Discharge procedures for mentally ill people: The perspective of former psychiatric patients on their primary social network, quality of life and future life expectations

This article on literature about social networks and social support in order to integrate a number of key concepts and findings that must be considered in research about the social conditions of mentally ill people. Interviews with 53 former psychiatric patients were carried out to get their perspective on their social network, quality of life and future life expectations. The duration of and stigma attached to mental illness, being without work and gender seemed to have the most influence on the primary network. The same issues, except for gender, together with place of residence, financial difficulties and inability to exert influence over one's own situation influenced the respondents' quality of life and their expectations of the future. These findings are analysed and discussed from a social psychological perspective.     

Preference for Nature in Urbanized Societies: Stress, Restoration, and the Pursuit of Sustainability

Urbanicity presents a challenge for the pursuit of sustainability. High settlement density may offer some environmental, economic, and social advantages, but it can impose psychological demands that people find excessive. These demands of urban life have stimulated a desire for contact with nature through suburban residence, leading to planning and transportation practices that have profound implications for the pursuit of sustainability. Some might dismiss people's desire for contact with nature as the result of an anti-urban bias in conjunction with a romantic view of nature. However, research in environmental psychology suggests that people's desire for contact with nature serves an important adaptive function, namely, psychological restoration. Based on this insight, we offer a perspective on an underlying practical challenge: designing communities that balance settlement density with satisfactory access to nature experience. We discuss research on four issues: how people tend to believe that nature is restorative; how restoration needs and beliefs shape environmental preferences; how well people actually achieve restoration in urban and natural environments; and how contact with nature can promote health. In closing, we consider urban nature as a design option that promotes urban sustainability.     

Parents at‐risk and their children: intersections of gender role attitudes and parenting practices

Existing research demonstrates that parent and child gender may influence important aspects of family relationships; however, most research in this area has been conducted with non‐clinical samples. As clinicians, it is important to consider how gender impacts family relationships, particularly among vulnerable families. This study examined the intersections of gender role attitudes and parenting practices among 34 parents involved with the child welfare system and referred for clinical intervention. Using a mixed methods design, themes regarding gender role beliefs and parenting practices were found through qualitative interviews with parents. Findings suggested that fathers felt responsible for financially providing for their families and expressed challenges in communicating with mothers, and mothers described challenges they face because of a lack of father involvement. Parents also discussed a perceived need to monitor daughters closely while fostering the independence of their sons. Results of the qualitative analyses were supported by quantitative findings indicating significant differences in harsh and inconsistent discipline practices and clear expectations for girls compared to boys. The discussion addresses implications for clinicians, including how a feminist family therapy perspective may help promote client influence over traditional gender norms by questioning gender role attitudes and exploring alternate narratives that may impact family dynamics.     

Race, Class and the Dilemmas of Upward Mobility for African Americans

We use the concept of intersectionality to explore the psychological meaning of social class and upward mobility in the lives African Americans. Throughout, we pay special attention to the context of education, a site which many Black Americans feel represents their best hope for upward mobility. Literature related to three themes is reviewed and discussed: (a) the history and significance of class divisions within the Black community, (b) experiences of educational institutions as entryways to upward mobility, and (c) the hidden costs of mobility. It is suggested that future research should address the intersection of gender with class and race, the relevance of class to racial identity, and the experience of downward mobility among Black Americans .     

Race, Gender, and Educational Advantage in the Inner City

Objective . In this study we examine race differences in the effect of childhood in an urban inner–city community on educational attainment in adulthood. Methods . We examine a cohort of African American and white individuals born in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the same hospital. Our analysis examines a set of individual, family, and community characteristics for the respondents at three time points in their life course, birth, childhood, and adulthood. Results . We find that black men and women are substantially more likely than their white counterparts to graduate from high school, and that black women are more likely than white men, black men, and white women to graduate from high school and college. Conclusions . We conclude that social policy to eradicate urban disadvantage must not shift its focus to the plight of poor whites to the neglect of African Americans. Rather, we urge that inner–city white children be "drawn out of the shadows" of social research and that the uniqueness of race, class, and gender intersections realized in the inner city be brought to bear.     

Marie Rozette and her world: class, ethnicity, gender, and race in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mauritius

In 1790, Marie Rozette, a freedwoman of Indian origin on Mauritius, executed a series of notarial acts which revealed that she possessed a small fortune in cash assets as well as slaves and substantial landed property in one of the island’s rural districts. The life of this former slave between 1776, when she first appears in the archival record, and her death in 1804 provides a vantage point from which to gain a subaltern perspective on aspects of Mascarene social and economic history, as well as developments in the wider Indian Ocean world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Marie Rozette’s life history challenges the notion that free persons of color in Mauritius were little more than an “unappropriated” people, and invites us to consider how supposedly marginalized individuals were able to cross various socio-economic and cultural boundaries. More specifically, her life affords an opportunity to consider the ways in which class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as race, interacted to create a distinctive Creole society in Mauritius, the nature and dynamics of which bear directly on our knowledge and understanding of the free colored experience elsewhere in the European colonial slave plantation world.     

社会工作与自闭症儿童家长消极心态干预研究

自闭症儿童的康复是一个世界性难题。从社会工作视角来看则更加注重自闭症儿童与家庭环境和社会环境的互动。自闭症儿童的家庭照顾者是自闭症儿童社会支持系统的“桥梁”,本文正是从自闭症儿童的家庭照顾者入手来研究其对自闭症儿童康复和积极融入社会的重要意义、面临的困境和相应对策。研究发现,自闭症儿童的家庭照顾者不仅存在经济压力和专业护理知识匮乏,更重要的是其内在巨大的心理压力和社会支持系统不足。本文从社会工作实践的优势视角出发,提出了构建家庭照顾者的互助系统以克服无助悲观的心态,加快恢复家庭的社会功能,促进自闭症儿童和家庭融人日常社会。     

试论中职学校学生的心理教育

随着社会经济的快速发展,成长中的中等职业学校的学生面临着越来越严重的社会心理压力,他们在学习、生活和社会适应方面必然会遇到种种困难和挫折,难免会出现这样或那样的心理问题。如何帮助中职学生提高心理素质,健全人格,增强承受各种心理压力和处理心理危机的能力,以迎接将来社会的严峻挑战,是中职学校德育工作所面临的迫切问题。     

Psychological Thriving Among Latinas With Chronic Illness

This study utilizes a 3-year longitudinal design to explore factors that promote thriving among Latinas facing multiple adversity: poverty and chronic illness (specifically, arthritis). From a thriving paradigm, focus is placed on understanding the positive growth and thriving experiences reported by respondents, as well as the social, cultural, and personal resources that promote thriving. In the baseline interview, we employed a qualitative methodology to understand women's experiences of thriving. Women reported a variety of such experiences, the most frequent being enhanced appreciation of life. In the follow-up study, we created a thriving scale based on responses generated at the initial interview and prior research, then examined which of a number of social/cultural and personal factors predicted thriving 3 years after the initial assessment. Only measures of competence (self-esteem and self-efficacy) and psychological well-being were related to thriving. Path analyses testing the causal sequence of these variables revealed that negative affect contributed to decreased self-efficacy and self-esteem, but it did not have a direct or indirect effect on thriving. Greater self-esteem positively predicted thriving. In contrast, positive affect did not contribute to either measure of competence, but had a direct effect on thriving. Results suggest that psychological well-being (not ill-being) promotes thriving.     

Dying and Bereavement, Spirituality and Social Work in a Market Economy of Welfare

Correspondence to Margaret Lloyd, School of Social Work, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL Summary This paper examines the contribution of social work practiceto the care of people who are dying or bereaved. It considerscurrent challenges to traditional practice arising from societaland organizational change, reaffirming the importance of thesocial work role but arguing that, in order to face those challenges,social workers must broaden their perspective to incorporatea spiritual dimension. The paper draws on a research study conductedby the author.     

Race From the Inside: An Emerging Heterogeneous Race Model

Race matters, influencing life experiences. Race is not a simple concept, and it is not a single category. Racial identity theories, however, typically handle race as a simple Black-White dichotomy that overlooks within-group heterogeneity, substituting a subgroup—young, low socioeconomic status, darker skinned men—for all African Americans. The centrality of this subgroup image reifies what it means to be Black but excludes African Americans who are women, middle class, and so on. We provide an overview of the situation of African Americans, high-lighting within-group diversity in everyday experiences related to gender, socioeconomic status, and physical attributes, including skin tone. Understanding the implications of race from an insider's perspective requires that we view it as a heterogeneous category.     

社会地位、生活境遇与焦虑

本文运用定量研究方法,探讨了人们的社会地位和遭受不公正对待的生活境遇在焦虑形成中的作用。研究表明,社会地位（包括客观地位和主观地位）和生活境遇对焦虑的产生具有明显的影响,社会地位低的群体和生活境遇中遭受过不公正对待的人,更易产生焦虑。这些由社会地位和生活境遇等因素导致的焦虑对于个体的影响是偏向消极的;在社会因素的持续作用下,具有焦虑特征的个体增多,焦虑有可能从个体的心理问题转化为社会的心理问题。     

Class-competent social work: a preliminary definition

The article seeks to present a theoretical framework for defining class-competence in social work practice. Social work has made significant progress in enhancing practice competence with respect to contextual factors that transcend social class such as gender, culture, race and ethnicity. But this positive development in overcoming the rigid view, which framed class as the sole explanation of diversity, has obscured the current impact of social class differences in social work practice. This article takes a critical look at the historical approach of the profession to class issues, extends the boundaries of the social class concept beyond its narrow economic dimensions, discusses the relevance of addressing class issues in light of current challenges in social work practice and, lastly, proposes a preliminary definition of class-competent social work practice.     

Unemployment,Legitimation, and Property Crime

Within recent years several economists have suggested that sociological and psychological concepts are not necessary in explaining criminal behavior. They contend that deviant behavior can best be understood as a type of economic activity resulting from the rational analysis of the rewards and costs associated with legitimate and illegitimate means. The sociologist would contend that such a perspective ignores the fact that people internalize the social norms of a society, and that it is only when they perceive the social system as unjust that they challenge the legitimacy of its rules and begin to consider the rewards and costs associated with deviant means. Data are presented which support this position. The differing policy implications of the two perspectives are briefly discussed.     

When Being Different Is Detrimental: Solo Status and the Performance of Women and Racial Minorities

Individuals experience solo status when they are the only members of their social category (e.g., gender or race) present in an otherwise homogenous group. Field studies and surveys indicate that members of socially disadvantaged groups, such as women and racial minorities, have more negative experiences as solos than do members of privileged groups, such as Whites and males (Kanter, 1977; Niemann & Dovidio, 1998). In this article, we review research showing that the public performance of women and African-Americans is more debilitated by solo status than that of Whites and males. We also show that this effect is exacerbated when negative stereotypes about the performer's social group seem relevant to their performance, and we discuss the contributing roles of lowered performance expectancies and feelings of group representativeness. We discuss how findings from social psychological research can be applied towards the goal of reducing the decrements typically associated with being the only member, or one of few members, of one's race and/or gender in the environment.     

Race, Local Life Circumstances, and Criminal Activity

Objective . Life–course researchers suggest that changes in local life circumstances explain changes in criminal activity in adulthood. Although the extent to which local life circumstances propel offenders toward/away from criminal behavior is a subject of considerable debate, the issue of race has largely been ignored. The objective in this research is to incorporate race into a life–course perspective that examines the influence of changes in life circumstances on changes in criminal activity. Methods . This objective is met by using longitudinal data on 524 parolees released from the California Youth Authority (CYA) who were followed for seven consecutive years after release. Results . The results suggest that changes in local life circumstances are related to changes in criminal activity, but do not eliminate the race/crime relationship for violence. At the same time, the effect of local life circumstances on criminal activity appears more similar than different across race, with the exception that common–law marriages are crime–generating among nonwhites as compared to whites. Conclusions . Because race continues to be associated with criminal activity over the life course, future research should increase efforts to better understand how race might condition life circumstances when influencing criminal activity. Implications of these findings for life–course theory are discussed.     

Social Psychological Factors in Lifestyle Change and Their Relevance to Policy

Crises in obesity and changes in the environment illustrate the need to change problematic behaviors and lifestyles in large segments of the population. This article uses social psychological theory and research to understand methods for facilitating lifestyle change. A basic assumption in the social psychological perspective is that the environment and the person interact to determine behavior. Both factors are important for understanding "upstream" and "downstream" approaches to lifestyle change ( McKinlay, 1993 ; Verplanken & Wood, 2006 ) and consideration of one factor without the other may be disastrous. We review evidence from within and outside of the health context to illustrate the upstream and downstream approaches and then describe implications for public policy and intervention. The evidence and recommendations encompass a wide range of behaviors, ranging from speeding and intoxicated driving to eating an unhealthy diet and energy conservation. When armed with the relevant social psychological theory and evidence, lifestyle change campaigns are likely to be successful.     

Social centrality and aggressive behavior in the elementary school: Gender segregation,social structure,and psychological factors

In this paper, we build on key findings in the sociological literature regarding different patterns of association between social centrality and overt aggressive behavior in the context of same‐and‐cross gender social interactions. We explore these associations in a population of urban elementary school students ( = 8.62, SD = 0.69, N = 848), while addressing claims that the role of psychological factors is overstated in this literature. Our results indicate that, on average, social centrality is positively associated with aggressive behavior for boys, but negatively for girls. We also find a moderating effect indicating that the proportion of male peers with whom participants are reported to hang around, as well as their own gender play a role in the association between social centrality and aggression. These findings are discussed in the context of an ecological perspective on human development in which interactions among individuals, their social groups, and key environments are viewed as central to shaping developmental pathways.     

Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Thriving: What Can Be Learned?

Using the data from two ongoing studies of resilience and thriving, one of gay men growing up in heterosexist environments, the other of women living with AIDS, we review how qualitative approaches have enabled researchers to grapple with conceptual, methodological, and ethical dilemmas related to the study of resilience and thriving. We discuss the implications our values as researchers have on determining who is thriving; the powerful social, cultural, and political contexts that must be considered when investigating the effects of and resistance to adversity; and the implications of conceptualizing thriving as a process. Finally, we consider the opportunities opened up by qualitative analysis and suggest some avenues for future research.     

Resilience and Thriving: Issues, Models, and Linkages

This article addresses distinctions underlying concepts of resilience and thriving and issues in conceptualizing thriving. Thriving (physical or psychological) may reflect decreased reactivity to subsequent stressors, faster recovery from subsequent stressors, or a consistently higher level of functioning. Psychological thriving may reflect gains in skill, knowledge, confidence, or a sense of security in personal relationships. Psychological thriving resembles other instances of growth. It probably does not depend on the occurrence of a discrete traumatic event or longer term trauma, though such events may elicit it. An important question is why some people thrive, whereas others are impaired, given the same event. A potential answer rests on the idea that differences in confidence and mastery are self-perpetuating and self-intensifying. This idea suggests a number of variables whose role in thriving is worth closer study, including personality variables such as optimism, contextual variables such as social support, and situational variables such as the coping reactions elicited by the adverse event.