integrated Pu...

Although substance abuse often accompanies delinquency and other forms of antisocial behavior, there is less scholarly agreement about the timing of substance use vis-à-vis an individual's antisocial trajectory. Similarly, although there is extraordinary evidence that onset is inversely related to the severity of the criminal career, there is surpr...

This study addresses the racial and religious contexts of identity formation among Lebanese immigrants to the United States of America and Somali immigrants to Canada. Each enters with a different racial status: Lebanese as white; Somalis as black/visible minority. Ethno-graphic interviews explore the strategies of adaptation and identity developme...

Early writers on migrants in North America such as Bryce-Laporte (19727. Bryce-Laporte , R. 1972. ‘Black immigrants: the experience of invisibility and inequality’. Journal of Black Studies, 3(1): 29–56. View all references) lamented the lack of research on black immigrants, referring to them as invisible immigrants. Since then, both the volume of...

Goffman's classic analysis of stigma tacitly suggests that it has a conditional nature. An important shortcoming, however, is that his analysis proceeds from the existence of a normatively shared understanding of the criteria for and the distribution of stigma assignment. I use data from Somali immigrants to Canada to further that argument by showi...

The insider/outsider debate in field research has recently been identified as one of the more important areas of needed research in immigration scholarship. My fieldwork as a native ethnographer among Somali immigrants to Canada is used to further that argument by showing the insatiability of categories such as native ethnographers and that the ins...

Empirical findings on the determinants of perceived satisfaction with the police generally have been sparse and inconclusive. More importantly, most studies have failed to control for the confounding effects of race and residential location on perceived satisfaction. Presents a contribution to the evaluation of public perceptions of the police. Usi...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Wayne State University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (p. 216-226). Photocopy.