The search for community in modern society: An interpretation

Community theory, at present, gives little importance to communal character in modern urban settings. This “search for community” results from continually conceptualizing community rigidly in terms of the traditional social forms of kinship and rooted neighborhood. Recent interest in social networks has revealed that individuals characterized by mobility and high achievement may not participate in traditional community, but rather in primary friendship networks based upon other variables such as affectivity. A comparative analysis of such networks and traditional community is presented. The primary friendship network while containinggesellschaft characteristics is community-like. Community theory, therefore, must consider manifold forms of primary association to gain a fuller understanding of the communal elements present in modern urban society. This is a revision of an earlier paper entitled “Evolving Community, Friendship and Communion: Some Conceptual Notes” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August, 1976. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of several persons to the development of this paper. T. Dunbar Moodie, Judith-Maria Buechler, L. C. Young, James L. Spates, Lynn E. Crevling, and especially Jack Dash Harris have provided challenging, and therefore valuable, criticism.     

The origin of white supremacy in South Africa: An interpretation

White supremacy in South Africa had its beginning in the initial Dutch colonial settlement of the Cape. The first Dutch settlers brought with them a vision of colonialism in which Europeans were superior to non‐Europeans, and could behave in colonies in ways that were not tolerated at home. The colonial idea of racial slavery corrupted early Cape officials before there were any slaves, and made the introduction of slavery inevitable. Marriages between white men and non‐European women were tolerated at the Cape as elsewhere in the Dutch colonial realm, but raciallymixed couples were not welcome in the Netherlands. The racial exclusivity of the Dutch home community gained ground at the Cape as its European settlers began to see themselves as a home community away from home, and sought to emulate home standards in so far as this was practicable in an overseas colonial setting.     

On freedom and aging: An interpretation

This article explores stages of historical development of age status and relates this to the present. Old people, already in the transition from tribal society to literate high culture, lost their leading social position. Moral and economic support was granted to them, yet the old as a social and cultural group never came back to power again in Western history. In technologically highly developed societies of the present countertrends of a new valorization of older people have set in. This is no return of gerontocracy. However, the main increase in social and cultural prestige of old people as individuals can be observed. This “readmission” is connected with the general sociological phenomenon of individualization in postmodern value orientations and lifestyles and will continue to expand.     

En route: An interpretation through images

This visual essay translates my experience of commuting by train between home and work. The auto‐sequenced series of black and white stills on the CD‐ROM visually reconstructs the social reality that is created in the train station and within the limited space of train carriages.     

The genetic connections of Alzheimer's disease: An emerging source of caregiver stress

The purpose of this study was to expand and refine current theoretical conceptualization of dementia caregiving by identifying and analyzing new potential sources of stress. A qualitative analysis of unsolicited letters (N=51) written by family caregivers of persons diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) was conducted. Content analysis of the data confirmed that providing care for persons diagnosed with AD could impart emotional, physiological, and financial stress on caregivers. The data also revealed an emerging source of stress for family caregivers—fears and uncertainties regarding possible genetic connections between family caregivers and relatives suffering from AD. These results strongly suggest that concerns with genetic connections should be included in theoretical models of stress and dementia caregiving. Implications include the need for increased dissemination of information regarding genetic connections and AD, as well as increased support for family members if and when genetic connections are discovered.     

Positivism and interpretation in sociology: Lessons for sociologists from the history of stress research

This paper examines the relation between positivistic and interpretive sociology, using the stress research literature as a case study. Analyzing the cultural history of the stress concept, it uncovers four central themes: anxiety, performance, adjustment, and mentalism. Examining the self-criticisms made by scientific students of stress, it focuses on the problems of temporal order, confounding, and interaction. Comparison of the cultural and scientific literatures shows that while some of the positivists' complaints derive from general methodological choices, others come from inescapable aspects of the culture's general idea of stress. Considering the past development of stress research, the paper argues that positivism and interpretation have not been Cartesian opposites but interpenetrating fractals. It then speculates about what this relation implies for future positivistic studies, both in the stress literature and more generally.This paper was first presented at the joint invitation of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Hispanic Research Center at Fordham University, May 15, 1987.     

Still connecting the dots: An investigation into infants' attentional bias to threat using an eye-tracking task

An attentional bias toward threat has been theorized to be a normative aspect of infants' threat and safety learning, and an indicator of risk for internalizing psychopathology in older populations. To date, only four studies have examined this bias using the dot-probe task in infancy and the findings are mixed. We extended the literature by examining patterns of attention to threat in a culturally and linguistically diverse sample of infants aged 5–11 months old (N = 151) using all measures previously employed in the infant dot-probe literature. Given that an attentional bias toward threat is associated with higher risk of developing anxiety disorders later in life, we also examined how negative affect—an early correlate of later anxiety disorders—is related to attentional bias toward threat in infancy. This study was the first to use a consistent measure of negative affect across the whole sample. An eye-tracking dot-probe task was used to examine attentional bias toward threat (i.e., angry faces) relative to positive (i.e., happy faces) stimuli. Results showed that an attention bias to threat was not characteristic of infants at this age, and negative affect did not moderate the putative relationship between attention and emotional faces (angry, happy). These findings therefore suggest that attention biases to socio-emotional threat may not have emerged by 11 months old.     

Context and interpretation in laboratory experiments: The case of reciprocity

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter’s and the subjects’ models of an experimental task can adversely affect the interpretation of data from laboratory experiments. We primarily focus on experiments designed to test a hypothesis by comparing behavior across two or more games and highlight the drawbacks of using a between-subjects design or a within subjects design. An alternative design for laboratory experiments is proposed which may alleviate this concern especially in studies of social preferences. We argue that the proposed design does not introduce any conceptual problems in addition to those that are already present in the between and within subjects designs and may alleviate some of the problems inherent to these designs in certain cases. We also use the proposed design to answer some questions that have attracted continued attention in the literature on social preferences in general and reciprocity in particular.     

Amateurism and its interpretation: The social origins of british sport

British amateurism was a complex phenomenon: it consisted of a set of principles (notably against profit from sport and against gambling), and also involved a distinctive administrative structure and ethos. A number of ‘theories’ of amateurism are examined in this paper in terms of the social origins of amateurism: Was it an upper class doctrine of ‘honour’ or a middle class doctrine of competition, or perhaps a complex blend of both?     

Expressing pain: The communication and interpretation of facial pain signals

This article reviews recent theory and research on the origins, nature, and meaning of facial expressions of pain. A general model of pain expression, distinguishing experiential, encoding, and decoding processes involved in pain episodes, is proposed. Variables which are known to or may affect these processes are reviewed. Relationships between elements of the model and clinical phenomena of interest to health-care workers are discussed. The implications of findings in this area for health-care workers are examined. Areas in need of research are identified.The authors' research reported in this paper was supported by research grants to K. M. Prkachin from the Medical Research Council of Canada and to K. D. Craig from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Medical Research Council, and the British Columbia Health Care Research Foundation. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments on earlier drafts of Mark Costanzo, Sherry Beaumont, Linda LeResche, and Glenda Prkachin, and the issue editor, Val Derlega.     

The interpretation of nonverbal behavior in a role-defined interaction sequence: The police-citizen encounter

Videotapes of staged police-citizen interactions were shown to subjects. Nonverbal behaviors of the citizen were programmed to reflect empirically derived reactions to spatial intrusion versus nonintrusion conditions by the police officer. In the first study subjects made attributional ratings of the citizen based on the nonverbal behaviors only with the physical distance between the interactants held constant. Citizens exhibiting spatial intrusion reaction behaviors were judged to be significantly more deceptive, guilty, anxious, and generally more suspicious and unfavorable than citizens not exhibiting such behaviors. In the second study physical distance was explicitly manipulated to create a close versus distant condition. The behavioral cue manipulation from the first study was reproduced in each of these proximity conditions. Many replications of results from the first study were obtained indicating that the preponderant cause of impression formation of the citizen was based upon spatial intrusion behavioral cues, regardless of the perceived physical distance between the interactants. However, significant interaction effects between proximity and behavioral cue conditions were obtained and confirmed an attribution theory prediction regarding degree of confidence in impression-formation ratings made of the citizen.     

Status variations in stress exposure: implications for the interpretation of research on race, socioeconomic status, and gender

Life events checklists have been the predominant method for estimating variations in stress exposure. It is unknown, however, whether such inventories are equally meaningful for estimating differences in exposure between men and women, African Americans and whites, and those in lower and higher socioeconomic categories. In this paper, we employ a wider range of measures of stress--recent life events, chronic stressors, lifetime major events, and discrimination stress--to examine the extent to which these dimensions collectively yield conclusions about status variations in stress exposure that are similar to or different from estimates based only on a life events checklist. Our analyses of data collected from 899 young men and women of African American and non-Hispanic white ancestry suggest that status differences in exposure to stress vary considerably by the measure of stress that is employed. Although women are more exposed to recent life events than men, males report more major events and discrimination stress than females. Our results also reveal that life event measures tend to substantially under-estimate differences between African Americans and non-Hispanic whites in exposure to stress. A similar pattern also holds for socioeconomic status. When stress is more comprehensively estimated, level of exposure profoundly affects ethnic differences in depressive symptomatology, accounting for almost half of the difference by socioeconomic status but contributing little to the explanation of the gender difference in distress. The implications of these findings for the debate over the relative mental health significance of exposure and vulnerability to stress are discussed.     

Self-touching and attentional processes: The role of task difficulty,selection stage,and sex differences

Lateral and bilateral self-touching movements were studied in a group of men and women performing a series of attentional tasks. In all tasks, subjects were instructed to selectively attend to, and shadow (i.e., repeat outloud), one of two passages that were presented simultaneously through earphones. Loudness, voice quality, or thematic content determined which passage had to be selected and shadowed. Performance was significantly better when shadowing on the basis of loudness or voice quality (an earlier, easier selection) than when following content (a more difficult selection that occurs at a later stage in the information processing continuum). However, self-touching rates during performance were not simply a function of task difficulty but seemed to depend on the processing stage at which selection occurred as well as on the type of selection involved. Strong, significant associations emerged between lateral self-touching and performance measures in most of the tasks for the women but in only one task for the men. The sample size on which these correlations are based is small and, hence, these findings must be interpreted with caution. However, in the light of previous findings on sex differences with these tasks, the present results suggest that lateral movements may serve different functions in men and women.We are grateful to Dr. Norbert Freedman, Director of the Unit at which this work was carried out, for his encouragement and support during all phases of this project, and to Dr. Marshall Bush for generously making available to us his selective listening tasks. Some findings reported in this paper were included in the second author's master's thesis at New York University, Department of Psychology.     

The growth of the nonprofit sector in the 1980s: Facts and interpretation

The nonprofit sector was the growth sector of the 1980s. This is the conclusion reached from detailed examination of the growth trends of major industry groups in New York State in the years 1981 through 1987. The analysis in this article suggests that the growth of the nonprofit sector was due primarily to the strong orientation of the economy toward services, where the nonprofit sector has traditionally had an important presence. Within service industries as a whole, the nonprofit and for-profit sectors grew at comparable rates; however, nonprofit growth was concentrated in semipublic services and in services where information is often difficult for consumers to acquire and understand, while the for-profit sector grew in simpler and more privately oriented services. The analysis shows that the nonprofit sector filled much of the gap left by reduced or stagnating government services. However, the growth of the nonprofit sector may be difficult to sustain in the future if sufficient entrepreneurial talent and other resources are not forthcoming.     

The recent history and the emerging reality of American sociological theory: A metatheoretical interpretation

This paper has several objectives. First, it demonstrates the utility of employing an array of metatheoretical tools (paradigm, paradigm bridging, micro-macro, integrated paradigm, theoretical syntheses) to analyze the recent history of mainstream American sociological theory. Second, it shows that we have moved through three rather well-defined epochs in sociological theory over the last three decades and are entering a fourth. Third, it demonstrates that the trend in recent years has been away from theoretical separatism and exclusivity, and toward theoretical synthesis and integration. Finally, and relatedly, the integrated sociological paradigm that I sketched a decade ago, or at least something very much like it, it shown to be now much closer to being a reality, perhaps even a defining reality, in sociological theory.