Validity and reliability of the Client Outcome Measure (Revised): The clinical relevance of a brief measure of family functioning

My thesis is that entrepreneurship enhances immigrants' social and political resources and that the benefits resulting from these improvements accrue and spill over to their co-ethnics in ways that are politically meaningful. I challenge the idea that ethnic entrepreneurship serves to `embed' immigrants into their ethnic community, further isolating them from social opportunities in the mainstream. By introducing a novel application of network analysis to study social capital, my research offers some insight into ways in which entrepreneurial activities and activism produce socially valuable interactions. I employ theories of civic engagement, in testing my hypothesis that immigrant entrepreneurship serves to cultivate political mobilization capacity within groups. In exploring these theories' further applicability to an alternative socio-political context --- that of immigrant communities in Rome, Italy --- I find that political activity is network driven. Through this research, I provide an empirical account of migrant activism which demonstrates that what may seem like silent and inactive communities are, in reality, active in responding to collective action problems through the deployment of within community institutions. Finally, in seeking to understand whether entrepreneurial activity creates opportunities for immigrants to improve their reputations with the host society in a way that expands the political opportunity structure, I employ techniques and analysis from the recently developed literature on social construction in public policy. In sum, the findings of this project not only confirm previous research that locates political participation within civic associations, it expands upon it by locating it in day to day interactions captured through social network analysis methods. My study contributes to our understanding into the many ways that `new' groups join `established groups' and the opportunities for agency in institutionally and historically determined social arrangements. Thus it informs our understanding of the potentialities (and limitations) for immigrant political and social integration.