Social Work Faculty Development: An Exploratory Study of Non-Tenure-Track Women Faculty

Administrators of schools of social work are paying more attention to the changing roles and types of faculty in their institutions, particularly given the surge of non-tenure-track faculty in academia. This topic is timely as social work grapples with the divergent roles, structure, and demographic characteristics of non-tenure-track faculty compared to their tenured or tenure-track counterparts. This exploratory study presents data from non-tenure-track women faculty (N = 10) on how they experience professional development. In-depth, qualitative data was collected to answer the research question, What do faculty identify as the barriers, supports, and opportunities for professional development and job satisfaction? Results indicate that organizational climate and mentoring are barriers and facilitators of faculty development, and the subjective definition of faculty development varies.     

Religiosity as a Moderator of Family Conflict and Depressive Symptoms among African American and White Young Grandmothers

ABSTRACT

This study examined the association between religiosity, conflict in the mother-daughter relationship, and depressive symptoms among 83 African American and white grandmothers. Interviews were conducted during the early stages of adaptation to grandparenthood due to the birth of a baby to a teenage daughter. The results of this study suggest that religiosity is associated with less depressive symptoms. In addition, religiosity moderates the relationship between conflict and depressive symptoms for African American grandmothers. Specifically, highly religious African American grandmothers experiencing low conflict with their daughters reported lower depressive symptoms than those who were less religious. These findings were not evident for white grandmothers. The implications of these findings for grandmothers in families with teenage mothers are discussed within the context of race, religiosity, family relationships, and psychological well-being.     

What circles look like

Over the past decade, under the influence of the Catholic charismatic movement, the Ambonwari people of East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea have radically altered their relationships with bush spirits and, simultaneously, their attitudes towards their landscape. During the current process of abolishing prohibitions pertaining to taboo places, the Ambonwari have also abolished a set of cultural activities that were characteristic of ancestral placemaking and have weakened the effect these places and their spirits have on the Ambonwari's contemporary life world. By abandoning their relationships with bush spirits and embracing God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and by moving their eyes, thoughts and feelings from earth to heaven, the Ambonwari want to transcend their familiar landscape and the life world that it sustains.     

Temporal Relationship of Sex Risk Behaviors and Substance Use Severity Among Men in Substance Use Treatment

Sex risk behaviors and substance use are intertwined. Many men continue to engage in high-risk sexual behaviors even when enrolled in substance use disorder (SUD) treatment. We hypothesized that changes in sex risk behaviors would coincide with changes in drug/alcohol use severity among men in SUD treatment. During an HIV risk-reduction trial, men in methadone maintenance and outpatient drug-free treatment (N = 359) completed assessments at baseline and six months after. We assessed changes in sex risk and substance use severity, using the Addiction Severity Index–Lite (ASI-Lite), controlling for treatment condition. In multinomial logistic regressions, decreased alcohol severity was significantly associated with decreases in reported sex partners, and increased alcohol severity was significantly associated with increases in reported sex partners. Increasing drug use severity was significantly associated with maintaining and initiating sex with a high-risk partner, while decreasing alcohol use severity was significantly associated with discontinuing sex under the influence. However, changes in drug/alcohol use severity were not associated with changes in unprotected sex. Substance use reductions may decrease HIV risk behaviors among male substance users. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating interventions in SUD treatment settings that address the intersection of sex risk behaviors and substance use.     

Perceived Stepparent–Child Relationship Quality: A Systematic Review of Stepchildren's Perspectives

Stepfamily scholars have emphasized the importance of including stepchildren in the analysis and discussion of stepfamily life. This systematic review synthesized recent research examining predictors/correlates of stepparent–child relationship quality from the viewpoint of stepchildren in the United States. Five bibliographic databases were searched, resulting in 631 potentially relevant studies for review. Manual searches of three prominent family studies journals were also conducted. Screening and eligibility assessment based on a priori inclusion criteria yielded a final sample of 23 studies, including published studies and reports found in the “gray” literature. Significant predictors/correlates associated with stepchildren's perceptions of stepparent–child relationship quality were grouped into the following conceptual domains: individual characteristics, family characteristics, features of (step)parent–child interactions, and stepcouple dynamics. Limitations, implications, and future research directions are discussed.     

Quality and the 2010 Census

The U.S. Census Bureau has a long tradition of evaluating the results of its censuses. This paper presents evaluation results from the 2010 Census, comparing them to earlier results. The paper discusses net coverage at the national and state level, as well as by age, sex, race, and ethnic group. It discusses components of error, including estimated number missed and counted in error. It also presents data on whole-person and item imputation.     

Why do groups cooperate more than individuals to reduce risks?

Previous research has discovered a curious phenomenon: groups cooperate less than individuals in a deterministic prisoner’s dilemma game, but cooperate more than individuals when uncertainty is introduced into the game. We conducted two studies to examine three possible processes that might drive groups to be more cooperative than individuals in reducing risks: group risk concern, group cooperation expectation, and pressure to conform to social norms. We found that ex post guilt aversion and ex-post blame avoidance cause group members to be more risk concerned than individuals under uncertainty. These concerns drive groups to choose the cooperation (and risk-reduction) strategy more frequently than individuals. Groups also have higher cooperation expectations for their corresponding groups than individuals have for their corresponding individuals. We found no evidence of pressure to conform to social norms driving groups to be more cooperative than individuals.     

The Conceptual Contours of Sex in the Chinese Life Sciences: Zhu Xi (1899–1962), Hermaphroditism, and the Biological Discourse of Ci and Xiong, 1920–1950

This paper “maps” a number of trajectories through which the conceptual contours of sex could be traced in the bioscientific discourse of Republican China. Focusing on the writings of the embryologist Zhu Xi (1899–1962), I analyze the epistemic functionality of such biological terms as ci (“biological femaleness”) and xiong (“biological maleness”) that acquired an unprecedented scope of cultural discursiveness in China only alongside the arrival of Western biology, which replaced classical learning and natural studies as the authoritative field of inquiry about life. I first show that when Chinese scientists used these terms to describe the sex of biological species, they relied on an epistemological framework of visual knowledge that granted some foundational operative power to a signifying order in which one could know by seeing the differences between ci and xiong (and, ultimately, sexual differences). These two terms’ lexicality and indexicality thus mutually reinforced one another in the production of their semiotic possibilities and epistemo-logicality. I then show that while they adopted ci and xiong as the bioscientific synonyms of the more culturally anthropocentric words such as nü (woman) and nan (man), Chinese biologists also incorporated sophisticated biological theories of sex from Europe and North America, including the theories of “gynandromorphism” and “intersexuality.” The implicit and explicit figurations of hermaphroditism reveal the ways in which at the heart of the entire bioscientific discourse of ci and xiong resides its key conceptual anchor: the human–non-human divide.