Spectacles of intimacy? Mapping the moral landscape of teenage social media

This paper explores young people's expressed concerns about privacy in the context of a highly mediated cultural environment, mapping social media practices against axes of visibility and participation. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptual resources from both the humanities and social sciences, we use ‘spectacles of intimacy’ to conceptualise breaches of privacy, mapping an emergent moral landscape for young people that moves beyond concerns with e-safety to engage with the production and circulation of audiences and value. The paper draws on data from a methodological innovation project using multi-media and mixed methods to capture lived temporalities for children and young people. We present a model that captures a moral landscape shaped by emotional concerns about social media, the affordances of those media and affective discourses emerging from young people's use of the media.     

The Impact of Neighboring on Changes in Sense of Community Over Time: A Latent Transition Analysis

Sense of community (SOC) is associated with the quality of community life and the building of social capital. While its linkage to informal social behavior, such as neighboring, is inherent in discussions regarding theory, empirical evidence remains scarce. Moreover, the degree to which neighboring behavior influences SOC over time is largely unknown. Using a latent transition analysis, the effect of neighboring on SOC was investigated over a 5-year span from 2006 to 2011 among a sample of adults (n?=?165) in Arizona. Initially, a latent class analysis identified two SOC subgroups: Low SOC and High SOC. The likelihood of shifts in SOC class membership over 5 years was generally stable, with most individuals staying in the same group (82.3% Low SOC; 92.4% High SOC). Neighboring behavior and socio-demographic covariates impacted the likelihood that individuals changed classes, with 25.3% of Low SOC individuals transitioning to High SOC in 2011 and 55.4% of High SOC individuals moving to Low SOC in 2011. Specifically, having an income greater than $60,000 and visiting with neighbors lessened the likelihood of being in the Low SOC class in 2006; and length of residence and exchanging favors with neighbors lessened the likelihood of being in the Low SOC class in 2011. These findings have implications for both community design and community development practice. Design and development interventions that promote greater social interaction may help build and sustain SOC over time.

     

Too Hard to Shout Over the Loudest Frame: Effects of Competing Frames in the Context of the Crystallized Media Coverage on Offshore Outsourcing

This study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshore outsourcing, an issue that is characterized by a predominantly negative, unemployment-focused media framing. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N = 152) demonstrate that conventional framing effects do hold for this issue and for this media context by moving recipients’ attitudes in the direction consistent with the valence of the frame. However, they also show the backfire effect of the positively valenced frame among recipients with greater interest in political and economic news, who become less supportive of outsourcing if they read a story framing outsourcing from a consumer-oriented perspective. Our results contribute to the ongoing debate about the limits of framing effects on forming opinion about contentious policy issues and demonstrate the challenges for nondominant perspectives to make their way to news-savvy audiences even when the nature of the issue in question necessitates considering them.     

GENDER AND RACE PATTERNS IN THE PATHWAYS FROM SPORTS PARTICIPATION TO SELF-ESTEEM

Athletics is the most prominent extracurricular activity in U.S. secondary schools in terms of student participation and school budgets. The latter is often justified on the grounds that healthy bodies produce healthy minds, that school sports boost school spirit, and that participation in school-based sports increases students' self-esteem. In this article we examine the interrelationships among participation in a school-based sport and the benefits assumed to be associated with it. Specifically, we test a model that postulates that school spirit, operationalized as attachment to school, and healthy bodies, operationalized as a sense of physical well-being, mediate the relationship between school sports and self-esteem. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health on Caucasian and African American girls and boys were employed to test the model. School attachment and physical well-being absorbed the statistical effect of participating in a sport for all four gender-by-race groups. Among Caucasian girls a negative residual effect of sports participation was observed, which suggests that sports participation encapsulates multiple effects with contradictory influences. For African American girls school attachment by itself was not a significant mediator of the effect of sports participation on self-esteem. For all groups a sense of physical well-being was the more powerful mediator.     

Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference 1

This article provides a review of the contributions that the discipline of geography is making to gender and migration research. In geographic analyses of migration, gender differences are examined most centrally in relation to specific spatialities of power. In particular, feminist geographers have developed insight into the gender dimensions of the social construction of scale, the politics of interlinkages between place and identity, and the socio‐spatial production of borders. Supplementing recent reviews of the gender and migration literature in geography, this article examines the potential for continued cross‐fertilization between feminist geography and migration research in other disciplines. The advances made by feminist geographers to migration studies are illustrated through analysis of the findings and debates tied to the subfield's central recent conceptual interventions.     

Female Victim Perceptions of the Causes of Male Spouse Abuse*

Victims of spouse abuse were interviewed concerning their views of why their husbands were abusive. It was hypothesized that by concentrating on one specific characteristic of this kind previously undocumented patterns of response would be elicited from the subjects. It was concluded that the women's reasons for the violence perpetrated by their spouses serve as justification for the abusers’actions and legitimize maintenance of the relationship.     

The State of Care Management in Learning Disability and Mental Health Services 12 Years into Community Care

This paper reports on the organization of care management froma longitudinal study of community care for people resettledfrom long-stay learning disability and psychiatric hospitals.The findings from a 12-year follow-up of care management arrangementsin 12 learning disability and eight mental health study siteservices are described. The diversity of care management arrangementsfound at earlier points in the evaluation remained evident.Also, many of the former ‘care in the community’service users were excluded from mainstream care managementarrangements in their localities. The difficulty of developingperson-centred arrangements in learning disability and the lackof integration of the Care Programme Approach and care managementwere evident. The findings and observations are placed in thewider policy and practice context, with suggestions for takingcare management forward nationally and locally.     

Person, Perception, and Place: What Matters to Health and Quality of Life

Interest in understanding how characteristics associated with where people live, in addition to the characteristics of the people themselves, affect health outcomes has risen sharply in recent years. While much of the research examining this question focus on teasing apart effects of place and individual on outcomes, less attention has been paid to examining how individuals’ perceptions of where they live may provide some clues to better understanding the influence of place on outcomes. We present findings from analysis undertaken that incorporate the subjective responses of individuals, residing in three socially contrasting neighbourhoods, to their local environment. Our first question addressed whether perceptions related to neighbourhood and city of residence matter to self rated health and quality of life independent of individual characteristics, while the second question examined whether the perceptions and individual characteristics are modified by the neighbourhood socio-economic context. Our results show that perceived neighbourhood characteristics, in addition to individual sociodemographic factors, are significant correlates of self rated health and quality of life. Moreover, we show that the type of perceived neighbourhood characteristics and the magnitude of their influence on self rated health and quality of life vary depending on whether they live in high- versus low-socioeconomic status neighbourhoods.

Child Care “Packaging” Among TANF Recipients: Implications for Social Work

This article reports the results of a study that examined the ways in which current and recent TANF recipients assembled or “packaged” their child care arrangements among formal and informal providers. The findings are drawn from in-person, in-depth interviews with current and former welfare recipients. The study found that most of the respondents used multiple providers within the category of informal child care for reasons including availability, the use of a network of social acquaintances as a problem-solving resource, the need to accommodate irregular work hours, and personal trauma that contributed to a distrust of strangers in formal settings. The findings can affect the efficacy of practice with TANF recipients by contributing to social workers’ understanding of the context of decision-making regarding child care.