Processes of Sexual Orientation Questioning among Heterosexual Women

Because very little is known about heterosexual identity development, this study assesses and describes sexual orientation questioning processes of heterosexual-identified women and offers a comparison of these processes with those employed by their sexual-minority counterparts. Participants included 333 female college students (ages 18–23; M = 19.2): 228 participants primarily identified as “exclusively straight/heterosexual,” and 105 participants indicated a sexual-minority identity. Sixty-seven percent of exclusively heterosexual respondents (n = 154) indicated having thought about or questioned their sexual orientation. The processes by which heterosexual participants described questioning their sexual orientation were coded for the presence of five emergent categories using an inductive thematic coding methodology. These five categories included unelaborated questioning (19%), other-sex experiences (16%), exposure to sexual minorities (26%), assessment of same-sex attraction (48%), and evaluations of same-sex behavior (26%). Several unifying and differentiating themes emerged between sexual orientation groups. Results from this study suggest that contemporary young women's heterosexuality is not necessarily an unexamined identity; indeed, the large majority of young women in this sample were deliberately identifying as heterosexual after contemplating alternative possibilities.     

A review essay: Reconstruction compared to what?

When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self‐Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867. Dan Carter. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1985. 275pp. £15.55.

Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877. Ted Tunnell. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1984. 252pp. $25.00.     

Bullying in secondary schools: through a discursive lens

Abstract

This paper analyses students’ constructions of bullying from a social constructionist perspective. Interviews were conducted with 24 students at a small semi-rural secondary school in New Zealand. These were taped, transcribed and a discourse analysis, informed by the work of Foucault, was carried out. It was found that students made sense of bullying by drawing on constructions that included bullying as a consequence of differences and as a form of discipline. These constructions had the effect of legitimizing the school's institutional power imbalance. This was supported by students and teachers who both played an active role in simultaneously enforcing, and being subjected to, the disciplinary technologies of normalization characterized by bullying. The goal of this research is to provide a critical focus to the political nature, power relations and ideological effects of these prevailing discourses that function to both create and support bullying behaviour in our schools.     

Weaving cohesive identities: New Zealand women talk as mothers and workers

Abstract

This exploratory study examines the discourses which construct women as mothers and workers and explores the strategies the women use to weave these sometimes contradictory identities together. Discourse analysis was used to explore the talk of two focus groups of first‐time mothers, all New Zealanders of European descent in stable heterosexual partnerships with babies aged less than six months. The women deployed an intensive mother discourse which privileged their maternal role and positioned the babies as needing parental care and mothers as the natural providers of that care. However, they also felt the pressure of successful woman and economic rationalist discourses in which paid work is essential to wellbeing and good citizenship while motherhood is devalued. The women's decisions about re‐entering the paid workforce were characterised by conflict and constraint. The analysis focuses on the strategies of resistance that the women used to warrant their life choices, including constructing motherhood as a job, and deploying an independent mother discourse which serves to facilitate their striving for the best of both worlds. Also explored are some of the structural barriers that serve to further limit women's choices.     

A Cognitive–Social Model of Fertility Intentions

We examine the use and value of fertility intentions against the backdrop of theory and research in the cognitive and social sciences. First, we draw on recent brain and cognition research to contextualize fertility intentions within a broader set of conscious and unconscious mechanisms that contribute to mental function. Next, we integrate this research with social theory. Our conceptualizations suggest that people do not necessarily have fertility intentions; they form them only when prompted by specific situations. Intention formation draws on the current situation and on schemas of childbearing and parenthood learned through previous experience, imbued by affect, and organized by self‐representation. Using this conceptualization, we review apparently discordant knowledge about the value of fertility intentions in predicting fertility. Our analysis extends and deepens existing explanations for the weak predictive validity of fertility intentions at the individual level and provides a social‐cognitive explanation for why intentions predict as well as they do. When focusing on the predictive power of intentions at the aggregate level, our conceptualizations lead us to focus on how social structures frustrate or facilitate intentions and how the structural environment contributes to the formation of reported intentions in the first place. Our analysis suggests that existing measures of fertility intentions are useful but to varying extents and in many cases despite their failure to capture what they seek to measure.     

Do Cross-National Differences in the Costs of Children Generate Cross-National Differences in Fertility Rates?

Parity-specific probabilities of having a next birth are estimated from national fertility data and are compared with nation-specific costs of having children as measured by time-budget data, by attitude data from the International Social Survey Program, and by panel data on labor earnings and standard of living changes following a birth. We focus on five countries (the United States, the former West Germany, Denmark, Italy, and the United Kingdom), whose fertility rates span the observed fertility range in the contemporary industrialized world and whose social welfare and family policies span the conceptual space of standard welfare-state typologies. Definitive conclusions are difficult because of the multiple dimensions on which child costs can be measured, the possibility that child costs affect both the quantum and the tempo of fertility, the relatively small fertility differences across industrialized nations, and the inherent small-N problem resulting from nation-level comparisons. Empirical analysis, however, supports the assertion that institutionally driven child costs affect the fertility patterns of industrialized nations.     

Muslim and Non‐Muslim Differences in Female Autonomy and Fertility: Evidence from Four Asian Countries

On the basis of research on paired Muslim and non‐Muslim communities selected in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, the authors test the hypothesis that greater observed Muslim pronatalism can be explained by less power or lower autonomy among Muslim women. Indeed, wives in the Muslim communities, compared to the non‐Muslim ones: 1) had more children, 2) were more likely to desire additional children, and 3) if they desired no more children, were less likely to be using contraception. However, the authors do not find that Muslim communities consistently score lower on dimensions of women's power/autonomy. Thus, aggregate‐level comparisons provide little evidence of a relationship between lower autonomy and higher fertility. Individual‐level multivariate analysis of married women in these paired settings similarly suggests that women's autonomy differentials do not account for the higher fertility, demand for more children, and less use of contraception among Muslim wives. These results suggest that explanations for Muslim/non‐Muslim fertility differences lie elsewhere.     

African-American marriage in 1910: Beneath the surface of census data

This paper examines the quality of information about marital status, marital duration, and marriage order among African-American women in the U.S. Census of 1910. It compares the reported prevalence of widowhood to estimates of widowhood based on the mortality of black men and on the ages of women at first marriage. It also compares the reported distributions of duration of first marriage to estimates based on mortality and on age at first marriage. It concludes that census reports are subject to serious error. Widowhood is overreported, and marital turnover appears to have been faster than implied by census reports. The prevalance of "own children" is used to confirm these conclusions and to suggest motivations for misreporting.     

Parity-specific fertility intentions and uncertainty: the United States, 1970 to 1976

A theoretical and analytic model of fertility intentions is proposed which treats “don’t know” responses and other uncertain responses as distinct from more firm intentions. Methodologically, these analyses show that “don’t know” responses need not be treated as missing data, but instead are both valid and meaningful responses. Furthermore, eliminating these uncertain respondents would have the negative effects of distorting across survey comparisons in intentions due to shifts in aggregate uncertainty, reducing the likelihood of accurately detecting shifts in fertility intentions, and lessening the representatives of the sample analyzed. Substantively, in conjunction with Morgan (1981), these results show that the sharp 1965–76 decline in the likelihood of intending more births at parities 2 through 5 occurred as women halted childbearing at minimal acceptable levels and postponed further childbearing. With time (or age), this delayed fertility became fertility about which the respondent was uncertain and, finally, fertility foregone. Since 1970, similar shifts are observed at parities 0 and 1, perhaps foreshadowing an increase in voluntary childlessness and one-child families.