A Comparison Study of Low Trauma Disclosure Participants and Their Partners in Army Couples

Intimate partner relationships provide unique conditions for examining how the interpersonal and/or systemic impact of trauma exposure and post-trauma responses can impact both the primary and secondary trauma survivors and the interpersonal dynamics of the couple. The current study explored qualitative and quantitative data from low trauma disclosure individuals (n?=?15) and their partners to understand the experiences of low trauma disclosure to spouses in a sample of Army couples. Contrary to the original hypothesis, the results indicated mixed trauma disclosure partners seemed to be functioning at lower individual and relationship functioning levels than the low or high trauma disclosure partners. Implications for practice and future research also are described.     

Environmental hazards and home loss: The social construction of becoming homeless

Home loss due to landslides is a recurrent phenomenon in unstable lands in Caracas, Venezuela, where poor people help themselves by building their precarious homes. The social construction of becoming homeless in such situations was studied through in-depth interviews with 27 adults who lost their homes due to a landslide. The main topics brought up by the interviewees included the meaning of their homes, the impact of having lost them, the impact on their sense of family, the meaning of having become homeless and remaining indefinitely as such, and attribution of responsibilities for the disaster and for solutions to their homelessness. We present an analysis of some of the psychosocial processes related to these topics, as well as some ideas derived from the interpretation of the information gathered regarding risk prevention and the conception of homelessness.     

Collateral damage on the home front: The gulf in America

Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.     

放大世博效应，加快社会建设——2010／2011年上海社会形势研究报告

2010年上海世博会的成功举办,不仅大幅提升了上海在国内外的影响力和辐射力,推动了上海产业结构转型和城市功能提升,而且有力地促进了社会建设。展望2011年,上海将迎来“十二五”与“世博后”的开局之年,全球经济复苏仍面临严峻挑战,国内宏观政策继续从紧,新历史条件下社会矛盾与风险不断涌现累积,上海加快社会发展的困难将更为突出。对此,迫切要求上海进一步放大世博效应,大力改善民生,努力加快社会建设步伐,为城市全面转型提供坚实社会支撑。     

加强社会体制建设的思路与对策研究

社会体制建设是我国社会建设和整个现代化进程中面临的一个重大问题,也是上海当前经济社会建设面临的一个重大问题。加强社会体制建设、进行社会体制建设重大战略决策,首先必须明确＂社会体制建设＂的主要内涵及其具体内容,还应掌握社会体制建设中诸多有待解决的体制性矛盾和问题所在,在此基础上,提出完善社会体制建设的整体思路、总体框架和阶段性目标,并提出进一步推进和完善社会体制建设的有关对策建议。     

“This will help your children”: Service providers’ experiences with military families during cycles of deployment

ABSTRACT

Military families face not only the same challenges as other families, but also unique issues due to their military involvement. Parenting programs for civilian families can be helpful, but they do not generally cover the specific issues faced by military families. The purpose of this qualitative study was to gather information from a focus group of eight service providers about the types of issues that affect military families, such that content and delivery of workshops at a social service agency could be formed to specifically cater to military families. This study utilized a phenomenological approach, and analyses revealed areas for social service involvement around the cycle of deployment. Specifically, social services could be helpful by using psychoeducational and normalization techniques around the five major themes that resulted from this study: (1) the issues of servicemembers psychologically withdrawing before deployment, (2) family cohesion and connectedness during and after deployment, (3) family stability during reintegration of the service member, (4) military families experience many of the same challenges that nonmilitary families do (such as domestic violence and financial issues), and (5) utilizing a military culture framework for all military family programs.     

The psychosocial well-being of children from Australian military and fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) mining families

This study investigates the effects of employment-related father absence on children's psychological well-being and home based mothers’ perceptions of family functioning. Ninety primary school aged children and their mothers residing in Perth in Western Australia participated in this study. The sample consisted of three groups: children whose fathers were employed in fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) mining (n =30), children whose fathers were in the military (n =30) and a community sample (n =30) of children, whose fathers’ employment was not military or mining based and who did not have extended periods of absence from home. Children's psychosocial well-being was measured by the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS). Children's and mothers’ perceptions of family function were assessed with the Family Assessment Device (FAD). Results indicated that there were no significant differences between the groups on all measures of child well-being, and all groups were functioning at healthy levels. However, mothers from the FIFO families reported significantly more stress than the military and community groups with respect to communication, support and behaviour control within the family. It was concluded that despite mothers’ perceptions of disruption to family routine, the well-being of children in this small sample was not affected.     

The social sources of homicide in different types of societies

A consistent finding to emerge from cross-national studies of crime is a positive relationship between the degree of social inequality and levels of homicide. This finding contrasts with the results of anthropological case studies that reveal high rates of homicide in some extremely egalitarian societies. Viewed together, these two sets of findings raise the question of whether the patterns observed in cross-national research on homicide are generalizable to the typically small, nonindustrial simple societies studied by anthropologists, but generally neglected by comparative sociologists. We address this issue in an analysis of homicide for a sample of small, nonindustrial societies. Our findings indicate that the degree of inequality in such societies is not significantly associated with the level of homicide. By contrast, levels of homicide do vary systematically with the complexity of the political and military organization of such societies. These results suggest that some of the most important findings of cross-national research in sociology are not readily generalizable across different types of societies.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Chicago, 1988.     

Cosmopolitan militaries and dialogic peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish women soldiers in Afghanistan

Feminist security studies (FSS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women’s war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FSS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers’ reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states’ adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that were less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogical peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogical peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women.     

The construction of social work in Brazil: a study of scientific texts

This article is a review of 50 selected peer-reviewed articles from 2004 to 2013. The texts are analysed with reference to Malcolm Payne’s model of the three-way discourse of social work, and the findings are discussed in relation to Brazil’s social and political background. The review of the articles reveals a general perspective on social work in Brazil as a profession aiming at social change through collective transformation, and a normative identity of social work as a profession with political implications. The texts written in Portuguese for a Brazilian audience are more inclined to promote explicit political perspectives on social work than the English texts. Ideological concepts such as democracy and universal rights expressed in the articles are challenged by competing views in Brazilian society. This is especially the case in discussions about the role of the third sector in Brazil. Social work as a concept cannot be taken for granted. The experience of extreme inequalities that Brazil shares with several other Latin American countries makes it necessary to consider historical and social characteristics in order to understand the analytical perspectives that national and international academics employ when studying social work in Brazil.     

The Resiliency Model of Role Performance for Service Members,Veterans, and their Families: A Focus on Social Connections and Individual Assets

The Road of Life, a life course metaphor, is used as the backdrop for a theoretically anchored model, The Resiliency Model of Role Performance, which has been developed to account for variation in the ability of service members and their families to meet their role responsibilities in the context of military life and duties. This model incorporates a focus on both individual assets and the social context in which individuals and families are embedded. The model provides a conceptual anchor for the Support and Resiliency Inventory—an online assessment tool for service members and the civilian spouses of service members. Implications for testing the model and its further development are discussed.     

Effects of Leader Support in the Work Unit on the Relationship Between Work Spillover and Family Adaptation

This study examines the direct versus the buffering effect of leader support in the work unit on the relationship between work spillover and family adaptation. The analyses use data from a probability sample of 3,190 married soldiers in the U.S. Army who participated in the 1989 Army and Family Survey, and the data are analyzed by the gender of the respondent. Two types of work spillover are examined in the analysis (energy and time interference), and both internal and external types of family adaptation are hypothesized and supported by the empirical analysis. Only modest support is found for the buffering effect hypothesis. In support of the direct effect hypothesis, the findings indicate that leader support in the work unit decreases perceptions of work spillover, which is a preventive effect, and enhances perceptions of external adaptation, which is a therapeutic effect.     

The construction of intellectual disability by parents and teachers

This study examines how disability is constructed by significant adults in the lives of young people with intellectual disability. Specifically, we are examined how parents of those affected by intellectual disability and teachers in special schools construct intellectual disability in talk. Using focus group interviews, we examined whether stigma might be recreated or sustained within the family and school settings of those affected by intellectual disability. Parents and school staff constructed disability as negative, articulating difference from ‘the norm’, which was claimed to drive social isolation for affected young people. There was also evidence that parents and teachers attributed less agency to young people affected by intellectual disability. Discussion orients to how parents and teachers, see themselves as advocates for those with intellectual disability highlight, whilst at the same time recreating pervasive and subtle distinctions between children with and without intellectual disability.     

Family Risk and Resilience in the Context of War and Terrorism

War and terrorism are exerting increasing force on world affairs, with growing implications for families and the scholars who study them. In this review, I consider the implications of mass violence for families, with particular emphasis on families with members serving in the U.S. military and families around the world who live where mass violence occurs. Mass violence poses significant threats to mental health and family functioning, but individuals and families also display striking levels of resilience.     

上海社区建设调查报告

为深入了解上海社区建设现状,进一步提高上海社区建设水平,上海社会调查研究中心上海大学分中心在全市范围内开展了社区建设问卷调研,结果显示,上海社区建设目前总体状况较好,市民认同感较高,但也存在一些突出问题。据此,对于如何进一步加强上海社区建设,提出对策建议。     

The humanitarian crisis of migration versus the crisis of humanitarianism: current dimensions and challenges for social work practice*

People who comprise today’s mass migrations are the embodiment of an increasingly hurtful planetary interconnectedness between towering inequalities and hegemonies and human lives. The humanitarian crisis has turned into a fundamental crisis of humanitarianism. The crisis of humanitarianism builds up by the state borders increasingly militarized, equipped with one manner or the other of securitization, seeking to externalize the migrating people. Further, the governments seek to institutionalize and spatially segregate the people, whilst the resident population is subjected to programmatic inciting of racism and xenophobia. Racist eurocentrism pictures the West as democratic, and migrant people as non-democratic; it does not distinguish between individuals and political regimes; does not take into consideration the emergency situations from which they flee: it is thus a form of armed humanitarianism. The Balkan countries which were part of the Balkan Refugee route have become prison countries, custodians of the EU border. They conserve the image of the dangerous Balkans and consolidate Balkanism. A complex social work response includes individual, institutional, curricular, and research levels of reflection and intervention.     

Towards the social analysis of twinship

The article examines the proposition that twinship is an irreducibly social phenomenon. Gender, age, birth order, socio-economic status and other variables are considered, along with the role of different patterns of socialization as these affect twinship. It is argued that, to a very large extent, from conception. through gestation, childbirth and subsequently childhood and adolescence, the social processing and regulation of social members take place in unitary terms and that therefore twins (and higher multiples) are an anomaly in relation to such processes. Twins' reactions to stigma, stereotyping and labelling are explored as an integral aspect of the social structuring of twinship. The role of the twin, as distinct from the role of the non-twin, is examined in the context of cultural expectations of twinship regarding similarity of identity and similarity of behaviour. Subsequent or concurrent processes of differentiation between twins are also examined. The article concludes with suggestions for further analyses of twinship.     

Traumatic Stress and Affect Management in Military Families

The war-time deployment of a service member creates significant stress for the family system that supports that person’s transition into combat, combat duty, and readjustment into civilian and family life upon return. The stressors associated with the deployment cycle are significant and can lead to depression, anxiety, and behavioral concerns for all family members including the children and partners. A family’s adaptation to these stressors can also impact the functioning of the service member during the phases of mobilization, deployment, sustainment, and reintegration. Social work interventions that offer support to the military family can reduce levels of distress within and between the members and improve overall family functioning. A case vignette will be presented that highlights some of the salient interpersonal challenges that can develop in a military family when a veteran returns home with posttraumatic stress that is left untreated. Recommendations for interventions will be considered through the application of psychoeducational approaches for managing traumatic stress in families.