The “Obesity Epidemic”: Evolving Science,Unchanging Etiology

“Obesity epidemic” discourse relies on scientific and epidemiological research to justify subjecting certain bodies to healthist messaging and disciplinary technologies. The science and framing of obesity has evolved, potentially partially due to critical obesity scholars. However, critical obesity scholars are now reliant on outdated critiques of ever progressing evolving/adapting discourse. Recent discoveries have been made concerning the determinants of obesity and the complexity of weight loss. Scientific discourse often now references environmental factors as contributors to obesity, low levels of sustained weight loss, and limitations of common measures such as the body mass index. Despite this refinement, the ultimate conclusion of studies, as presented within the scientific articles or in related media reportage, remains unchanged. Individuals are still expected to attempt to “correct” their non‐normative bodies through lifestyle changes, regardless of the evidence underscoring the likely futility of these endeavors. This paper updates obesity science and public health responses and evaluates the extent to which new findings, with the potential to greatly subvert standard weight loss advice, have altered supposedly evidence‐based public health communications and recommendations. As emerging scientific insights have further muddied already‐complex obesity‐related pathways, solutions have largely remained the same.     

Single Mothers “Do” Family

This paper explores how single mothers both incorporate others into family life (e.g., when they ask others to care for their children) and simultaneously “do families” in a manner that holds out a vision of a “traditional” family structure. Drawing on research with White, rural single mothers, the author explores the manner in which these women both endorse their children’s attachment to other caregivers and maintain boundaries around issues of discipline and attachment vis‐à‐vis these others. The author demonstrates that single mothers are willing to share this protected realm of family life with a new man (a fiancé or cohabiting boyfriend) as they pursue the goal of what has been called the “Standard North American Family.”     

FAMILY THERAPY RESEARCH AND THE “NEW EPISTEMOLOGY”*

Epistemological critiques of the theory and practice of family therapy recently have also been brought to bear on mainstream strategies and methods of research in family therapy. In this paper, it is argued that standard research methods are the only ethically responsible means presently available by which we can assess the efficacy of family therapy. It is also argued that standard research models have already provided data of practical relevance to clinicians, patients and public policy makers and should not be abandoned in haste. Finally, it is argued that there are insufficient grounds for divorce between the “new epistemology” and standard research, since commonplace research designs and methods are far more compatible with systemic thinking than some observers have suggested.     

Commentary on Studying Circular Questioning “In Situ”

In their discursive study of circular questioning in a systemic family therapy session, the authors raise some interesting perspectives on the original Milan therapy team's guidelines for the therapist as the conductor of therapy. By emphasizing circularity from a discourse point of view, they suggest these guidelines can be used to help family members hypothesize about their own perspectives on themselves and the other family members in circular terms, and, drawing upon Cecchin's notion of neutrality, by creating a state of curiosity in their talk and maybe in their minds. Their emphasis on circularity also helps us to become more sensitive to ways in which the natural recursion in language can help us to appreciate the new guiding lines circular questions can suggest with previously spoken elements. If we follow this line of argument, then circular questions can be seen as a critical part of a therapy we can call recursive family therapy in which we use the recursive element of all natural living languages to help our clients to recursively change their language and lives naturally.     

THE FAMILY CRISIS INTERVENTION LITERATURE: WHAT IS MEANT BY “FAMILY”?*

Family crisis intervention is a rapidly growing area of clinical care in family therapy which lacks clear conceptualization, especially with respect to how “family” fits into crisis intervention theory. This paper integrates recent concepts from the family therapy literature into three views: family as background, family as context, and family as a unit. The family crisis intervention literature (56 publications) is reviewed and categorized according to these three views. Clarity in how “family” is viewed and consistency between theory and practice are examined. Recommendations for improving the conceptualization of “family” in family crisis intervention theory and practice are made.     

Getting “Bi” in the Family: Bisexual People's Disclosure Experiences

There are many similarities in gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals' coming out experiences, but bisexual people face unique challenges. Despite this, an explicit focus on bisexual people is missing from family research. Using family systems and cultural sociological perspectives, the authors analyzed how social and cultural factors shape disclosure processes for bisexuals as they come out to multiple family members. After analyzing qualitative data from a diverse group of 45 individuals, they found that bisexual people navigate monosexist and heterosexist expectations in their family relationships. Cultural constructions of bisexuality shape the ways that bisexual people disclose their identities, including how they use language to influence family members' responses in desirable ways. Relationship status also influences bisexual people's disclosure strategies, as a romantic partner's gender is meaningful to family members' understandings of their sexual orientation. The findings highlight the importance of addressing cultural and social contexts in understanding sexual minority people's coming out processes.     

Between “Families in Trouble” and “Children at Risk”: Historicising “Troubled Family” Policy in England since 1945

The launch of the Troubled Families Programme in 2011 has thrown into sharp relief how governments develop policies and practices to intervene in the lives of so‐called ‘troubled families’. Commentators were quick to make comparisons with historic efforts to rehabilitate ‘problem families’ in the post‐war period. However, beyond discursive similarities, there are also marked continuities in how family policies have been developed and implemented. This review narrates the rise, fall and rise of concern about ‘problem’ and ‘troubled’ families in England in the context of anxieties about child and family welfare, and the appropriate response of the state.     

The Divide Between “Evidenced‐Based” Approaches and Practitioners of Traditional Theories of Family Therapy

Evidenced‐based approaches continue to grow in the field of family therapy. However, practicing family therapists do not always embrace these approaches. In this article, we explore factors contributing to practitioners' concerns with evidence‐based treatments and suggest a broader, more clinically palatable view of evidenced‐based treatment. We also suggest how family therapy researchers, practitioners, and educators might begin to close the researcher–clinician divide in the best interest of all concerned.     

Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

DECOMPOSING TRENDS IN INCOME VOLATILITY: THE “WILD RIDE” AT THE TOP AND BOTTOM

We use 2‐year panels from the Current Population Survey to provide a detailed accounting of family income volatility from 1980 to 2009. Volatility doubled overall, and the increase was most pronounced among the top 1% of the income distribution, but in any given year the level of volatility among the bottom 10% exceeds that of the top. The increased volatility comes from higher instability of head and spouse earnings, other nonlabor income, and from reduced covariance between these income sources with the tax system. This suggests that current tax policy is less effective in mitigating income shocks than previous decades. (JEL J31, I30)     

“NEW” STRUCTURAL POVERTY?

Proponents of the new structural poverty thesis contend that "overly generous" meanstested transfer payments increase poverty by encouraging female headship and welfare dependency. Skeptics of this view concede that transfer programs have serious faults, but argue that their overall effect is to reduce poverty. Focusing on states' Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs, this article examines how well these competing hypotheses account for changes in poverty since 1960. AFDC contributed to the substantial poverty reduction of the 1960s. By the next decade, however, such effects attenuated, in part because the most generous programs began to encourage slight increases in female headship, which exacerbates poverty. The new structural poverty thesis may offer some understanding of the feminization of poverty in recent years, but the argument that AFDC transfers generate poverty is unfounded.
The welfare system is anti-work, anti-family, inequitable in its treatment of the poor and wasteful of taxpayers' dollars. It provides incentives for family breakup. It discourages work. (Carter 1977)     

Fat in the Fire? Science,the News Media,and the “Obesity Epidemic”2

In recent years, the “obesity epidemic” has emerged as a putative public health crisis. This article examines the interconnected role of medical science and news reporting in shaping the way obesity is framed as a social problem. Drawing on a sample of scientific publications on weight and health, and press releases and news reporting on these publications, we compare and contrast social problem frames in medical science and news reporting. We find substantial overlap in science and news reporting, but the news media do dramatize more than the studies on which they are reporting and are more likely than the original science to highlight individual blame for weight. This is partly due to the news media’s tendency to report more heavily on the most alarmist and individual‐blaming scientific studies. We find some evidence that press releases also shape which articles receive media coverage and how they are framed.     

“He Did It on Purpose!” Family Correlates of Negative Attributions About an Adolescent Sibling

Scholars have suggested that family life may influence children's attributions about close relationships. Using a sample of 369 two‐parent families with 2 children (a target adolescent in the 8th grade and a sibling aged 10 to 18), we investigated whether the sibling's negative attributions regarding the target adolescent were associated with mother's and father's negative attributions regarding the target adolescent, or the gender constellation and birth order of the sibling pair. In addition, we used the self‐reported negative attributions of both siblings and adolescents to investigate whether attributions predicted one's own behavior, or whether the behavior of the partner predicted the perceiver's negative attributions. Structural equation models showed that mothers' and fathers' negative attributions regarding the target adolescent predicted concurrent negative attributions for girls, but not boys. In addition, siblings' negative attributions regarding each other predicted their negative and positive behavior toward the partner 2 years later. The positive behavior of the attribution target also predicted the perceiver's negative attributions, but its effect was weaker. Girl sibling pairs were less negative in their attributions than cross‐sex sibling pairs and boy sibling pairs. Finally, although younger siblings were less negative in their attributions than older siblings, this difference decreased over time. This study advances the knowledge of negative attributions in close relationships by identifying family correlates of an understudied, but important, close relationship.     

“Flexible Citizenship” or Familial Ties that Bind? Singaporean Transmigrants in London

Easier travel and communication technologies, together with the global demand and supply labour market exchanges occurring under post-Fordist capitalism, create the conditions that make transnational family formations more common than before. Geographically dispersed family members are governed by different citizenship regimes that affect familial interactions and the possibility of family reunification. Such family formations have significant implications for the nation-state framework and the way that citizenship is practised in a transnational world. Singapore, a young city-state in Southeast Asia, provides an insightful case-study to examine migrant motivations and citizenship behaviour. The political leaders in Singapore represent the nation-state's internationalising drive – which includes encouraging Singaporeans to live and work overseas for a period of time – and its domestic nation-building goals as strategies that are both necessary and yet in tension with one another.
This paper draws on discourse analysis to examine the ways in which the Singaporean state plays upon familial logics and citizenship regulations as one of its strategies to bind overseas citizens to the country. I also employ findings from in-depth interviews with Singaporean transmigrants in London to discuss the manner in which the above considerations frame their decisions on migration and citizenship. In doing so, I argue that research on migration and the transnational family should consider how they both articulate and are in turn articulated by the nation-state. I then show how my research results have important implications for citizenship policymaking in a transnational world, particularly with respect to gendered familial discourses and nation-building processes. I also suggest that my research findings indicate areas for further academic enquiry into the morphology, strategies and temporality of transnational family formations.     

Between Tradition and Modernity: “Leftover” Women in Shanghai

In recent years, single, educated women who are not yet married by their late 20s in China's major cities have been increasingly castigated as “leftover” women. After more than 3 decades of rapid socioeconomic development, marriage remains near universal and early in China. In the meantime, there has been a resurgence of patriarchal traditions. Using semistructured interviews, in this qualitative research the author sought to understand the motivations of these women and their efforts to negotiate the contradictions regarding marriage formation and career development. Six themes emerged from the women's narratives: (a) parental pressure, (b) a gender double standard of aging, (c) forced socioeconomic hypergamy, (d) the importance of compatible family backgrounds, (e) efforts to balance women's independence with support for family and men, and (f) conflicting gender ideologies. The author contextualizes these themes by analyzing how women weave traditional expectations with modern life in a transitioning China, where tradition and modernity alternately clash and converge to constitute a somewhat uneasy mosaic society.     

Obesity and Living Together

As shown by parent-child, sibling and twin correlations and by comparison of the children of different parental fatness combinations, fatness definitely follows family line. Indeed, fatness level can be predicted from grandparental fatness levels and from the number of obese family members living together. However, a purely genetic explanation for the level of fatness and actual obesity is untenable given fatness similarities of spouses, parents and their adopted children, adoptive siblings and of parents and their adult children who no longer live within the home. Comparing fatness levels of genetically unrelated "family" members and measuring synchronies in fatness change among family members who live together (i.e., parents and children and siblings and spouses) it is clear that fatness and obesity are both acquired in the family context. While parental and grandparental models of eating and exercising may well explain levels of energy intake and expenditure that account for differences in fatness differences in children, there is also some evidence that fatness and fatness gain of younger family members may affect the body fat mass of members of the elder generation. The largely-learned family line nature of fatness and obesity becomes important in the early diagnosis of obesity, the prevention of obesity and in programs of fatness reduction and dietary reeducation if they are to be of lasting effect.     

The Family Context of Relational Aggression in “Difficult to Treat” Female Juvenile Offenders

Female juvenile offenders often engage in socially aggressive behaviors that make them more difficult to treat than male juvenile offenders. This social (i.e., relational) aggression may be developed or maintained through transactions with family members. To investigate this issue, we measured relational aggression in the family interactions of 140 adolescents divided by gender and offender status into four equal‐sized groups (female juvenile offenders, male juvenile offenders, female nonoffenders, and male nonoffenders). Adolescents and caregivers completed a family discussion task, and raters coded relationally aggressive behaviors at the dyadic level. Results showed that female juvenile offenders and their mothers directed more relational aggression toward each other than did mother–adolescent dyads in the other groups. Implications of these results for treatment and research are discussed.     

“Beating the Odds” Versus “Changing the Odds”: Poverty,Resilience, and Family Policy

Mixed in with national data on declining poverty rates are other signs that poverty, economic hardship, and inequality continue unabated. This essay examines: (a) the scope of poverty and the growing disparity in income and wealth; (b) the consequences of poverty of adults and children; and (c) strategies for improving their resilience. It is suggested that resiliency will be enhanced more by keen attention to national economic policies than by focusing upon individual personality characteristics, family attributes, or even unique community features. Drawing on a public health analogy, a focus on prevention (through sound economic redistribution policies) could significantly strengthen families and improve their well‐being.