Work and Family in the 1990s

This review highlights four themes emerging from the work and family literature of the 1990s. The first theme evolves from the historical legacy of the maternal employment literature with its focus on children's well‐being. The second theme, work socialization, is based on the premise that occupational conditions, such as autonomy and complexity, shape the values of workers who in turn generalize these lessons off the job. Research on work stress, the third theme, explores how experiences of short‐ and long‐term stress at work make their mark on workers' behavior and well‐being off the job. Finally, the multiple roles literature focuses on how individuals balance roles, such as parent, spouse, and worker, and the consequences for health and family relationships. In addition to these four major themes, advances in work and family policy initiatives over the past decade are discussed. Suggestions for future research focus on addressing issues of causality, attending to the complexity of social contexts, linking research to policy, and developing interdisciplinary theories and research designs.     

Parental Job Experiences and Children's Well-Being: The Case of Two-Parent and Single-Mother Working-Class Families

The aim of this study is to examine how two types of working-class families, two-parent and single-mother, serve as distinct contexts within which the connections between parental employment and child well-being may differ. Data from 50 dual-earner families and 52 employed single-mother families were obtained through in-home interviews. Parents provided assessments of their work experiences and ratings of their psychological well-being, and their school-age children completed questionnaires concerning their psychological well-being. In dual-earner families, results revealed that fathers' positive work experiences were related to daughters' positive evaluations of their internalized well-being. For dual-earner mothers, however, more positive work environments were related to daughters' reports of lower well-being. Finally, single mothers' more positive evaluations of their work environments were linked to sons' reports of greater restraint of aggressive tendencies. Further analyses that attempted to examine the role of parental well-being as a mediator of the relationship between job and child well-being yielded few results. The importance of examining work-family processes as they vary by social context and characteristics of the person is discussed.     

Beyond a dyadic approach to public diplomacy: Understanding relationships in multipolar world

This study advocates for a multipolar approach to public diplomacy within a public relations framework. This study applies semantic network analysis to understand Chinese public diplomacy efforts during the 2011 Libya crisis. Two theories, image building and relationship management, informed the analysis. Four important findings emerged from the analysis. First, the evidence suggests that the combination of image building and relationship management provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to understand public diplomacy communication efforts. Second, understanding triads of national relationships reveals nuances that cannot be captured by a dyadic approach to public diplomacy. Third, this study introduces a new method, semantic network analysis, to the research of public diplomacy, and reveals linguistic relationships and shared meaning manifested in the content of People's Daily newspaper coverage of the Libya crisis. Finally, the findings support the pervasiveness of multipolar thinking. Public diplomacy in general, and soft balancing specifically, is about positioning a nation in a wider context and strategically using relationships to accomplish foreign policy goals.     

"Flying by the seat of our pants": current processes to share best practices to deal with elder abuse

We examined current processes used to identify, communicate, and adopt "best practices" in the field of elder abuse using an iterative process involving literature and Internet reviews, surveys completed by stakeholders, and key informant interviews. Results indicate minimal research evidence exists to support current assessment and intervention strategies; there is an immediate need for more evaluation and research in this area and for improved knowledge exchange and translation. Two strategic directions are recommended: to (a) build capacity for research and program evaluation to advance knowledge of effective practices, and (b) build capacity for knowledge exchange to enhance professionals' efforts.     

Tools from moral psychology for measuring personal moral culture

Moral culture can mean many things, but two major elements are a concern with moral goods and moral prohibitions. Moral psychologists have developed instruments for assessing both of these and such measures can be directly imported by sociologists. Work by Schwartz and his colleagues on values offers a well-established way of measuring moral goods, while researchers using Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory have developed validated measures of moral prohibitions. Both values and moral foundations are distributed across the social landscape in systematic, sociologically interesting ways. Although typically measured using questionnaires, we show that values and moral foundations also can be used to analyze interview, archival, or “big data.” Combining psychological and sociological tools and frameworks promises to clarify relations among existing sociological treatments of moral culture and to connect such treatments to a thriving conversation in moral psychology.     

Dialogic Engagement: Clarifying Foundational Concepts

The principle of engagement underlies much of the relational and organization–public communication research. Unfortunately, the principle of engagement suffers from a lack of clarity in the public relations literature. Use of the term engagement varies widely. This article clarifies the principle of engagement by positioning it within dialogue theory. We posit a conceptualization of engagement as: Engagement is part of dialogue and through engagement, organizations and publics can make decisions that create social capital. Engagement is both an orientation that influences interactions and the approach that guides the process of interactions among groups.     

Comparative analysis of aging policy reforms in Argentina,Chile, Costa Rica,and Mexico

This investigation uses case studies and comparative analysis to review and analyze aging policy in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico and uncovers similarities and relevant trends in the substance of historical and current aging policy across countries. Initial charity-based approaches to poverty and illness have been gradually replaced by a rights-based approach considering broader notions of well-being, and recent reforms emphasize the need for national, intersectoral, evidence-based policy. The results of this study have implications for understanding aging policy in Latin America from a welfare regime and policy makers’ perspective, identifying priorities for intervention and informing policy reforms in developing countries worldwide.     

Public relations channel “repertoires”: Exploring patterns of channel use in practice

While public relations practitioners may use any number of channels to accomplish organizational objectives, research has focused on the use of single communication channels in isolation from other available channels. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify the common combinations of channels or “channel repertoires” that practitioners use to reach their publics. Analyses of survey data (N = 504) of practitioners from five countries revealed four distinct patterns or repertoires of channels. The results also indicated that many public relations functions predict the use of certain repertoires, and explained which functions of public relations use more channels than others. The findings have implications for theory building, practice, and pedagogy on planning and engagement with publics.