LGBT Family Lawyers and Same-Sex Marriage Recognition: How Legal Change Shapes Professional Identity and Practice

ABSTRACT

Lawyers who practice family law for LGBT clients are key players in the tenuous and evolving legal environment surrounding same-sex marriage recognition. Building on prior research on factors shaping the professional identities of lawyers generally, and activist lawyers specifically, I examine how practice within a rapidly changing, patchwork legal environment shapes professional identity for this group of lawyers. I draw on interviews with 21 LGBT family lawyers to analyze how the unique features of LGBT family law shape their professional identities and practice, as well as their predictions about the development of the practice in a post-Obergefell world. Findings reveal that the professional identities and practice of LGBT family lawyers are shaped by uncertainty, characteristics of activist lawyering, community membership, and community service. Individual motivations and institutional forces work to generate a professional identity that is resilient and dynamic, characterized by skepticism and distrust coupled with flexibility and creativity. These features are likely to play a role in the evolution of the LGBT family lawyer professional identity post-marriage equality.     

Validation of the Australian Midwifery Standards Assessment Tool (AMSAT): A tool to assess midwifery competence

Background

There is no current validated clinical assessment tool to measure the attainment of midwifery student competence in the midwifery practice setting. The lack of a valid assessment tool has led to a proliferation of tools and inconsistency in assessment of, and feedback on student learning.

Underestimating Protection and Overestimating Risk: Examining Descriptive Normative Perceptions and Their Association with Drinking and Sexual Behaviors

Individuals who engage in risky sexual behavior face the possibility of experiencing negative consequences. One tenet of social learning theory is that individuals engage in behaviors partly based on observations or perceptions of others’ engagement in those behaviors. The present study aimed to document these norms–behavior relationships for both risky and protective sexual behaviors, including alcohol-related sexual behavior. Gender was also examined as a possible moderator of the norms–behavior relationship. Undergraduate students (n = 759; 58.0% female) completed a Web-based survey, including various measures of drinking and sexual behavior. Results indicated that students underestimate sexual health-protective behaviors (e.g., condom use and birth control use) and overestimate the risky behaviors (e.g., frequency of drinking prior to sex, typical number of drinks prior to sex, and frequency of casual sex) of their same-sex peers. All norms were positively associated with behavior, with the exception of condom use. Furthermore, no gender differences were found when examining the relationship between normative perceptions and behavior. The present study adds to the existing literature on normative misperceptions as it indicates that college students overestimate risky sexual behavior while underestimating sexual health-protective behaviors. Implications for interventions using the social norm approach and future directions are discussed.     

From the Mouths of Mothers: Can Drama Facilitate Reflective Learning for Social Workers?

This article explores and evaluates a cross-disciplinary small-scale project using applied theatre in social work education. The aim was to provide an ‘Affective Encounter’ where students could practice empathic engagement, understanding of the needs of children who have been sexually abused and their protective parents/carers and engage in the complexities of working with family members who may be resistant. The workshop took place five times over a period of three years and was attended by children and families social workers on a one year post-qualifying graduate diploma course. While the use of verbatim theatre does not offer a guarantee of factual truth, it provided the students with some performed moments of personal testimony which was taken word-for-word from mothers whose children had been sexually abused. This allowed the social workers to hear the marginalised narratives of the protective mothers and to practice without a negative impact on the service user. The evaluation identified from self-report the development of emotional and practical skills and knowledge of available resources. This paper focuses on the emotional skills reported and two emerging themes are discussed: learning for humane practice, and the use of this pedagogical approach to encourage affective reflection.     

Do “Clicker” Educational Sessions Enhance the Effectiveness of a Social Norms Marketing Campaign?

Abstract

Objective: Social norms campaigns are a cost-effective way to reduce high-risk drinking on college campuses. This study compares effectiveness of a “standard” social norms media (SNM) campaign for those with and without exposure to additional educational sessions using audience response technology (“clickers”). Methods: American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment questions are used to evaluate actual and perceived use. Additional survey questions assess individual exposure to the interventions. Results: The authors find “clicker” technology to be more effective than social norms poster media alone in reducing misperceptions of normative alcohol use for those students who attended clicker sessions. Conclusion: Poster SNM campaigns may be most effective when supported by group “clicker” heath-related sessions.     

Girls’ “New Femininity” Refusals and “Good Girl” Recuperations in Soap Talk

The “new femininities” produced in postfeminist media confront girls with complex and challenging subjectivities that reach into the spaces where girls engage in their own productions of self. Feminist scholarship has interrogated and critiqued the “girl” produced in postfeminist popular culture texts, highlighting her internal contradictions and often problematic re/production within the heterosexual matrix. Yet, despite an intensified focus on girls featured in popular culture, the ways that girls themselves make sense of the “girl” in contemporary femininity texts has been relatively neglected. Viewing girls' sense-making of femininity in popular culture texts as crucial in the process of their subjectivity or self-production, in this paper we examine pre-teen girls' negotiations of femininity through their talk about Scarlett, a main teen girl character in a New Zealand soap drama. Our analyses and discussion focus on girls' management of the contradictory and regulatory productions of femininity in the text, in particular the often classed conditions under which girls recuperate the “good girl” discourse to refuse the regulatory femininities inside the heterosexual matrix. We suggest that an absence of empowering discourses outside of postfeminism's sexual empowerment limits girls' resources for critiquing and challenging regulatory femininities, “new” and “traditional.”     

Sexuality and the dual‐earner couple,part II: Beyond the baby years

This article reports results from two data sets testing predictions that a couple's sexual relationship suffers if the wife is employed, particularly if she is employed full time or high full time. A multiple‐theory framework was used, fusing the scarcity hypothesis, the enhancement hypothesis, and identity theory. The last suggests that an important individual difference variable, spouse role salience, should be related to a couples sexual functioning. In Study 1, data from the National Health and Social Life Survey were analyzed, focusing on 1,744 married persons. No significant differences in sexuality were found between women employed part, full, or high full time, nor between men employed full or high full time. In Study 2, data from the Wisconsin Maternity Leave and Health project were analyzed, focusing on 261 couples when they had a 4.5‐year‐old child. There were no differences between homemakers and women employed part, full, or high full time for several measures of sexual functioning. Neither were there differences between husbands employed full and high full time. More important were individual differences in spouse role salience.