Urbanism and Social Psychological Well-Being: A Cross-Cultural Test of Three Theories*

Three competing theories of how urbanism affects social-psychological well-being are tested using data from London, England; Los Angeles, California; and Sydney, Australia. Path analyses are conducted using visiting friends, visiting kin, and marriage companionship in the different paths. It is found that determinist theory can be rejected because most-urban people do not have fewer social relations than less-urban people; in fact, they may have more. Subcultural theory received some weak but mixed support, and compositionalist theory generally is not supported. The three metropolitan areas do not differ markedly from each other in the paths they show. The best predictor of well-being is the quality of people's social relationships.     

The Social Meaning of Pets

When companion animal interact closely with people, the roles they play may be categorized in terms of three major functions. The projective function involves the extent to which pets may serve as a symbolic extension of the self. The sociability function involves the role of pets in facilitating human-to-human interaction. The surrogate function involves the extent to which interaction with pets may supplement human-to-human interaction, or serve as a substitute for it. A person publicly identified with a companion animal makes a symbolic statement of their personality and self-image. Whether or not this process is intentional, the presence of a pet and the way it is treated become factors which are taken into account in the assessment of the social self. Pets facilitate interaction by being social lubricants. They provide a neutral subject of conversation, and perform a variety of functions as social catalysts. Since interaction with companion animals can approximate human companionship, the presence of pets may serve to supplement the benefits usually derived from the roles of friend, parent, spouse, or child. Alternatively, pets may serve as surrogate antagonists. In the extreme, interaction with companion animals may not only supplement human companionship, but may actually replace it. These three major functions are discussed with examples. Implications are noted for future research on companion animals.     

The Social Participation of Blacks: A Proposed Synthesis of Two Competing Theories

Discrepant findings have typified the research concerning the social participation of blacks in America. The bulk of the findings would seem to posit three competing theories, one emphasizing low participation levels on the part of blacks, and the later two emphasizing high levels of social participation. These theories are examined and a synthesis of the "isolation" and "compensation" models is proposed. By examining both formal and informal types of social participation on the part of blacks, it is argued that both theories are viable toward explaining variation within black participation levels in particular and toward mediating the discrepant findings as they have been previously offered in general. Some support is found for such a proposed synthesis.     

Encoding Action Roles in Meaningful Social Interaction in the First Year of Life

Previous research has shown that 6‐ to 9‐month‐old infants detect role reversals in dyadic interaction involving 2‐argument relations. These studies extend this line of research to a 3‐argument structure: An agent gives an object to a recipient. We conducted 4 experiments in a novelty‐preference paradigm. Infants were habituated to videotaped sequences of a puppet giving a flower to another puppet. In the test phase, the puppets' spatial positions were switched, and infants alternately saw role‐reversal and direction‐reversal trials. Results indicate that 10.5‐ and 12‐month‐olds but not 9‐month‐olds selectively encoded the change of action role (agent‐recipient) over a change in the spatiotemporal properties of the interaction and that action role encoding was specific to intentional relations in a 3‐argument structure. Thus, infants at the end of their 1st year seem to be sensitive to movement cues that specify intentional relations between an agent and a recipient.     

Introduction: The Senses in Social Interaction

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles.     

Openings Revisited: The Foundations of Social Interaction

Twenty years after its publication, the “openings” research of Miller, Hintz, and Couch (1975) continues to be the conceptual foundation of the New Iowa School of Symbolic Interation. However, we believe that this work has been misread. Returning to the original work, we offer a new reading of this groundbreaking research that broadens the scope of the analysis and more closely defines the hierarchical structure of social interation found in all social encounters.     

Legacy Volunteering: A Test of Two Theories of Intergenerational Transmission

Sociological theory suggests two reasons that volunteering runs in families. The first is that parents act as role models. The second is that parents who volunteer pass on the socioeconomic resources needed to do volunteer work. Panel data from two generations of women (N = 1,848) are analyzed to see how much influence family socioeconomic status and mother's volunteering have on daughter's volunteer careers. More highly educated women and women whose mothers volunteered donate more hours initially, but only family socioeconomic status increases volunteering over the life course.     

Immigrants in a Restructuring Economy: A Partial Test of Theories

The article addresses the occupational integration of immigrants from the former USSR into the economy of the city of Tel Aviv. This process is examined from a structural perspective, which focuses on the location of immigrants as a group in the restructuring economy of Israel's main business centre.
Data from labour force surveys and income surveys conducted in 1992 and 1994 by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics are used to analyse the distribution of veteran Israelis and recent immigrants among economic sectors and occupations.
Despite their superior academic and professional qualifications, immigrants were underrepresented in the business and financial services sector, the leading sector in post-industrial economies. They were most strongly represented in the personal services sector, where they replaced Palestinian workers. The findings lend support to both the restructuring and replacement hypotheses.     

Role-Taking Accuracy in Medical Encounters: A Test of two Theories

Abstract

This paper tests five hypotheses derived from two contrasting theoretical perspectives on role-taking accuracy: a social contact theory and an institutional resource theory. We investigate how well doctors and patients perceive one another's perspectives in a medical encounter. The cumulative weight of the data supports the proposed social contact theory. Increased contact between residents and patients, as reflected in physician's year in residency, contributes to more accurate role-taking on the part of physicians. Conditions of social compatibility between doctors and patients vis a vis gender or race lead to more accurate role-taking. Finally, personal characteristics are better predictors of role-taking accuracy than institutional status variables such as type of residency training program or doctor's year in residency status.     

Community Context and Theories of Deviant Behavior: An Examination of Social Learning and Social Bonding Theories

The social learning and social bonding theories of deviant behavior were investigated in four community contexts: farm, rural-nonfarm, suburban, and urban. The mean differences across these contexts on pertinant variables did not form a continuum from rural to urban. Rather, the farm and suburban areas were similar, and the rural-nonfarm and urban areas were more alike than either of the other two contexts. A number of the social bonding variables interacted with community context, but no systematic pattern was observed. Social learning variables did not interact with context. Rather, the different level of these variables appeared to account for the variance in deviant behavior.     

Review Essay: Unifying Social Movement Theories

Qualitative Sociology -     

The Social Meaning of Children's Narratives: A Review of the Attachment-Based Narrative Story Stem Technique

Recent attachment-based research with the Narrative Story Stem Technique (NSST), a laboratory method using family doll figures and structured story stems, has proven to be useful in assessing young children's perceptions of social relationships. Eleven studies are reviewed that have validated this method with measures of children's social behavior or experience, contributing to a long-needed empirical basis for interpretations of children's play. Meaningful themes found in children's responses with the NSST are presented and organized with concepts from attachment theory, particularly the child's perception of the caregiver's trustworthiness and self-perception of worthiness to receive care. Implications for continuing research and for clinical interviewing are discussed.     

Three Social Dilemmas of Workforce Diversity in Organizations: A Social Identity Perspective

This paper explores the relationship among threesocial dilemmas faced by organizations wishing to attainand maintain workforce diversity: the dilemmas oforganizational participation, managerial participation, and individual participation. Functional andsocial category diversity offer benefits fororganizations (creativity, adaptation and innovation,and access to external networks), but there are costswhich deter organizations from pursuing thesebenefits. The costs associated with organizationalparticipation in diversity initiatives arise becausemanagers and their employees perceive organizationalconflicts and organize their interactions along socialidentity lines, so that temporal traps and collectivefences surround diversity. Resolving the subordinatedilemmas of managerial and individual participation provides the key to resolving the dilemma oforganizational participation. Social identity theory isused to understand the dilemmas and to develop possibleresolutions, which should make the benefits of diversity more immediately accessible toorganizations and society.     

The Implications of Social Neuroscience for Expectation States Theories

We review recent findings from the social neuroscience literature that links status differentiation between individuals to neurological processes, and draw out the implications of those findings for expectation states theories, including its dominant theory of status‐organizing processes – Status Characteristics Theory. Our underlying assumption and implicit argument is that social neuroscience research is useful for both bolstering and corroborating some core sociological claims. In addition, it sheds light on some of the ongoing theoretical debates within sociology. We highlight and discuss the following four social neuroscience findings: 1) Neural activity varies depending on whether an individual is interacting with someone of a lower, equal, or higher status; 2) There is an interplay between status and affect such that status processes may promote the control of emotional reactions; 3) Both men and women are neurologically attuned to high status opposite sex conspecifics; and, 4) Status differences are processed in the same region of the brain as numerical or size differences, and this region is responsible for the coding of information along continuous dimensions. The implications of these points are discussed with respect to sociological theories.     

The Determinants of Racial Disparities in Perceived Job Insecurity: A Test of Three Perspectives

Why do African Americans report higher levels of perceived job insecurity than whites? We analyze data from the 1996 and 1998 General Social Survey to test alternative predictions from the compositional, inclusive‐discrimination, and dispositional perspectives concerning the sources of the racial gap in perceived insecurity. Results from ordered probit regressions provide most support for the inclusive‐discrimination perspective, which maintains that employment practices associated with “modern racial prejudice” induce perceived insecurity on a widespread and generalized basis among African Americans. Accordingly, compared to whites, African Americans experience perceived insecurity net of human capital credentials and job/labor market characteristics. Additional analyses provide one qualification to these findings: dynamics associated with the inclusive‐discrimination perspective are more pronounced in the private sector than the public sector.     

Symbolic Interaction as Music: The Esthetic Constitution of Meaning,Self, and Society

Analytical frameworks such as dramaturgy and narrative analysis are respectively grounded in metaphors of life as theater and life as a story. In related fashion, in this article the authors argue for the creation of another metaphor: life as music. Viewing selfhood and symbolic interaction as music sensitizes us to observe and understand an important but much too neglected dimension of social life: the esthetic. Drawing from the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, the authors argue that the realm of the esthetic should not be confined to museums and art galleries, for the intentional perception of beauty constitutes the very foundation of individuals' embodied experiences of their lifeworlds. From within our metaphor of life as music we conceptualize beauty as the diverse rhythms, melodies, and harmonies contributing to the constitution of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity.