Premarital sexual standards of rural youth

Abstract

This study measures and evaluates the premarital sexual standards of a sample of adolescents residing in a small Mississippi community. On the basis of their response patterns to a set of Guttman scale items, the students were classified into three standards: abstinence, double standard, and the single standard of permissiveness. A racial comparison of the Mississippi sample with Reiss' Virginia student sample revealed striking similarities with one exception—a significantly higher proportion of Mississippi whites endorsed permissiveness without affection. The Mississippi data, however, failed to give strong support to the presumed prevalence of the double standard. Moreover, several social factors examined appeared to influence the standards of whites and females to a greater extent than those of Negroes and males.     

Responsible Entry into the Profession—Some Current Issues

The community organization component of social work education has had a varying history—sometimes viewed as a vigorous and integral part of social work training, and sometimes treated as only marginal. Recently the trend has been toward a relatively minimal presence. In the face of this, the School of Social Administration at Temple University has revitalized and expanded its community organization sequence. This paper describes that process and develops the analysis and perspective on which it is based. The specific programmatic development is located within a broader assessment of the nature and role of community organization in social work in the 1980s.     

Resilience of Families Living in Poverty

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that community social workers reflect the established literature on family resilience. This exploratory study involved semistructured group interviews with community social workers from an urban agency that serves families who are poor. The analysis was completed by comparing Walsh's “Key Processes in Family Resilience” with the responses from the participants in the group interviews. Specifically, Walsh (2002 Walsh , F. ( 2002 ). A family resilience framework: Innovative practice approaches . Family Relations , 51 ( 2 ), 130 – 137 .[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) identifies three domains of resilient families, including belief systems, organizational patterns, and communication processes. These were used as reference points for comparison. The interviews with the community social workers revealed a connection between using positive beliefs, thinking, and taking action steps that define a resilient family. This only becomes possible in the context of supportive internal family relations and external community connections. While the community social workers affirm elements of the established models of family resilience, they also emphasized its dynamic nature as the interplay of positive family beliefs combined with action steps and support from the community.     

Hidden school dropout among immigrant students: a cross-sectional study

Actual school dropout among immigrant youth has been addressed in a number of studies, but research on hidden school dropout among immigrant students is rare. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze hidden school dropout among primary school students with an immigrant background. The analyses were performed using survey data of 1186 immigrant students in Swiss primary schools. Our results show that immigrant students’ academic achievement, their attitudes towards school-related values, and the quality of their relationships with classmates and teachers were significant predictors of their disengagement during classes. Moreover, our findings strongly suggest that those predictors that are important for actual school dropout are crucial for hidden school dropout as well. We conclude that low-achieving immigrant youth who do not value school and who have poor relationships with teachers and peers are especially at risk of hidden and, eventually, of actual school dropout.     

The Detrimental Side Effects of Minimum Wage Laws

The adverse effects of minimum wage legislation demonstrate how a government policy presumably intended to help people worst off in society can actually end up causing far more harm than good. In this case, the victims are unskilled laborers. By making it illegal for employers to pay unskilled workers wages equal to their marginal revenue productivity, it causes unemployment for all workers whose productivity happens to be below the minimum wage. It also widens the wage gap between whites and minorities because there are disproportionate numbers of unskilled and uneducated minorities compared with whites.     

The Role of Empathy in Improving Intergroup Relations

This article analyzes the role that empathy can play in improving intergroup relations. Three types of empathy are defined: cognitive empathy and twotypes of emotional empathy, reactive and parallel. Research indicating that empathy causes prosocial behavior is reviewed, along with studies indicating that training can be used to increase levels of empathic skills. Intergroup relations programs that employ empathy are also reviewed. Studies of the effects of empathizing with outgroup members on prejudice are discussed, andseveral processes by which empathy may mediate changes in prejudice are presented (e.g., reducing perceived dissimilarity and anxiety concerning the outgroup) and cognitive dissonance. The ways in which empathy can be introduced into intergroup relations programs are discussed, along with a series of recommendations for its implementation.     

From cathedral to supermarket: mourning, silence and solidarity1

Where do mobile, individualistic members of modem Britain spontaneously congregate, eg, for public mourning, atid what does this tell us about the construction of solidarity and a sense of society? Where flowers were laid atid books of condoletice provided after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 provides a case study. A survey of 147 cities, towns and villages found that churches were important in cities and villages, but elsewhere, town halls, war memorials, shops and public buildings provided the magnets to bring people together. The role of war memorials and supermarkets is then examined in an analysis of the 1995 revival of the 11th November silence for the war dead. This indicates a) the payoff for companies in showing that they care, b) the impori;ance of practical logistics of space and time. In a plural and secular society, ritual ‘words against death’ become ‘silences against death.’ These congregations of contemporary nomads may not be full‐blown Durkheimian rites, but they are a representation of existing society at the same time as representing popular hope for a better society.     

A Transactional Model of Temperamental Development: Evidence of a Relationship between Child Temperament and Maternal Stress over Five Years

Although there is growing consensus that parental stress is a risk factor in child development, longitudinal studies of its effects are few. This study tested a sample of 231 mother–child dyads in terms of whether the relations between the global experience of stress in mothers (perceived stress scale) and child temperamental characteristics (infant behavior questionnaire and child behavior questionnaire) could be conceptualized through transactional models of development. The assumption was that higher negative emotionality and lower positive affectivity in the infants would contribute to an increase in maternal stress over a five‐year period, beginning in infancy, and that higher maternal stress would contribute to an increase in child negative affectivity and a decrease in positive affectivity and self‐regulation over the same period. Evidence was found for both hypotheses, but not within the same models: the effect of maternal stress on child temperamental development was greater. The results are discussed with reference to bidirectional models of temperamental development.     

Die Forschungsleistung der Soziologie an zehn deutschen Universitäten

Der Artikel stellt eine Methodik zur Bildung von bibliometrischen Ma?zahlen vor, mit denen sich die Forschungsleistung von Autoren, Institutionen, F?chern und F?chergruppen darstellen l?sst. Basierend auf den im SSCI erfassten wissenschaftlichen Artikeln, den Impaktfaktoren der Zeitschriften, in denen sie erschienen sind, sowie der H?ufigkeit, mit der die Artikel innerhalb der Zeitschriften des SSCI zitiert werden, beschreiben absolute und relative Publikations- und Zitationsma?e anschlie?end die Publikationsleistung der soziologischen Institute im Vergleich zu den anderen gro?en wirtschafts- und sozial-wissenschaftlichen F?chern Politologie, Betriebswirtschaftslehre und Volkswirtschaftslehre. An insgesamt zehn deutschen Hochschulen liegt die Soziologie bei der absoluten Zahl der Ver?ffentlichungen und Zitationen zwischen 1993 und 2002 weit hinter der Volkswirtschaftslehre, holt unter Berücksichtigung des eingesetzten Personals jedoch auf. Eine zweite Analyse vergleicht die Forschungsleistung der Institute für Soziologie an den zehn Standorten. Bei allen absoluten Ma?zahlen liegt die Universit?t Mannheim vorn. Unter Berücksichtigung der eingesetzten Mittel zeigt sich, dass die Soziologen der LMU München und der Universit?t zu K?ln qualitativ und quantitativ am produktivsten forschen und auch kleine Institute unter Effizienzgesichtspunkten wettbewerbsf?hig sind.