Reporting on The State of Canada's Environment

The 750 page report,The State of Canada's Environment, is the collaborative effort of more than 100 experts from universities, private industry, environmental groups, and government. In 27 chapters the report addresses four fundamental questions about Canada's environment: what are the key environmental conditions and trends in Canada; what are the links between human activities and environmental changes; what are the environmental, economic, and health implications of these changes; and what are Canadians doing to address the concerns identified? Topics examined include: environmental components (air, fresh and marine water, land, and wildlife), human activities that affect the environment (e.g. forestry, agriculture, fisheries, urbanization), as well as six regional case studies and major environmental issues such as toxic chemicals, ozone depletion and acid rain. The report also indicates areas where Canadians have made progress toward sustainable development and identifies areas where work remains to be done. Actions that are being taken to strengthen state of the environment reporting in Canada, including the development of indicators, are also briefly discussed.     

Toward the development of an adolescent gambling problem severity scale

The development and initial psychometric properties of an adolescent gambling problem severity measure are described. The scale, based on a revision of the South Oaks Gambling Screen (Lesieur & Blume, 1987), was administered to 1,101 older (ages 15 to 18) Minnesota adolescents as part of a state-wide gambling survey. Study results indicated that the scale had moderate internal consistency reliability and was significantly related to alternate measures of problem severity for male subjects. Because the rate and severity of gambling among females was very low, the psychometric adequacy of the scale for females is not known at this time. The implications of study findings to the conceptual understanding of adolescent gambling problem severity as well as study limitations and future research needs, are discussed.Support for the study was provided by the Minnesota Department of Human Services and the Center for Addiction Studies, University of Minnesota, Duluth. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance from Robert Blum, Linda Harris, Durand Jacobs, J. Laundergan, Alan Mathiason, Brenda Miller, James Schaefer, school officials from the participating high schools, and interviewers who assisted with the telephone survey.     

Queers,Bodies and Postmodern Sexualities: A Note on Revisiting the “Sexual” in Symbolic Interactionism

This article reflects on the linkage between developments in symbolic interactionist theory over the past thirty years and the sociological study of the social construction of sexualities. After some personal reflections on the development of the theory, four main themes are highlighted: the links to postmodernism and queer theory; the paths to new research styles; some internal problems with the theory; and the need to reinstall the importance of the body. The article concludes that symbolic interactionism remains a major approach to the study of sexuality.     

Unions,PAC contributions,and the NAFTA vote

Political action committees (PACs), especially those controlled by organized labor and business, have been shown to affect Congressional voting. We explore how PACs influenced the House of Representatives’ vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA vote is analyzed because organized labor strongly opposed the treaty while business generally supported it and because of the straight-forward voting generated by its fast-track status. Probit analysis of a unique, unpublished data set containing information about PAC and non-PAC contributions to the 1992 House election campaigns demonstrates that Representatives who depended largely on labor PACs tended to oppose NAFTA, while Representatives who derived a large proportion of their campaign contributions from business PACs tended to favor its passage.     

西方主导媒介与“逆流”媒介在当代媒介文化中的对立及相互作用

全球文化秩序长期以来都被西方发达国家的媒介所主导,其突出表现在媒介与传播资源从西方发达国家向欠发达国家的单向流动,从而在某些欠发达国家形成主导地位,文化殖民成为可能.随着时代的发展与变化,媒介资源流动方向由单向发展为多向,媒介的应用背景随之改变,在全球化背景下的重新评估也成为必然.本文透过不同市场受众对于媒介产品的反应,以及发达与欠发达国家在媒介产品内容模式上的发展与更新两个角度,分析文化殖民主义下的主导媒介与“逆流”媒介两股势力之间的对立以及相互作用的关系,并从中总结出全球媒介产品发展与更新的趋势.     

Reconfigured Reciprocity: How Aging Taiwanese Immigrants Transform Cultural Logics of Elder Care

Drawing on 55 interviews with older Taiwanese immigrants who relocated to the United States at an earlier life stage, the author argues that changing contextual features involved in the processes of international migration encourage and even demand aging immigrants to reconstruct cultural logics of aging and geriatric care. He develops the concept of reconfigured reciprocity to demonstrate how aging migrant populations transform cultural logics of intergenerational responsibility, obligation, and entitlement to reconcile the tension between ethnic tradition and modernity. First, he reveals how many of the respondents' lack of caregiving for their own parents undermines their sense of entitlement to receive care from younger generations. Furthermore, he highlights how the structural squeeze among work, family, and caregiving with which the younger generation struggles further discourages the respondents from relying on their children. Finally, the author underscores how aging immigrants evoke the concept of Americanization to reconstruct expectations of how they should be taken care of in their twilight years.     

Digital Strategies for Building Spiritual Intimacy: Families on a “Wired” Camino

Qualitative Sociology - Researchers have explored the role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play in mediating both religious practice and intergenerational family...     

Parenting,Uncertainty, and Expert Advice: How Privileged American Families Work with Private Counselors in Their Children's College Race

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of “collaborative cultivation” to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of “concerted cultivation” reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish “bridges” between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child‐rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs.