Values in Life Role Choices and Outcomes: A Conceptual Model

Values are widely viewed as central to the selection of, and subsequent satisfaction with, life roles. But because no conceptual framework has been advanced to guide the work of practitioners and researchers, values are widely ignored by both groups. This article sets forth several propositions aimed at remedying this oversight by clarifying the importance of values in both decision making and life satisfaction.     

Power: A Conceptual Framework*

Symbolic interactionism lacks a coherent conception of power. This paper defines power in a manner consistent with the interactionist perspective. Power is conceptualized as a collective transaction characterized by a division of labor, movement toward a common end, and flexible coordination between opponents. Power is distinguished from other types of collective transactions by asymmetrical interaction, a conflict of interests between opponents, and the intentional production of compliance. Some implications of considering power as a collective transaction are then examined.     

The Role of Managers in Critical Incident Stress Management Programmes: A Qualitative Study of New Zealand Social Workers

This paper reports part of a larger exploratory research study of social workers' preferred models of critical incident stress management and experiences of critical incident stress debriefing. Social workers were invited to contribute to the research through an advertisement in the national association's newsletter for Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers. Using a qualitative methodology involving in-depth interviews with 13 social workers, participants were asked about their experiences of critical events encountered within their workplaces over the last five years. Interviews were recorded by audiotape with consent and analysed using thematic analysis. Four main themes emerged: the importance of preparation for critical incidents, the role of relationship between line managers and social workers, specifically the line manager's support immediately after the critical incident, and the availability of peer/colleague networks. An unexpected finding was that social workers interviewed noted that the pre-existing relationship with the line manager influenced their experience of the debriefing process itself. The more engaged and emotionally aware the manager was seen, the more the social worker claimed the debriefing process had been successful from their perspectives. The implications for social workers and their employing agencies are discussed.     

When Stepfathers Claim Stepchildren: A Conceptual Analysis

Guided by social constructionist and symbolic interactionist perspectives and a grounded theory method, my conceptual analysis explores stepfathers’ experiences with claiming stepchildren as their own. Using in‐depth interviews with a diverse sample of 36 stepfathers, my analysis focuses on paternal claiming as a core category and generates 10 properties relevant to this social psychological phenomenon: timing, degree of deliberativeness, degree of identity conviction, paternal role range, solo‐shared identity, mindfulness, propriety work, naming, seeking public recognition, and biological children as benchmarks. In addition, I consider how five conditions may influence stepfathers’ perceptions of stepchildren. My analysis reveals a number of sensitizing concepts for studying stepfathers’ efforts to develop a sense of group belonging and a fatherlike identity.     

Commitment: A Conceptual Structure and Empirical Application

A conceptual structure for commitment is presented, specifying and clarifying the various meanings of the term as it has been used by sociologists and social psychologists. The possible importance of the concept for social psychology is illustrated by the interpretation of a number of social psychological experiments in terms of commitment processes. The utility of the concept of commitment for the analysis of courtship systems is discussed and the application of the concept of commitment on the level of social systems is illustrated by the use of the proposed conceptual structure in research on cohabitation on a university campus.     

Adolescent Gambling: Understanding the Role of Stress and Coping

The central variables of stress, coping, and gambling severity were examined along three lines of inquiry. The first addressed whether adolescents with gambling problems reported a greater number of minor or major stressful (i.e., negative) life events relative to others. The second examined whether more with gambling problems employed less-effective coping styles, such as those characterized as less task- or solution-focused, and more emotion- or avoidance-focused coping. Finally, the third question explored whether adolescents’ coping styles mediated the association between stress and gambling severity. Ranging from 11 to 20 years of age, 2,156 high-school students completed instruments assessing gambling involvement, gambling severity, stressful life events, and coping styles. Results indicated that, overall, adolescents with gambling-related problems reported more negative life events relative to social gamblers and non-gamblers. When negative life events were further separated into major and minor events, results revealed that problem gamblers reported more major negative life events but not more minor negative life events relative to others. Results indicated that adolescents with gambling-related problems used less task-focused coping, and more avoidance-focused coping. Males, but not females, who experience gambling-related problems reported using more emotion-focused coping strategies. Finally, emotion-oriented coping was found to mediate the relationship between negative life events and gambling severity. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Moderators of Stress in Salvadoran Refugees: The Role of Social and Personal Resources1

Refugee research has tended to focus exclusively on the mental health consequences of migration with little attention being devoted to factors that facilitate adjustment. Recently, several cross‐cultural researchers have suggested that the growing literature on moderators of stress may elucidate why some migrants experience adverse effects whereas others remain relatively unscathed. This study examines the moderating effects of social and personal resources on the relationship between stress and subjective well‐being in 60 recently‐arrived and 60 established Salvadoran refugees in Canada. The participants completed a questionnaire that included scales pertaining to stress (life events, hassles, migration‐related events), resources (social support, locus of control, self‐esteem) and well‐being (quality of life, life satisfaction). Varying results were found for both groups. For Recent Refugees, personal resources were found to moderate migration stress. In particular, locus of control buffered the relationships between migration stress and quality of life and life satisfaction, whereas self‐esteem buffered the migration stress‐quality of life relation. For Established Refugees, social support and self‐esteem moderated the relationship between life events and life satisfaction. In addition, social support buffered the effects of hassles on quality of life. The findings underscore the relevance of integrating more firmly the study of refugee adjustment with current developments in stress research.     

Stress Pattern Preference in Spanish‐Learning Infants: The Role of Syllable Weight

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English‐ and German‐, but not French‐learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish‐learning infants' lexical stress preferential patterns and the role of syllable weight at 9 months of age. Spanish is a syllable‐timed language with no vowel reduction and variable stress. Around 50% of the word types in Spanish are disyllabic, with a superior proportion of trochees than iambs (60% and 40%, respectively). Experiment 1 with CV.CV pseudo‐words failed to reveal a clear trochaic bias in 9‐month‐old Spanish‐learning infants. However, when preference was explored with items containing a heavy syllable (CVC.CV and CV.CVC, respectively), both a trochaic (Experiment 2) and an iambic preference (Experiment 3) could be elicited. These results suggest that knowledge about the close and highly regular link between heavy syllables and stress assignment in Spanish can be easily acquired and determines infants' preference at 9 months of age, while for CV.CV items, the trochaic bias appears to be weak. Our results broaden the current knowledge on the factors that determine the emergence of rhythmic biases.     

Helping Adolescents With Career Development: The Active Role of Parents

This article contains suggestions for counselors and parents regarding the active role parents can play in the career development of their children. These suggestions are based on the author's research on the intentional, goal-directed action of parents in influencing the career development of their children. In the context of an increasingly important role for parents and families in the development of adolescent children, three dimensions of the active role of parents are discussed: the intentionality and meaning attributed to career influence by parents and adolescents, the use of narrative, and sources of conflict.     

Generative Grandfathering: A Conceptual Framework for Nurturing Grandchildren

Empirical research on grandfather–grandchild relationships is small and undeveloped and has not enjoyed systematic theory construction. The weak theory-research connections in the extant grandfather literature have resulted in a body of research that is not cohesive and lacks scope and depth. To address these criticisms, I propose here a conceptual framework for understanding and investigating grandfathering and grandfather–grandchild relationships. The generative grandfathering framework was developed as a result of reviewing and making extrapolations from the growing literature on grandparents and a limited grandfather literature. It is hoped that this framework will be useful to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in capturing the contributions that grandfathers and aging men make to grandchildren's lives.     

The Role of Work in Adolescent Development

This commentary discusses the articles in the special section, “Adolescent Career Development in Social Context.” Initially, common and integrative themes are identified and explicated based on the diverse perspectives of the work role in adolescence that were evident in these five articles. In addition, the theoretical frameworks provided by life-span, career development relational perspectives are discussed as possible means of integrating some of the findings presented by the authors of these articles. This article concludes with an observation on how the findings reported in the special section can inform career development scholarship and practice in the next millennium.     

The Role of Heritage Camps in Identity Development Among Korean Transnational Adoptees: A Relational Dialectics Approach

This study contributes to the literature on transracial adoptions in two important ways: (1) it compares how parents and transnational adoptees negotiate racial and family identities through the use of heritage camps and (2) it informs that comparison with insights garnered from the theory of relational dialectics. The results, which are based on interviews with Korean-born children and Caucasian-American parents (matched parent-child pairs), suggest that parents utilized camps to both downplay their children's racial differences and give credence to their children's “unique” lives. Adoptees, in contrast, were not concerned with downplaying race; instead, they reported that although camps were fun, they did not impact their sense of identity significantly because they did not do enough to address the racial challenges they faced. These results suggest a potential disjuncture between parental purposes for utilizing heritage camps and the actual experiences of adoptees while at these camps. Moreover, they suggest that additional empirical attention should be paid to adoption policies and practices that explicitly address the racial and ethnic needs of transnational adoptees.     

The Role of Migrant Remittances in Development: Evidence from Mediterranean Countries

Given the persistent problems in the balance of trade in LDCs, the limited effect of foreign aid, and the difficulties of borrowing, the often huge amounts of migrant remittances can substitute for the inadequacies of these forms of foreign exchange. As market flows of foreign exchange, remittances have complex positive and negative effects on development. In this paper, I deal with this role of migrant remittances in the theoretical framework of development economics, as related to the importance of foreign exchange as an indispensable factor of growth and structural change in LDCs. Various channels transmitting the impact of remittances on development are investigated based on the experience of countries from both sides of the Mediterranean basin.