Children's Vocational Development: A Research Rationale

Vocational development research and interventions have focused primarily on adolescents and young adults. The lack of attention to career development antecedents in children has led to a serious neglect of this period of life when the foundation is laid for career choices and outcomes in later life. A harmful by‐product is the frequent preclusion of gender‐atypical occupational pathways by boys and especially by girls. To address this situation, the authors recommend identifying a core set of constructs that describe children's vocational development and developing sound instruments to measure them, leading to a longitudinal study ranging from childhood to early adulthood.     

A Research Note on Canada's LGBT Data Landscape: Where We Are and What the Future Holds

There is a growing international literature on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. One of the biggest limitations for researchers in this field continues to be the dearth of population‐based surveys that include questions on sexual orientation, gender identity, and high‐quality demographic, health, social, political, or economic variables. This research note provides an overview of the current LGBT data landscape in Canada. We start with some of the challenges for researchers studying the LGBT community, including issues of sample size, measurement, response bias, and concealment. Next, we provide an overview of Canadian surveys that include questions on sexual orientation and/or gender identity, including the strengths and weaknesses of each. We end with a brief discussion on newly available administrative data and provide recommendations for researchers and policymakers moving forward.     

Investigating value structure: Using theory-based starting configurations in Multidimensional Scaling (Research Note)

Abstract

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) has been a central tool of psychological research into value structure for more than two decades. MDS is usually applied in an exploratory way because strict confirmatory analyses are still difficult to realize, due to the manifold problems of how to impose regional constraints on MDS solutions. “Weak confirmatory approaches” (Borg & Staufenbiel, 2007) which use a theory-based starting configuration could be an acceptable compromise. In this paper, we outline how such a configuration can be derived from Schwartz's (1992, p. 14) original model, which is characterized by a strict circular structure. Such a “parsimonious” structure seems particularly suited for multi-method studies. We also apply this configuration to the Spanish value data from the first three rounds of the European Social Survey to illustrate the procedure. Finally, we show how to test whether and to what extent regional adjustments of single items affect the overall fit of the respective MDS solution.     

Race and Gender Differences in Workplace Autonomy: A Research Note

While many studies have focused on race and gender differences in monetary labor market rewards, few studies have used national samples to examine race and gender differences in nonmonetary labor process rewards. Utilizing multivariate analysis on data from the 1993 and 1997 National Employee Survey, the present study examines how race and gender interact in shaping workplace autonomy. We regress an index of autonomy on human capital, structural level variables, and race and gender interaction terms. Findings show that black and white females, relative to white males, fare worse net of controls for human capital and structural level variables. Black males fare worse than white males when controlling for human capital but this disadvantage fails to retain its significant effect when controlling for structural level variables. We conclude that contrary to some beliefs that black females have experienced greater success in the labor market as a result of affirmative action policies, black females remain hindered by the double jeopardy of race and gender.     

Ethnic Entrepreneurship Among Indian Women in New Zealand: A Bittersweet Process

This research article explores the lived‐in and lived‐through experiences of Indian women entrepreneurs in New Zealand in the context of ethnic entrepreneurship. Through a four‐stage model emerging from qualitative interviews, the article illuminates the bittersweet entrepreneurial process of ethnic minority migrant women. The four stages are: the low permeability for entry into the job market for ethnic minority migrant women; underemployment; setting up a micro‐enterprise and expanding the business and creating employment for others, primarily co‐ethnics as well as an expanding customer base. A combination of factors ranging from perceived discrimination, low self esteem and feelings of being devalued, to ethnic networks and lack of access/knowledge of government resources and the entry of women from Indian business families feed into each of the four stages of this model. The article offers an analysis of minority voices, along with implications for future research.     

GENDER AND PROSOCIAL VALUES DURING ADOLESCENCE: A Research Note

To date, relatively little is known about the prosocial values of adolescents. Research has shown that females attach more importance to certain prosocial values than males do in late adolescence but has not considered whether this gender difference is evident across stages of adolescence and whether it varies by race. We examine values that focus on doing things for others, using data from a nationwide survey of 12- to 17-year-olds. We find that girls place more importance on these prosocial values than boys at younger ages. However, we also find important patterns in this gender difference across racial groups as well as across age. White boys appear to attach less importance to prosocial values than other race and gender groups. Furthermore, the gender gap in prosocial values is larger at older ages, with older adolescent boys placing less importance on prosocial values than younger ones.     

Training Camp on Safe Motherhood in Rural India: A Research Note

ABSTRACT

The Center for Women Studies at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (Rajasthan), India made an effort to combine theory and practice by implementing some of the discussions of an international conference that the center had organized on safe motherhood. A clinic was set up as a medical training camp in a village near Pilani. Measures to ensure safe motherhood included check-ups, interventions, advocacy, and counseling at the grassroots level. As a follow-up, the center has adopted the 12 by 12 initiative of the Government of India to ensure that each child has a percentage hemoglobin of 12 grams by the age of 12 years with special focus on adolescent girls.     

A Note on CBD: It's All in a Name

I recently saw an article with the following title: “Medical cannabis relieves symptoms in children with autism.” On reading it, I realized that the Drug Target Review was talking about cannabidiol, otherwise known as CBD, not THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis). I also realized the words cannabis and marijuana are no longer useful in talking about marijuana now that CBD has been moved to Schedule V of the Controlled Substances Act when manufactured by GW Pharmaceuticals. Still, it is common to see CBD lumped with the hundreds of other cannabinoids, especially if not produced by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved pharmaceutical company where it is still classified as Schedule I by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). I think this has implications for popular understanding and clinical utility.     

Nation in Market Times: Connecting the National and the Commercial. A Research Overview

This article provides an overview of the growing body of research pertaining to different forms of mediated nationhood. In particular, it focuses on the relatively recent trend toward increasing articulations of national identity with the language of consumerism and neoliberal market ideology. It argues that the process is twofold; on the one hand commercial entities employ nationalist appeals in order to sell their commodities, a process which is called “nationalizing the commercial”. On the other hand, nation states make advantage of advertising agencies to create attractive and competitive nation brands which is a process of “commercializing the national”. The article argues that this double logic is a result of the growing importance of the economic power in societies which can be named as " economization of the social" . In the context where the political articulations of nationhood are subsumed by the commercial ones, the link between the national and the commercial is seldom challenged or questioned.     

Sex Differences in the Characteristics of Members Lost to a Longitudinal Panel: A Speculative Research Note

A nine-year follow-up of former adolescents reveals sex differencesin the relative deviance and drug involvement of individualslost to the panel in young adulthood. As expected, men who werereinterviewed were less deviant than the noninterviewed, whilethe opposite was observed among women. Specification by raceindicates that the female pattern applies especially to nonwhites,but all women who are reinterviewed, irrespective of race, areno less deviant than the nonreinterviewed. The paradoxical findingfor females may result from changing marital status in thatparticular period of the life cycle and an inverse relationshipbetween delinquency and marriage.     

Exposure to Suicide Movies and Suicide Attempts: A Research Note

Research on the impact of exposure to suicide movies on suicidality has been marked by three limitations. It is largely based on (1) aggregate data subject to the ecological fallacy, (2) exposure to a single movie, and (3) relative lack of controls for psychological states and social factors linked to suicide. The present study addresses these gaps. It follows a modified Beach method and assesses the impact of cumulative, voluntary exposure to suicide movies on suicide attempts. The subjects are 260 undergraduates at a midwestern university. The dependent variable is a previous suicide attempt. Cumulative exposure to suicide movies is based on self-reports. Controls include religiosity, depression, burdensomeness, and demographics. A multivariate logistic regression analysis determined that, controlling for other predictors, for each additional movie exposure the risk of attempted suicide increased by 47.6 percent. This is the first investigation to demonstrate a link between cumulative, voluntary exposure to suicide movies on suicidality.     

DEREGULATION AND THE RELIGIOUS MARKET IN TAIWAN: A Research Note

The religious economy model predicts that when encountered with competition, loosely organized religions will fail or will be transformed into congregational religions. Over time, competition will drive congregational religions to establish an extended relationship with their consumers by generating exclusivist claims and exclusivist socialization. And thus exclusive religion tends to occupy the biggest market share. This model, however, has rarely been tested empirically. By analyzing religious trends in Taiwan after the deregulation of the late 1980s, we find that state suppression contributed to the weakness of organized religion while enhancing the popularity of unchurched congregational religions in Taiwan. We also find that deregulation is associated with the rise of organized and congregational faiths. But whether or not these newly organized religions become exclusive or not needs further studies. Implications of the findings for future research are offered.     

Embodying Gender,Work and Organization: Solidarity,Cool Loyalties and Contested Hierarchy in a Masculinist Occupation

Despite a ‘somatic turn’ in the social sciences, there remains a dearth of theoretically informed research on male working bodies, the embodied doings of masculinities independent of biological sex and intra–gendered workplace relations. This is unfortunate because embodiment is thoroughly implicated in major social divisions, including gender domination in institutional contexts. Using an embodied sociological perspective and data generated during an ethnography of British nightclub and pub security work, this article goes some way towards embodying the social study of plural masculinities, work and organization. Exploring worker solidarity, cool loyalties and contested hierarchy in this risky masculinist occupation hopefully makes several contributions to the literature. Furthering the (theoretically informed) empirical study of masculinities and socially embedded bodies, the article sensitizes other researchers to gendered/embodied processes possibly taking a more diluted form in other work settings.