The cut sleeve 1 revisited: A brief ethnographic interview with a male homosexual in mainland China

This paper focuses on a brief interview with a self‐disclosed male homosexual from a Western province in mainland China. While others have reported on homosexuality in China, the sources of information have generally been nonreactive (letters and clinical case notes). To the author's knowledge, this is the first documented face‐to‐face interview with a Chinese male homosexual to reach the Western professional press. Segments chosen for focus include the self‐perceptions of the individual, his sexual orientation and liaisons, and the manner in which he negotiates his alternate lifestyle in a cultural system largely negative to homosexuality in any form. While this example is obviously not representative of homosexuals in China, it does briefly illustrate the kinds of experiences that confront a male homosexual in the post‐Mao Zedong era. Adaptive strategies by this individual also indicate how the expression of a sexual orientation at variance from the norm can be sustained, even in a seemingly closed system.     

Children and anti-poverty strategies

This paper discusses how far local authority anti-poverty strategies consider the impact of poverty on children. After outlining some findings on child poverty and linking these with current debates on children's rights, it examines a selection of anti-poverty strategies. Although examples of good practice are highlighted, the paper concludes that in general issues affecting children living in poverty are insufficiently addressed and that anti-poverty strategies should be refocused to take account of the needs and rights of children.     

An ethnography of HIV/AIDS and sexuality in the People's Republic of China

China's HIV epidemic is now a growing reality, yet there is virtually no evidence of it in the HIV/AIDS literature. This report documents ethnographic and epidemiologic findings from field visits conducted in Beijing, Chengdu, and Kunming; the latter in Yunnan province, site of China's most severe nidus of HIV infection. This report also elaborates those cultural, social, and political factors involved in China's attempt to manage its growing HIV epidemic. Contemporary attitudes toward sexuality in China which impinge upon such management, as revealed through ethnographic interviews, are reviewed. Data from the First Sino‐American Management of HIV Disease Symposium (to which the author was a delegate) are also blended with the ethnographic material to further clarify the cultural and epidemiologic status of HIV/AIDS in China. It is the conclusion of this report that HIV/AIDS and its management pose a transforming, ineluctable challenge to China's traditional attitudes toward sexuality.     

Self-protective Optimism: Children's Biased Beliefs about the Stability of Traits

Studies indicate that children believe that positive behaviors are more likely than negative ones to remain stable across time and situations. The present study assessed whether children hold such optimism equally regarding their own vs. others' behavioral patterns. Thirty five-year-olds answered questions about the extent to which they viewed themselves as having various positively, neutrally, and negatively valued behavioral patterns. An experimenter then asked children about the extent to which behavioral patterns that children thought they had would remain stable in themselves and in others, and the extent to which behavioral patterns that they did not think they had would remain stable in others. We found that children gave higher stability ratings for positive behaviors in themselves than in others, and the opposite regarding negative behaviors. This self-protective optimism is discussed vis-à-vis the relationship between children's beliefs about traits and their behaviors and motivations.     

Research,A Basic Ingredient in the Study of Social Policy and Social Services

The course model described in this paper has four components: first, a systems base for understanding family structure, including intergenerational themes, taboos, toxic issues, triangulated relationships, and attitudes toward ethnic or racial heritage; second, utilization of research skills, including cataloging sources, constructing topical and autobiographical interviews and questionnaires, determining credibility of sources, and assessing style and form as well as content of correspondence; third, structural adaptations that students' families made over three generations in response to immigration, natural disasters, military mobilization, economic depression, long-distance relocations, and discriminatory actions; and fourth, public review of each student's research, elaborating on the similarities and differences in the experiences of each ethnic or racial group and in the structural accommodations of family systems to these experiences.     

Caregiver's Spirituality and Its Influence on Maintaining the Elderly and Disabled in a Home Environment

ABSTRACT

This study examined the role that faith-based organizations play for caregivers in maintaining the elderly and disabled in their homes. The study explored if persons who use religious beliefs and practices cope with caregiver stress better than those who do not use religious beliefs and practices. The study also explored the role of religious coping as a factor affecting decisions to institutionalize, and the role that faith-based practices and organizations play in helping caregivers maintain the elderly and disabled in their homes.     

Relationships across multiple settings: an overview

It is not the method of interaction but the quality of the interaction between patient and therapist, student and teacher, mentee and mentor, or youth and youth worker that is the most critical determinant of success in a myriad of fields.     

Threat and trauma: an overview

Common responses after exposure to threat include reexperiencing the event, intrusive thoughts and images, hyperarousal, avoidance and numbing, a sense of a foreshortened future, and shattered assumptions about control and safety.     

The social composition of the Communist nomenklatura: A comparison of Russia,Poland, and Hungary

Conclusion Reflecting, in conclusion, upon the significance of our inquiry into the social origins of the nomenklatura, we suggest that the main reason the term nomenklatura remains a loaded one in East European political discourse is that it raises the question of what the Communist period in East Europe meant, and what it might mean now. Was Communism an artificial break in the organic history of these societies, a history that now resumes? Or, were Communist institutions deeply embedded in the social logic of East European development in ways that mean the Communist legacy will endure into postcommunism? Our usage of the term upper class was calculated precisely to capture this notion of embeddedness. We argue that in some East European countries, most notably Russia, and probably Hungary as well, where the Communist elite became an organic component of the emerging social order as an upper class, it is not enough to ask if the Communistelites have reproduced or circulated. Whether an upper class existed, and to what degree, forms the class context of personnel changes: a lot of circulation at the individual level, for example, may mean nothing but the reproduction of privileges and advantages institutionalized during the Communist period via the upper class. Reproduction on the individual level, on the other hand, may indicate precisely the opposite; that an upper class did not form and therefore nomenklatura members were unable to enjoy such institutionalized mechanisms during the transition to postcommunism. To put it in the language of our introduction: to answer the question of whether the Communists are still in power, one has first to determine what kind of a social order Communism was in each country. It was these different social orders, comprising concrete groups and group identities, as distinct from the mechanisms of surplus allocation or the individuals who staffed them, which may have been left intact through the post-Communist transition.