Identity Transformation and Family Caregiving: Narratives of African American Teen Mothers

This article explores connections between informal caregiving and identity transformation as experienced by pregnant teens. Based on in‐depth interviews with 51 African American teen mothers, the article examines teens’ pregnancy narratives as an example of narrative repair, illuminating how attending to processes that connect one’s identity to the care of others can work to empower individuals to resist threats to a positive sense of self or a damaged identity. The authors suggest that family caregiving can provide an important context that supports identity transformation not only among pregnant teens as they strive to become good mothers but among those experiencing other types of disruptions to their lives.     

The Loss of Friends to Homicide and the Implications for the Identity Development of Urban African American Teen Girls

Homicide is the leading cause of death of African American youths in the United States. The loss of their friends to these deaths challenges the identity development of many urban African American teen girls. To understand the implications of such a loss on the psychosocial task of identity development of urban African American teen girls, 21 African American girls, 16–19 years old, living in a large Northeastern city in the United States, participated in a qualitative study. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted. A grounded theory, constant comparative approach, is used to analyze the narrative data. The findings show (a) the presence and pressure of psychosocial stress on the participants’ identity development process, (b) the adaptive functions of foreclosed religious identity commitments, (c) the potential for this event to inform, in complex ways, racial identity development examined through racial group orientation, and (d) natural avenues of resistance to marginalization and race devaluation that may be experienced from societal responses to this event. How the teens make meaning of this experience informs their identity development. The article promotes the inclusion of identity-informed psychosocial interventions in bereavement work with this population.     

The discursive construction of gay teenagers in times of mediatization: youth's reflections on intimate storytelling,queer shame and realness in popular social media places

New media applications such as social networking sites are understood as important evolutions for queer youth. These media and communication technologies allow teenagers to transgress their everyday life places and connect with other queer teens. Moreover, social media websites could also be used for real political activism such as publicly sharing coming out videos on YouTube. Despite these increased opportunities for self-reflexive storytelling on digital media platforms, their everyday use and popularity also bring particular complexities in the everyday lives of young people. Talking to 51 youngsters between 13 and 19 years old in focus groups, this paper inquires how young audiences discursively constructed meanings on intimate storytelling practices such as interpreting intimate stories, reflecting on their own and other peers' intimate storytelling practices. Specifically focusing on how they relate to intimate storytelling practices of gay peers, this paper identified particular challenges for queer youth who transgress the heteronormative when being active on popular social media. The increasing mediatization of intimate youth cultures brings challenges for queer teenagers, which relate to authenticity, (self-) surveillance and fear of imagined audiences.     

The Networked Household

The authors argue that individuals, rather than family solidarities, have become the primary unit of household connectivity. Many households do not operate as traditional densely knit groups but as more sparsely knit social networks where individuals juggle their somewhat separate agendas and schedules. At a time when many people enact multiple, individual roles at home, in the community and at work, the authors ask: how do adult household members communicate with each other? How do adult household members use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to organize, communicate and coordinate their leisure and social behavior both inside and outside the home? Interviews and surveys conducted in 2004-2005 in the Toronto, Canada area of East York show that households remain connected - but as networks rather than solidary groups. The authors describe how networked individuals bridge their relationships and connect with each other inside and outside the home. ICTs have afforded household members the ability to go about on their separate ways while staying more connected - by mobile phone, email and IM - as well as by traditional landlines. In such ways, rather than pulling families apart, ICTs often facilitate communication, kinship and functional integration.     

“My Adoptive Father”

Abstract

Gay men's intimate life worlds have been the topic of some empirical inquiry since the late twentieth century. Drawing on the symbolism of love, friendship, and biology, these studies discuss the recent changes in queer communities that have shaped contemporary discourse about gay and lesbian family life. What appears missing in these intimate accounts are the lesser known readings of gay male intimate relationships which are both sensitive to the complex, interactive, and often contradictory experiences of everyday family life and attentive to the contextual ways these stories become constructed. This paper is a presentation of an experimental case study narrative which grapples with the practical, everyday considerations of what it means to create and sustain a supportive familial relationship between two gay men. Documenting the complexities of this contemporary familial arrangement provides us with some important opportunities for gay storytelling. In this instance, it allowed the author to better understand how two gay men like Ted and Simon came to construct their own notions of a father-son relationship. It also encourages us to explore how new gay identities and relationships are forged and negotiated over time through the biographical lens of family membership.     

Technology and Family Violence in the Context of Post‐Separated Parenting

Whilst the advent of new and increasingly accessible communication technologies undoubtedly provides new, positive, and effective ways for individuals to communicate and connect with their communities, it simultaneously provides additional means and forums for perpetrators to abuse and harass their victims. Furthermore, such technologies enable perpetrators of family violence to overcome geographical boundaries and continue their abuse post‐separation, particularly where there are children of the relationship. This paper reviews and classifies the existing literature on technology‐facilitated abuse, identifying predominant themes in relation to context and focus, as well as the gaps. New forms of criminality as well as new ways to perpetrate existing forms of criminality are described.     

Key factors and characteristics of successful resource parents who care for older youth: A systematic review of research

There is growing recognition that competent, committed resource parents are a critical component to the effective delivery of foster and adoptive services for teens placed in out-of-home-care. This study implemented a systematic review process to identify the personal characteristics, skills and abilities of successful resource families that maximize foster and adoptive parent retention and maximize placement permanency of teens placed in out of home care. Starting with an extensive search of the literature across the last two decades and outreach to locate studies, the authors systematically analyzed research that used permanency and placement stability as the primary dependent variables and personal characteristics/attributes, knowledge, skills and abilities as independent variables. Of the 838 total documents identified, 48 were original research studies that focused on one or more of these variables. Although rigorous and systematic, this research was hampered by differing definitions, samples, measures, and the type of analysis utilized among these studies. Personal characteristics that promoted permanency and placement stability included having a tolerance for rejection, flexible expectations, having a sense of humor, having a belief in a higher power, belief in self-efficacy, having higher education, having sufficient economic resources, having healthy family and marital functioning, having access to support systems, and being motivated to foster/adopt. Knowledge, skills, and abilities resources families acquired that promoted permanency and placement stability included the ability to communicate effectively, maintain attentiveness to the parent/child relationship (i.e. using routines and structure while also offering children a variety of experiences), understand the effects of trauma and teach socio-emotional health, provide culturally competent care, recognize, express and process grief, take care of oneself, valuing and participating in life -long learning, training and education, and valuing a connection to the child's birth family.     

Multiple social contexts in qualitative bereavement research

Little research focuses on the ways that bereaved family members react to and make meaning of their experience of the death of an elderly father and husband. In a qualitative, ethnographic study of 34 bereaved families we examined how family members respond to two inter-related social contexts: 1. social-cultural values and attitudes such as attitudes toward grieving for old persons, and 2. the inter-personal dyadic relationship between interviewer and interviewee. An underlying theme of uncertainty pervades the study participants' views of what is normal and expected in their own process of bereavement. Implications for future bereavement research are suggested.     

Narratives of pain in later life and conventions of storytelling

In this article, I discuss conventions of storytelling by drawing on two accounts of the experience of chronic pain that challenged my hearing. To engage with these accounts and to reflect on my hearing/reading practices I use narrative analysis. Narrative analysis acknowledges the way people tell their stories as integral to the meaning they convey. But definitions of narrative are often linear and causal and are closely linked to the conventions of storytelling that are dominant in our culture. Recognising that link enables the listener/reader to go beyond; to follow disjointed, chaotic accounts that are not easy to hear, and to situate speakers within or outside of dominant discourses. I argue that such a hearing contributes to an understanding of the self that provides an alternative to the modernist idea of an autonomous, self-controlled and independent individual, an alternative that values the lives and narratives of older people.     

Along the Cancer Continuum: Integrating Therapeutic Support and Bereavement Groups for Children and Teens of Terminally Ill Cancer Patients

Family life is altered irrevocably when a young parent is diagnosed with or dies from cancer. This article tracks the genesis and transformation of a comprehensive psychoeducational support and bereavement program for children, adolescents, and parents affected by cancer. From the inception of the program, families with parents in active treatment participated in time-limited support groups. When a parent died, families transitioned out of support and into bereavement groups. As the cancer experience became more chronic, families remained in these respective groups for longer periods of time. This required clinicians to reconsider group structure to avoid the additional losses incurred as newly bereaved families transitioned from one group to another. Restructuring the program allowed participants to remain in familiar environments and to experience greater support and continuity in their care. Children, teens, and parents made clinical gains in communicating their needs and feelings to loved ones. Further, children and teens stayed on track developmentally, academically, and socially. Clinicians structuring these programs must be skilled in working simultaneously in both support and bereavement modalities. Recommendations for self-care and supervision are suggested.     

Khash,history and Armenian national identity: reconsidering post-socialist gender,food practices and the domestic

This article explores how improvisation with food and cooking is a way for Armenian women to appeal to ‘public’ national narratives from within their ‘private’ spaces. Such appeal to the grand narrative of Armenian identity is in many ways predicated on their skilful abilities to survive or ‘make do’ with what is available and it is these skills that establish connections between individuals, the community and the nation. When these skills are enacted, women have the power to invoke national feelings of Armenianness and feminine morality through their ability to find and cook a proper Armenian meal. These skills also give women the ability to obligate individuals both within their families and amongst their peers at the same time that they can use them to express creativity and personal identities through their cooking. In other words, through cooking and from within the kitchen, I argue that women engage with powerful ‘public’ or national discourses that are often assumed to suppress them.     

NARRATIVE PRACTICE AND THE COHERENCE OF PERSONAL STORIES

While the sociological analysis of personal stories is becoming more sophisticated, it would benefit from a refined appreciation for narrative practice. The theme of this article is that the coherence of stories and the experiences they convey are reflexively related to the manifold activities and the increasingly diverse conditions of storytelling. Drawing on ethnographically assembled story material, we offer an empirically sensitizing vocabulary to illustrate how practice constitutes coherence through the interplay of narrative composition and the local conditions of storytelling. The vocabulary high-lights the growing need to think of personal stories and their coherence as an active ensemble of narrative practice, now "owned" as much by the diverse auspices of story-telling as by the storyteller (Alasuutari 1997).     

A Blumerian Approach to Storytelling

Blumer's work on life histories and symbolic interactionism represents an important contribution in the twenty-first century. I join his work with research on storytelling to build a Blumerian approach to storytelling. This approach holds that social actors use stories to construct subjective meanings, stories exist in some social context, stories are told or written for some audience, a wide range of social processes produce stories, the temporal sequence of storytelling audiences is important, social actors use interactional techniques of showing story preferences, and symbolic structures and narrative linkages are the resources social actors use to compose stories. Future research can continue to develop this approach.     

The impact on the family therapist of a focus on death, dying, and bereavement

Recognizing the growing numbers of family therapists who are choosing a focus on death, dying, and bereavement, this article addresses the nature of the commitment required--as well as the gifts and challenges presented by work in this area. Particular attention is given to therapists' vulnerability to compassion fatigue and/or vicarious traumatization, both of which are described and discussed. A variety of strategies for individuals and institutions, aimed at supporting professionals and preventing problems, are considered. It is concluded that as family therapists focus on self-care as well as client care, they have the potential to increase not only their effectiveness but also to enhance their own well-being. Implications for training and for research on this topic also are considered.     

Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London

In this article, I explore the ways in which ‘middling’ migrant New Zealanders living in London and New Zealand discuss and identify with home. For these multi‐local individuals, the discursive and material aspects of New Zealand as home form a framework for their everyday life as migrants living in London. Interpretation of the interviews using thematic and narrative analyses works through a conceptualization of home, migration, and identity as interdependent, through three interrelated themes: the symbolic or political nature of home; the importance of family and familiarity for a sense of home; and the role of physical material objects and places. Participants in this study see New Zealand as their home, yet by being away from home they gain new perspectives on home. In London, they engage with or resist a collective imaginary of New Zealand as home that is both self‐perpetuated and externally imposed, and which both reveals and conceals ideas about individual and group identity and community. On returning from London, the idealistic and sometimes simplistic visions of New Zealand as home that structure their lives in London are often disrupted by the more complex yet more mundane version of home and self with which they are confronted.     

Single Parent Widows:

This paper examines the stressors, appraisal of be- reavement, coping, resources, grieving responses and health of four types of single widow parents: widows raising dependent children; widows raising a handicapped child; independent older widows with children; and dependent, ill, older widows with a child. A review of literature on single parent widow families and data from the authors research on single parent widows served as a basis for this paper. Major gaps in knowledge include: limited research on single parent widow families including longitudinal and theory-based research; findings which are based on small samples of single parent widows who are often mixed with other single parent types; little research on single parent widows from Black, Hispanic and other ethnic groups; and few studies on resources used by widows. A secondary analysis of data from the authors research indicated characteristics of high- risk, vulnerable, and healthy single parent widow families. High-risk single parent widow families are characterized by: presence of mul- tiple stressors; intense grieving; appraisal of bereavement as a threat or harmful loss; use of less adaptive coping; limited use of resources;and poor health. Characteristics of vulnerable single parent widow families include: presence of stressors including an unresolved grieving process; negative appraisals of bereavement with hope for a more positive appraisal in the future; limited coping abilities; use of some resources such as helpful social supports; and less than op- timum health which can improve with intervention. Positive mean- ings of bereavement, use of adaptive ways of coping, a normal grieving process, use of many resources, and good health are charac- teristics which are prevalent in healthy single parent widow families. Themes in common to all four family types were: the grieving pro- cess; changes in roles and responsibilities; employment; loneliness; dating and remarriage; and caregiver stress. Directions for future research and implications for family professionals are discussed.     

Family therapy and terminal illness

Abstract

This article describes the experience of a family therapist working in a family with an adolescent child suffering from a terminal illness. This work was undertaken in the framework of the Mexican Institute of Social Security.

In dealing with patents afflicted with incurable diseases such as renal deficiency, osteosarcoma or leukemia, which will eventally lead to death, it is important to know about the successive stages in this progression from life to death and to understand them. Some authors have studied in general the reactions of the dying and their families. Kubler-Ross (1970) reports denial, resentment, bargaining, depression and acceptance; Eric Lindemann (1944) mentions pain, anxiety, tension and guilt as the main components of mourning.

Psychotherapy with the terminal patient and their family is intimately concerned with the separation process, which is always accompanied by anxiety; this can become so acute that it feels like death or total annihilation. The family responds in many ways to this anxiety, but will often not express these feelings; the therapist has to try to discover at which stage of mourning the family has arrived. This is even more important where the patient is an adolescent who has no hope of achieving his longing to live. It is important that we are dealing here with anticipatory mourning, which can prevent serious reactions following bereavement. Great care is required in uncovering feelings of hostility, anger, fear, repulsion and frustration. The patient too must be encouraged to express his feelings; this will relieve tension, and make it easier for the family to accept the reality of what is going to happen.

It is important to keep the family informed about the medical requirements of the treatment. These should be explained very clearly, so that all members understand, accept and cooperate in such tasks as ensuring attendance at out-patient consultations, laboratory investigations and taking the medicine prescribed. We find that often only one member of the family, usually the mother, carries the whole responsibility of caring for the patient. All these matters need to be discussed with the whole family, together with such matters as the patient's school attendance, any problems of family relationships, and plans for the future. The worker needs to help family members to continue their personal growth and development while understanding this crisis, which might otherwise arrest them.

Treatment should not be rigidly planned at the start; as in all psychotherapies, it is necessary to make an initial evaluation of the degree of function and dysfunction in the family. This appraisal is made by exploring family problems, areas of conflict and the resources which are mobilized to support the system. In this process the worker collects all the elements which enable him to get a picture, free from his own technical preferences, so that the data can be integrated, taking into account the opinions of experts on structural family therapy, triaxial or psychodynamic views among others.

In the case I shall describe, we used a combination of theories and techniques, mainly derived from systems theory and psychoanalysis. A purist attitude was not adopted, because our main aim was to find what was of most immediate benefit to patient and family.     

Covictims of capital murder: statements of victims' family members and friends made at the time of execution

The death penalty is often touted as a punishment providing the only way to truly serve justice and offer closure for covictims (defined as family members or friends of murder victims'). These rationales are rarely structured around the actual words of these individuals, however. The findings in this study suggest that such rhetoric oversimplifies and often misrepresents the experiences and perspectives of covictims. Through their own words, we learn that the death penalty is not always the soothing salve for the pain and suffering of covictims we wish it to be. Rather, we find much more ambivalence and complexity in the statements of covictims. The impact of the death penalty and executions on covictims and their ability to attain healing and closure is not so clear cut. By presenting the actual words of capital murder covictims at the time of execution, this inductive, exploratory study provides a novel glimpse at the perspectives of these individuals and their perception of the death penalty process.     

“As Far as They Knew I Came from France”: Stigma,Passing, and Not Speaking about the Holocaust

Today we recognize that storytelling plays an important role in helping survivors of traumatic episodes such as sexual abuse, military combat, or genocide refashion a sense of self and “work through” their traumatic experiences. But before the Holocaust was named and widely acknowledged and the diagnosis of post‐traumatic stress had emerged, survivors of Hitler's genocidal policies struggled to tell their stories in a world that did not particularly wish to hear them. While most accounts of Holocaust survivors’ postwar experiences focus on themes of redemption, adjustment, and integration, my analysis of interviews with Holocaust survivors suggests during their first two decades living in the United States they were often silenced by individuals they encountered. I use Goffman's analysis of stigma to document how and why this silencing occurred, and with what consequences, providing an account of the interactions survivors had with family members, neighbors and acquaintances, and the strategies of identity management that survivors devised.