An exploration of gratitude themes and suggestions for future interventions

For many years, the concept of gratitude was not considered worthy of investigation by psychologists since research goals were strongly dominated by the deficit-based approach and gratitude concepts were believed to be derived from common sense, and thus not warranting scientific query. This study, in attempting to understand gratitude themes, explores various events that elicit gratitude among engineering students in India. Thirty-two final year engineering students were introduced to gratitude research, administered gratitude exercises, and asked to provide feedback about the exercises. Nested questions, in the form of three-blessings and benefit finding exercises, were used to identify experiences of students leading to gratitude. Content analysis was applied to identify underlying themes and report them systematically. Four major themes and five minor themes were uncovered. Among these, positive emotions was the most prevalent theme and finance was the least encountered theme. Strategies to improve intervention studies, including restricting the area of investigation to one domain and making exercises interesting, have been suggested. Implications of the research within the socio-cultural context have been discussed with special reference to the complexities in separating the sense of duty and gratitude. Further research will provide us with more insights into the topic, specifically from an Indian socio-cultural perspective.     

How scientists and engineers use cultural resources to make controversies and selves meaningful

In this essay, I provide an overview of recent sociological studies of science, technology, religion, and spirituality; the ways they contribute to sociological theorizing; and make some recommendations for future research. There are two major themes in these studies. One of them analyzes religious and spiritual discourse as controversy practice, suggesting how religion and spirituality are used as cultural discourses to understand controversy, who the actors are or should be, how to act in a controversy, and how popular discourses inform, and are informed by, science and technology discourses. This theme contributes to theorizing by describing how forms of cultural talk organize understandings of controversies, interactions, and action. The second theme explores scientific and religious identities, and how they are made compatible with each other. This theme points sociological theory toward considering science and religion relations as intertextual relations.     

A bibliographic study of public relations in Spanish media and communication journals, 2000–2012

This study analyses the trends and visibility of research on public relations in the most relevant Spanish media and communication journals between the years 2000 and 2012. Bibliometrics and content analysis are used to show the reduced presence of articles on public relations in these publications. A trend towards gender parity in authorship is confirmed in the sample, as well as a plurality of universities and a variety of research themes. The study also proves preference for generic questions rather than for specialised topics. Another finding is that almost one fourth of the specific articles on this discipline do not contain the term “public relations”. This can hint towards the need to have a specific high-impact publication on public relations to bring together and provide visibility to the contributions of researchers in this field.     

Disposable lives

This paper reports one key finding of a larger case study critical discourse analysis of a youth-led research project. A model of 20 care-related conceptual dimensions, utilizing a variety of linguistic tools was applied to the responses to five questions asked of youth in the original study. This paper explores one of the three core findings that were identified by the nested analytical approach. The three meta themes of the original research were: a regulated reality, a disposable life and a stained identity. This paper reports on the theme of a disposable life. It draws on that analysis, demonstrating content, frame, and textual analyses of the spoken text of these young people.     

Introduction: prendre au serieux la culture dans les relations internationales

Culture and international relations are related in all circumstances. On the one hand, if one refers to the discipline of International Relations, culture is an important parameter that influences knowledge production and paradigmatic elaboration. The discipline of IR is therefore culturally situated. On the other hand, when one is dealing with the phenomenon of international relations, it appears as if all social relations, international relations are orientated by the ways of thinking, beliefs and representations of its actors. At the same time, international relations create opportunities for cultural invention in order to regulate the interaction among actors.     

The workers role in knowledge management and sustainability policies

Based on the concepts of sustainability and knowledge management, this article seeks to identify points of contact between the two themes through an exploratory study of existing literature. The first objective is to find, in international literature, the largest number of papers jointly related to the theme of knowledge management and sustainability. In these documents, the authors looked at the kind of relationship existing between the two themes and what the benefits introduced in organizations are. Based on an ergonomic point of view, the second objective of this article is to analyze the role of the worker (whether at the strategic or operational level) and his importance in this context. The results demonstrate that there is very little literature that addresses the two themes together. The few papers found, however, can be said to show the many advantages of introducing sustainability policies supported by adequate knowledge management. Very little has been studied with regards to the role of workers, which could be interpreted as meaning that little importance is given to the proactive role they may play. On the other hand, there is a high potential for future research in these areas, based on the high level of consideration of workers in knowledge management and sustainability literature, as well as in literature in the areas of ergonomics and sociology.     

Characteristics of Communication in Families of Alcoholics

In the United States, roughly 43% of adults have encountered alcoholism in their family, and one in four children lives with an alcoholic parent (Grant, 2000). Prior research suggests that alcoholism can negatively impact the nature and quality of family relations, but studies rarely consider the specific ways in which family communication dynamics are impacted by the disease. Thus, the goal of this study was to identify the characteristics of communication in families of alcoholics and to develop a larger conceptual model to guide future inquiries in this context. A national sample of 682 adult children of alcoholics were asked to describe the communication dynamics in their family of origin. A theme analysis of the open-ended data revealed four overarching themes that were comprised of nine subcategories: (a) aggressive communication (e.g., heightened conflict, tense communication, and secretive slandering); (b) protective communication (e.g., superficiality, limited or indirect communication, and sober parent buffering); (c) adaptive communication (e.g., functional communication); and, (d) inconsistent communication (e.g., struggles over power and control, mood fluctuation). We draw on the results of this analysis to propose a model depicting communication dynamics in families of alcoholics and the antecedent conditions and consequent outcomes of such communication patterns in the family.     

Searching for the Self: Adult International Adoptees’ Narratives of Their Search for and Reunion With Their Birth Families

In this case study, five international adoptees from Finland were interviewed about their search and reunion experiences to find out what meanings they ascribed to their identities and family relations. The thematic analysis yielded three themes: search and reunion in significant periods of life, meaning of reunion for identity, and belonging and relatedness within family. The first theme was characterized by the changing interest in birth family from the inability in childhood to fully understand the meaning of adoption and the growing interest in adolescence to adulthood where participants’ own parenthood intensified their interest. The second theme was characterized by the sense of coherence and sense of continuity that the adoptees, despite the conflicting emotions of reunion, felt they had achieved through reunion. In the third theme, reunion with their birth family appeared significant, even though belonging to a family was interpreted more as an outcome of attachment and nurture than biology. Particular for all themes was the meaning of communicating about adoption-related issues for the adoptee–adoptive parent relationship. Future research is needed to concentrate in more detail on the broad themes and to investigate how the meanings of the birth family for adoptive identity change over life courses.     

Fitting Demand and Supply: How Identification Brings Appeals and Motives Together

In this article, participants in two demonstrations are compared. The demonstrations took place in two different squares in Amsterdam, on the same day, opposing the same governmental policy. Everything was the same except the organizers and their appeals: labor unions with an appeal in terms of threatened interests, on the one hand, and an anti-neoliberalism alliance with an appeal in terms of violated principles on the other. We hypothesize that social cleavages shape mobilizing structures and mobilization potentials. Thereby, this study takes an important yet rarely tested assumption in social movement literature seriously: namely, that grievances are socially constructed. If indeed grievances are socially constructed, one would expect that organizers rooted in different cleavages issue different appeals that resonate with different motives. What made individuals who were protesting the same governmental policy participate in one square rather than in the other? Organizational embeddedness, identification, and appeals that resonate with people's grievances provide the answer to that question. To test our hypotheses, we conducted surveys at both demonstrations; survey questionnaires were randomly distributed. The findings supported our assumptions regarding the influence of the diverging mobilizing contexts on the dynamics of protest participation and revealed the crucial role of identity processes.     

Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.     

Illegal immigrants in Texas: impact on social services and related considerations

A 1982-1983 survey of 868 undocumented aliens and a number of providers of public services showed that the state of Texas receives more from taxes paid by undocumented persons than it costs the state to provide them with public services, such as education, health care, corrections, and welfare. The same survey showed that 6 cities in the state (Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, McAllen, and San Antonio) together expended more to provide services to undocumented aliens than they received in taxes. The survey concentrated on undocumented persons not detained by the immigration authorities and found that this group constituted a distinct population from those in detention centers in that the former exhibited normal characteristics of settled families, while the latter were predominantly the familiar young, single, and peripatetic males. A related finding is that the households of the transient group consist predominantly of undocumented persons whereas the households of the settled group contain a greater mixture of legal residents and illegal aliens. Undocumented persons do indeed use public services, primarily education and health services. They are rarely recipients of welfare services or food stamps. Undocumented persons do indeed pay taxes and those taxes that go to or revert to the state of Texas clearly exceed the cost to the state to provide services to those people. On the other hand, local governmental units (below the state level) in Texas must expend more to provide public services to illegal aliens than those governmental levels receive from the taxes paid by these persons. This is an administrative issue relating to the recipients of tax dollars and the government level on which the burden falls to provide certain services, primarily health care and education. Finally, since only about half of the settled population is in the job market in Texas, a quick fix of deportation of these persons would not create an equivalent number of jobs.     

Grievances do matter in mobilization

This article proposes that by studying grievances as not only materially but also ideationally constituted claims, scholars can gain analytical leverage on puzzles of social movement emergence and development. This meaning-laden approach to grievances recognizes that the ideas with which some claims are imbued might be more conducive to motivating political resistance than others. The approach is inherently grounded in context—scholars begin by understanding the meanings that grievances take on in particular times and places. But it is also potentially generalizable; as scholars uncover the ways in which apparently different grievances may index similar ideas across time and place, those grievances can be categorized similarly and their potential relationship to social mobilization explored. Drawing on evidence from the 2000 Bolivian water wars, the article proposes that market driven threats to subsistence resources offer one such potential categorization.     

European Muslims’ engagement in the public sphere soft counterpublics

This article addresses European Muslims’ public engagement in the arts by applying the concept of counterpublics. It examines two case studies of young German Muslims whose involvement in the public sphere can be described as soft counterpublics. The term soft counterpublics denotes publics that show some characteristics of counterpublics, but are at the same time not only about ‘countering’. They can be seen as ‘in between’ cases, neither strong counterpublics nor completely beyond counterpublics. Their art reflects a diversity of interests that are translated into public expressions and related back to their multiple identities. Motivations and themes are multi-layered. Occasionally, topics address stereotypes and negative identity representations of Muslims, which reflect important characteristics of counterpublics. However, themes can deal with a broad range of matters that go beyond this particular issue and that can be seen in isolation of counterpublics. On the one hand, there is a natural interest in the arts as a tool to express oneself, which is not a typical case of counterpublics. On the other hand, there is also the intention to speak to people through the arts. As well as wanting to reach the Muslim youth community in Germany, who can identify with their art, the case studies are also concerned about the non-Muslim German community and its perception of Muslim identity in Germany.     

Operationalizing genuineness in CSR communication for public engagement on social media

Public relations professionals from global corporations have increasingly communicated corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on social media to engage publics. Yet the link between CSR communication of global corporations, particularly with regard to the dimensions of genuineness exhibited in their communication and public engagement on social media is under-researched in China. This empirical study conceptualized and operationalized the dimensions of genuineness, which encompass providing information about different CSR themes, being responsive to publics, demonstrating empathy, and being consistent in what corporations say and do, and then investigated how global corporations engaged Chinese publics through genuine CSR communication on Sina Weibo. Enhanced public engagement outcomes of comments, likes, and shares were observed for the provision of information about the community involvement and development CSR theme alongside the use of empathy. This study informs public relations scholars and practitioners about the importance of providing information on the CSR theme of community involvement and demonstrating empathy to generate higher public engagement.     

Tweeting Toward Transformation: Prison Abolition and Criminal Justice Reform in 140 Characters

The United States is the world leader in confining bodies behind bars. As scholars, practitioners, and activists struggle against the problem of mass incarceration, this article makes a distinction between two competing perspectives, both of which seek to change the current criminal legal system: “prison abolition” and “reformism.” Each represents ideological and political differences in how mass incarceration should and could be resolved. Prior research has relied on historical methods and data to examine theoretical departures between prison reform and prison abolition, yet to our knowledge, there have been no explorations of these perspectives on new media. This article fills the gap, drawing on a sample of 2,112,206 tweets between 2011 and 2020 and engaging in an in-depth qualitative analysis of nearly 5,000 tweets over a 6-year period in order to investigate the ways Twitter users disclose and define their positions on criminal justice reform on one hand, and prison abolition on the other, and how these discussions have changed over time.     

Why should they live more with one of us when they are children to us both?: Parents' motives for practicing equal joint physical custody for children aged 0–4

Joint physical custody, i.e., children spending an equal amount of time in both parents' home after a separation or divorce, is increasing in many countries. In line with the national policy to promote paternal involvement in parenting, two-thirds of Swedish preschoolers with non-cohabiting parents live in two homes. Internationally, there has been a debate regarding the benefits or risks with joint physical custody for infants and toddlers. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the reasons given by divorced parents for sharing joint physical custody of children 0–4 years of age. Interviews were conducted with 46 parents (18 fathers and 28 mothers) and analyzed using systematic text condensation. Two themes emerged in response to the research question. In the theme Same rights and responsibilities, parents described that joint physical custody was ‘a given’ as both parents were seen to have equal rights to and responsibility for the children. Both men and women described involved fatherhood as an ideal goal. In the theme For the sake of the child, parents emphasized that joint physical custody was in the best interest of the child. Some parents had conflicts with their ex-spouses, but were still convinced of the benefits of joint physical custody and strove to make it work.     

Challenges,Changes, and Impact of the Council on Social Work Education Women’s Council: An Update

This article highlights the contributions of the Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education (Women’s Council) as well as the role and status of women in social work education. For this historical analysis update, the authors drew on several primary and secondary data sources. The first major theme was organizational development (e.g., organizational commitment, strategic planning, and sustainability). The second major theme was contributions to social work education (e.g., furthering the knowledge base, influencing accreditation standards, and monitoring equity). These major themes and subthemes remained constant from the previous publication on the history of the WC (Alvarez et al., 2008), underscoring the resilience, commitment and persistence of the WC to keep a sharp focus on infusing feminist perspectives into social work education.     

Our American Heritage

This article offers a contextual analysis of contemporary immigration issues impacting the institutions in the United States, in particular the school. It discusses the importance of addressing this theme in the classroom and presents its curricular value in the elementary and middle school social studies and interdisciplinary curricula. Using a picture book thematic text set on the topic of immigration allows for multiple curricular venues and connections through which teachers can address the complexities of immigration. Included is a recommended thematic text set annotated bibliography of twenty-three picture books of different reading levels about historical and mostly contemporary immigration issues. This annotated bibliography is a valuable curriculum resource for teachers because it supports the social studies’ curriculum and its integration with other subject areas, such as language arts and the arts. Each book's bibliographical information offers teachers suggested teaching focal themes and content knowledge, target processes of inquiry and discussion, and attitudinal dispositions that can be fostered.     

Pockets of Participation: Revisiting Child‐Centred Participation Research

This article revisits the theme of the clash of interests and power relations at work in participatory research which is prescribed from above. It offers a possible route toward solving conflict between adult‐led research carried out by young researchers, funding requirements and organisational constraints. The article explores issues of participation in child‐centred research in a cross‐cultural context and gives examples from research carried out with young refugees. The author discusses what might be the best way forward for researchers against a backdrop of critical dialogues concerning child participation on the one hand and funders’ frequent calls for participatory methodologies on the other. In doing participatory research with children and young people on the margins of society, issues of power, knowledge, ethical relations, funding processes and research methodologies and practices may seem at odds and difficult to resolve. In this article a methodology of creating pockets of participation that can be owned by the young researchers is suggested as a possible route.     

An Exploratory Study of the Meaning of Marriage for African Americans

Using specific tenets from symbolic interactionism as a frame, we asked 31 African Americans (18 women and 13 men) including students as well as nonstudents, across a variety of types of relationships and ages, what marriage meant to them. Two major themes, commitment and love, emerged from qualitative content analysis of the meaning of marriage. Other themes, including partnership/friendship, trust, family, and covenant, also emerged as themes, although less frequently. The overwhelming meanings of marriage were positive, with only a few negative instances (i.e., marriage as unnecessary and not fulfilling). Supportive qualitative data are presented for each theme. We discuss implications for the meaning of marriage for African Americans.