Verification of Self Using a Mathematical Theory of Identity,Feeling, and Behavior

The current study tests the affect control theory of self, a mathematical theory that demonstrates a core social psychological principle: individuals strive for a stable and coherent self through identity selection and behavior. In the affect control theory of self, the self is conceptualized as self‐sentiments, which are measured on three dimensions: evaluation (good/bad), potency (powerful/powerless), and activity (fast/slow). In a longitudinal sample of college men and women, I find the self‐sentiment predicts how individuals describe themselves on a range of terms, including primary emotions and both stigmatized and esteemed traits related to mental illness and self‐esteem. It also predicts various productive and deviant behaviors five months later. Thus, the current study demonstrates the theoretical precision of the theory, its ability for understanding human behavior, and its potential for identifying at‐risk individuals.     

Social Contagion and General Diffusion Models of Adolescent Religious Transitions: A Tutorial,and EMOSA Applications

Epidemic Models of the Onset of Social Activities (EMOSA) describe behaviors that spread through social networks. Two social influence methods are represented, social contagion (one-to-one spread) and general diffusion (spread through cultural channels). Past models explain problem behaviors—smoking, drinking, sexuality, and delinquency. We provide review, and a tutorial (including examples). Following, we present new EMOSA models explaining changes in adolescent and young adult religious participation. We fit the model to 10 years of data from the 1997 U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Innovations include a three-stage bi-directional model, Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation, graphical innovations, and empirical validation. General diffusion dominated rapid reduction in church attendance during adolescence; both diffusion and social contagion explained church attendance stability in early adulthood.     

No One Theory of Suicide: The Experience of a Cancer Patient Who Killed Himself

More than a million people worldwide die by suicide annually, and more than 30,000 of them in the United States. Cancer patients are two to four times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. The purpose of this article is to use the results of a phenomenological psychological autopsy to (1) illustrate the interplay of the interpersonal and intrapersonal circumstances of one colon cancer patient’s struggle and ultimate suicide, and (2) demonstrate that health and mental health practitioners need to use more than one theory of suicide to inform their assessment of risk. The findings present a telling picture of the struggles of the decedent, and the authors recommend how the results inform health and mental health practitioners’ practice, policy, and research related to suicide prevention.     

Caught in a Winding,Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory

The study of social movements has recently been energized by an explosion of work that emphasizes political opportunities—a concept meant to come to grips with the complex environments that movements face. In the excitement over this new metaphor, there has been a tendency to stretch it to cover a wide variety of empirical phenomena and causal mechanisms. A strong structural bias is also apparent in the way that political opportunities are understood and in the selection of cases for study. Even those factors adduced to correct some of the problems of the political opportunity approach—such as mobilizing structures and cultural framing—are subject to the same structural distortions. We recommend social movement analysis that rejects invariant modeling, is wary of conceptual stretching, and recognizes the diverse ways that culture and agency, including emotions and strategizing, shape collective action.     

Social Work with Clients Contemplating Suicide: Complexity and Ambiguity in the Clinical, Ethical, and Legal Considerations

Social workers in agency and private practice settings often work with clients grappling with suicide, either as an acute or chronic situation. Probably more than any other clinical condition, suicide forces the practitioner to confront complex ethical, legal, and psychological questions while managing an urgent circumstance. This article attempts to illuminate the ethical and legal considerations that may arise when a client contemplates suicide. Rather than advancing one answer, we stress that in training and the workplace social workers must fully consider the complexities and ambiguities of a client's experiences as well as their own clinical, ethical, and legal obligations.     

Travelling concepts and crossing paths: a conceptual history of identity

The concept of identity is ubiquitous in public discourse even though its meaning is often imprecise or nebulous – it is maybe because of this that its contents can be taken for granted. One speaks of individual, personal, group, social, collective and political identity; of identity formation, crisis, diffusion, conflict and politics; a multiple identity may be pathological or a component of an integrated identity; culture and ideology but also knowledge and experience supposedly enrich identity; identity may be rigid or open to development and growth – and so on. Against this background the present paper explores the argumentative uses of the concept of identity in psychoanalysis and in social psychology and sociology.     

A qualitative analysis of suicide risk factors,preferred means,and means restriction feasibility within a homeless shelter environment

Suicide completion rates among homeless individuals are approximately nine times higher than the general population. The purpose of this study was to capture the state of social support among homeless individuals, understand how homeless community members support peers in crisis, examine the awareness of suicidal ideation, identify common methods for suicide, and generate strategies for means restriction within a shelter. Twenty individuals residing at an emergency shelter were interviewed. Participants were of diverse cultural identities overrepresented in the sample relative to the general population. Interviews revealed that 40% of participants lacked social support. However, the majority indicated that if they encountered someone at risk for suicide, they would provide support and encouragement to the at-risk individual. Almost half of participants reported knowing of an individual in the shelter who had previously attempted suicide and/or was currently or previously feeling suicidal. Overdose was identified as a primary method for suicide; however, the majority of participants were unable to generate strategies for means restriction. The present study offers a glimpse into the experience of homeless individuals and provides valuable information regarding risk factors for suicide within this highly marginalized and underserved population.     

Assessment of a hybrid reform path: Social and labour policies in Uruguay, 1985–2005

Since Uruguay's return to democracy in 1985, a shift in economic and social policy has radically changed the country. The outcomes have been shaped by adjustment to international circumstances “by default”, stop‐go market reforms and the inconsistent pace and content of reforms. Unlike other countries in the region, Uruguay has not followed a resolutely neo‐liberal course, but rather a hybrid one. The end result has been a liberal labour regime coupled with a three‐dimensional social policy balancing the market, the old corporatist welfare State and the new welfare state targeting specific beneficiaries.     

A culture of whiteness: How integration failed in cities,suburbs, and small towns

As America's neighborhoods have become more racially diverse in the last half century, are these shared spaces fulfilling the “promise of integration”? In this study, I review the literature on desegregation as it occurs in urban, suburban, and rural places, illuminating how a culture of whiteness works in each of these types of places to reproduce racial domination. The literature on multiethnic urban areas demonstrates how a culture of whiteness reframes gentrification as ‘revitalization’ and nostalgia, which result in social control and cultural displacement of non-white residents. In suburban places, I draw out the ways a culture of whiteness is expressed as ‘niceness’ and ‘governmentality’, resulting in symbolic exclusion and forced assimilation of people of color. Finally, in rural places, a culture of whiteness uses narratives of ‘pollution’ and ‘parasitism’ to understand often low-income migrants of color, which renders them invisible and reproduces their structural disadvantage in the community. Revealing the subtle and obscure mechanisms through which a culture of whiteness reproduces racial domination in diverse places ultimately provides the key to their undoing and opens the door to the promise of integration.     

Social Status and Decent Work: Test of a Moderated Mediation Model

On the basis of the psychology of working theory (PWT; Duffy, Blustein, et al., 2016), we tested a moderated mediation model with subjective social status, work volition, proactive personality, and decent work as variables. Data were collected from 225 South Korean employees (115 women, 110 men). Results indicated that work volition mediated the relation between low subjective social status and decent work. In addition, proactive personality moderated the link between low subjective social status and work volition. Further analysis revealed that the indirect effect of social status on decent work via work volition was conditional upon proactive personality; that is, the indirect effect was weaker for individuals with a higher level of proactive personality. These results provide an application of the PWT-based model in a South Korean context. Future research could include samples from marginalized populations and additional constructs (e.g., career adaptability, human need satisfaction) of PWT.     

Migration,Poverty, and Risk of HIV Infection: An Application of Social Capital Theory

A majority of current HIV/AIDS interventions are designed primarily after individual-based public health models and pay little attention to the socioeconomic environment in which HIV transmission occurs. This article focuses on outlining how migration acts as a conduit for disease transmission in South Africa and then proposes a macro-level prevention model based on social capital theory, thus then supplementing current prevention literature. It is based on the argument that social disruption and stresses from migration lead to sexual interactions during the migration periods that amplify the risk of HIV transmission among migrants.     

Emerging Strategies for Risk Assessment of Sexually Abusive Youth: Theory,Controversy, and Practice

SUMMARY

Clinicians and other professionals evaluating, managing, and treating sexually abusive youth are frequently called upon to offer judgments regarding risk for sexual reoffense. There are currently no empirically validated methods for accurately classifying risk among this population. Therefore, those faced with this task have an obligation to consider the research on the assessment of risk and recidivism. Five methods of risk assessment are reviewed, and four scales are discussed, with directions on how to obtain them. These include the Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol (JSOAP), the Protective Factors Scale (PFS), and Estimate of Risk of Adolescent Sex Offender Recidivism (ERASOR).     

Individualism and Its Discontents in Social Work: Proposing a Counternarrative for a New Vision of Social Work Theory and Practice

The ideology of individualism undermines the foundation of social work theory and practice. Hyper-individualism drives cultural systems and institutions, rendering the social work profession fundamentally incapable of promoting social change for social justice. A radical communitarian counternarrative provides a critical analysis of the disconnect between the needs of individuals and the capacity of communities to meet those needs. A real-world application of radical communitarian principles is demonstrated in cohousing, a contemporary movement in community building. The cohousing model shows how social work might reorient its vision for professional theory and practice.     

Pedagogy of international social work: a comparative study in the USA,UK, and Georgia

The social work profession worldwide has been increasingly influenced by globalization and its effects on social issues that require social workers to be responsive and knowledgeable in addressing them. In recent years there has been an increased emphasis on the internationalization of the social work profession and education. With limited examples of international social-work-teaching methods discussed in the literature, there is also a lack of information obtained directly from students on methods of instruction that they most prefer and find beneficial. This collaborative, comparative project examined students' perceptions of methods that make teaching international social work successful at three universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Georgia. While there were different preferences for content- and process-driven approaches in teaching, students' common interest was in gaining practice examples and exposure to real-life practice of international social work in their own and other countries. The findings suggest that international social work education needs to be more experiential and practice-based.     

Grounding Online Prevention Interventions in Theory: Guidelines from a Review of Selected Theories and Research

ABSTRACT

Literature suggests that grounding online interventions in theory improves their success. This article reviews 10 theories selected from the fields of psychotherapy, social work, health promotion, gaming, and innovation dissemination that can be used for grounding the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of online interventions. Selected studies are reviewed to illustrate how these theories have been used in online human service interventions. After this review, an integrated theoretical approach for grounding online interventions is proposed along with guidelines suggested by the review.     

Media use,social cohesion,and cultural citizenship: an analysis of a Chinese metropolis

The emergence of new social strata and plural identities are two of the most profound changes in China's social transition toward integration into the global economic system. Differentiating three dimensions of cultural citizenship identity (i.e., cosmopolitan, national, and local), this study seeks to depict the paths of influence in the formation of such identities that involve reality construction by the media and evolving patterns of social stratification. Analysing data from a 2009 Shanghai survey, we found a strong relationship between individuals' consumption of local media contents and their local identity. Further, their perceptions of media's centripetal and centrifugal forces have significant effects on their identities, and the Internet has different effects from the traditional media, although such influences vary across different social strata.     

American Criminology Meets Collins: Global Theory of Intellectual Change and a Policy‐Oriented Field1

Ideas from Randall Collins’s Sociology of Philosophies are applied to U.S. criminology, a policy‐oriented field and one case of differentiation out of a fragmented sociological discipline. Building on previous quantitative work, in‐depth interviews with eight prominent scholars provide the empirical material. As in philosophy, vertical network ties are important. Yet, they may take different forms, with consequences for the shape of horizontal networks and the nature of scholarship. Comparable to philosophy, horizontal network ties provide social capital and opportunities for interaction rituals that generate collective effervescence and emotional energy. Further, the nature of these interactions is dependent on the changing institutional environment in which they are embedded. Such institutional settings, themselves affected by changes in the political economy, also provide material resources, constituting dependencies that produce mediated effects and, in this policy‐oriented field, also direct effects on the nature of scholarship.     

Leadership,Through Loss and Change: Management of Change Viewed as Challenges within a Couple Relationship*

This paper emanated from a Doctoral Thesis, which was an in-depth single case study of a frontline social work team based in the third sector. The research took place over a period of five months and included weekly visits to observe the day-to-day operations of the team, attending special events such as the Teams Away Day, Team Meetings and undertaking management consultation sessions with the Project and Deputy Managers. The thesis concludes that just as frontline staff require effective support, frontline managers also need space to effectively reflect on their experiences in role. The focus of this paper is the relationship dynamic between the managers, the team, senior management and the wider organisation as they dealt with the sudden announcement of the project’s closure. The paper makes use of ethnographic and psychoanalytically informed observations of the team’s ordinary day to day work processes, in addition, use was made of consultative interviews (MCI’s) with the managers of this service who were afforded space to think about their management roles. Aspects of thematic analysis informed by psychoanalytic theory were used to analyse the material.