Back to Normal: Gender and Disaster

Our earlier studies of Hurricane Andrew focused on the destruction of everyday life during the crisis itself and the reconstruction of a taken-for-granted world during the recovery period; this paper examines the significance of gender in these processes. The abrupt loss of taken-for-granted reality occasioned by the storm involved only a slight and momentary disruption of gender roles. The resilience of these roles can be understood only if gender is seen as a property of social organization that shapes not only interactional expectations and pressures, but also cultural and institutional processes, as well as bodily experiences.     

The therapeutic value of women's adult friendships

Abstract

In 1980, thirty‐five years after the end of World War II, the long‐term impact of war‐trauma on individuals’ lives led to concern about Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder. While the focus here is not on “disorders,” it is on interactive patterns of “defensive” caretaking behaviors which contribute to intergenerational transmission of anxiety, silence and losses related to the Holocaust. In this long‐term group, defensive caretaking patterns are conceptualized as second‐generation behaviors which focus on parental needs thereby avoiding addressing second‐generation vulnerabilities. Relevant concepts of Sullivan, Winnicott, Bion and Fairbairn are applied. In an innovative trauma group design, defensive caretaking patterns are illustrated through clinical examples and interventions by the therapist as a “validating object” work to mitigate transmission to still the next generation.     

Audiovisual Correlates of Interrogativity: A Comparative Analysis of Catalan and Dutch

Languages employ different strategies to mark an utterance as a polar (yes–no) question, including syntax, intonation and gestures. This study analyzes the production and perception of information-seeking questions and broad focus statements in Dutch and Catalan. These languages use intonation for marking questionhood, but Dutch also exploits syntactic variation for this purpose. A production task revealed the expected language-specific auditory differences, but also showed that gaze and eyebrow-raising are used in this distinction. A follow-up perception experiment revealed that perceivers relied greatly on auditory information in determining whether an utterance is a question or a statement, but accuracy was further enhanced when visual information was added. Finally, the study demonstrates that the concentration of several response-mobilizing cues in a sentence is positively correlated with the perceivers’ ratings of these utterances as interrogatives.     

Community standards,conservatism, and judgments of pornography

In an attempt to determine if a community standard existed and to relate judgments of pornography to conservatism, scores on Wilson and Patterson's Conservatism Scale, yes‐no judgments on whether 25 pictures were or were not pornographic, and demographic data were obtained from a random sample (N = 114) of a community. Results were as follows: (1) suggestive evidence for the existence of a community standard; (2) the c‐scale correlated .57 (N = 114, p < .01) with number of pictures judged pornographic; (3) the 25 pictures met Guttman requirements of unidimensionality (reproducibility of .925); and (4) factor analysis of the pornography judgments yielded three clear‐cut factors and one ambiguous factor which were ordered along the Guttman dimension.     

Incest: Self‐report findings from a nonclinical sample

Self‐reports of incest experiences from a nonpatient, nonoffender sample of 100 individuals are described. The purpose is to document the wide range of incest types by correlating the negative‐to‐positive perceived outcome of the experience with sex, age, exploitation, and guilt. A 23‐item questionnaire was administered to respondents contacted through nationally circulated classified advertisements. Respondents, were categorized as perpetrators, victims, and consenting participants. Incestuous experiences with age peers, adult or child, constitute 42% of the accounts. Of the cross‐generational reports, 33% are from adult males describing incest with children, and 63% are from adults retrospectively describing childhood incest with adult males. Both exploitative and nonexploitative experiences are perceived by some respondents as negative and by others as positive. There was no correlation between positive‐to‐negative outcome and type of erotic activity, consanguinity, or sexual orientation.     

The Impact of Different Kinds of Neighborhood Involvement on Residents' Overall Evaluations of Their Neighborhoods

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relative impact of different kinds of social participation on an individual's sentiment toward his or her neighborhood. Three kinds of neighborhood participation are considered: (1) informal social participation; (2) involvement in formal neighborhood voluntary associations; and (3) use of neighborhood services. Survey data on nine moderate income neighborhoods with various racial mixes are employed in the analysis. The results of the regression analysis indicate that informal social participation and use of neighborhood services are positively associated with overall sentiment toward the neighborhood, whereas involvement in formal neighborhood voluntary associations has no relationship to the dependent variable. The implications of these findings for policy-making concerned with neighborhood maintenance and revitalization are discussed.     

Social work: 'The appliance of social science' - a cautionary tale

With the expectation that research be relevant to users and that teaching ensures that graduateness involves teaching people to be fit for a purpose, social sciences in British universities are being encouraged to interact with employers, politicians and policy makers. This paper was presented at an ALSISS/ESRC1 conference on Interactive Social Sciences and argues that social work educators have a great deal to teach their colleague academics about interactivity, but that that very interactivity has led to their place in the academy being placed under threat.