Showing friendship,fighting back,and getting even: resisting bullying victimization within adolescent girls’ friendships

Research suggests that about a quarter of bullying incidences occur within friendships. Yet little attention is given to the underlying social processes and wider macro-system forces that shape friendship victimization experiences. Guided by constructivist grounded theory and Wade's work on resistance, this research explored the phenomenon of victimization within adolescent girls’ friendships. Canadian women reflecting on their school-based victimization experiences were interviewed for this study. Results suggest that participants resisted victimization in important ways but that their resistance strategies were negotiated within gender expectations and ambient discursive constructions of resistance and victimization. Our findings illuminate the ways that discourses concealing women's resistance and privileging overt responses to bullying run counter to gendered expectations for resistance, leaving women in a double bind. Consequently, we found that retaliatory relational aggression allowed girls to deny their victim status while complying with gendered expectations for resistance but led to their bullying experiences being normalized and overlooked.     

Narratives of the Future Affect Fertility: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment

European Journal of Population - In recent years, fertility rates have declined in most wealthy countries. This phenomenon has largely been explained by focusing on the rise of economic...     

Same job,different rewards: The gender pay gap among physicians in Italy

Women have made significant progress in the medical profession, but despite this trend towards equality, the gender pay gap persists. This study investigates the determinants of earning differentials among physicians in Italy. This analysis is based on a dataset of more than 1000 doctors working in five hospitals in the Lombardy region. Data were collected through an online survey with a response rate of 48.7 per cent. Women's concentration in the lower ranks of the career ladder, their lower propensity to work as private practitioners and their lower concentration in surgical specialties contribute to the gender income gap. Having children and a spouse or a cohabiting partner entails a premium on income for men, but no penalty for women, which suggests that positive discrimination towards fathers and husbands is stronger than negative discrimination towards mothers and wives. On the other hand, the gender gap associated with marital and parental status is stronger in public hospitals than in private hospitals, at least up to the second child. Once differences in characteristics are controlled, women earn 18 per cent less than men. This penalty should be ascribed to employer's discrimination and/or unobserved characteristics. These findings challenge the human capital perspective by calling for attention into the role of structural mechanisms in producing inequalities.     

Temporal aspects of increases in eye-neck activation levels during visually deficient near work

In an experimental study two levels of oculomotor load were induced via optical trial lenses. Trapezius muscle activity was measured with bipolar surface electromyography and normalized to a submaximal contraction. Sixty-six subjects with a median age of 36 (range 19-47, std 8) viewed a black and white Gabor grating (5 c/deg) for two 7-min periods monocularly through a 0 D lens or binocularly through -3.5 D lenses. The effect of time was separately regressed to EMG in two different subgroups of responders: a High-Oculomotor-Load (HOL) and a Low-Oculomotor-Load (LOL) group. A linear regression model was fitted on group level with exposure time on the x-axis and normalized trapezius muscle EMG (%RVE) on the y-axis. The slope coefficient was significantly positive in the -D blur condition for only the HOL subgroup of responders: 0.926 + Time(min 1-7) × 0.088 (p = 0.002, r(2)=0.865). There was no obvious sign of this activity to level off or to stabilize. These results suggest that professional information technology users that are exposed to a high level of oculomotor load, during extended times, are at an increased risk of exhibiting an increased trap.m. activity.     

Discrepancies in pain presentation caused by adverse psychosocial conditions as compared to pain due to high physical workload?

Disorders in the musculoskeletal system have been associated with a high physical workload as well as psychosocial and individual factors. It is however not obvious which of these factors that is most important to prevent. Musculoskeletal disorders in neck and upper extremity was assessed by interview and clinical examination in 79 teachers and 93 assisting nurses, all females. Psychosocial work environment was assessed by questionnaire. The physical workload was recorded by technical measurements of postures, movements and muscular load, in 9 teachers and 12 nurses. The physical workload was lower among the teachers, but they had a more demanding psychosocial work environment. Among the nurses, but not in the teachers, the neck-shoulder disorders were associated with a high body mass index (BMI). The teachers reported neck-shoulder complaints to a higher extent than the nurses, but had much lower prevalence of diagnoses in the clinical examination (12% vs. 25%; POR 0.3 CI 0.1 - 1.2; adjusted for age and BMI). The results suggest that adverse psychosocial conditions among the teachers give rise to a different kind of pain in the neck-shoulder region than from physical overload, troublesome but not as severe as the one afflicting the nurses.     

Using cognitive interviews to refine translated survey questions: an example from a cross-national crime survey

Lately, social researchers have become increasingly interested and involved in comparative and cross-national research. In part this reflects a growing realisation that key social, economic and political processes are not merely ‘domestic’ but are common across countries and cultures. Although numerous good quality data sets now exist (e.g. the European Social Survey or International Social Survey Programme), in many instances researchers need to design their own bespoke comparative surveys. Such surveys require careful design if they are to produce meaningful data. Herein we introduce, outline and report on one technique which may usefully be employed in order to design better survey items for use in cross-national surveys.     

Learning to gamble: early gambling experiences among young people in Denmark

This article presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal qualitative study of gambling among young people in Denmark. The longitudinal study is designed to capture the trajectories of young gamblers and to explore how social and cultural factors and processes impact on young people's gambling careers. The first stage of analysis places a special emphasis on young people's introduction to gambling and the social contexts of these early gambling experiences. Theoretically, this first study is guided by a symbolic interactionist approach. We conclude that early experiences with gambling are socially mediated and that significant social contexts such as the family and peer groups form important contexts of these early experiences. Our evidence suggest that becoming engaged in gambling is a social process involving a transfer of skills and knowledge in which novices learn how to play and to attribute specific meanings to gambling. Overall, our findings indicate that young people start gambling not because of purely individual characteristics or deviant motivations but through social processes within significant social networks. Implications for prevention and further research are briefly discussed.     

Bullying and Negotiated Identities: Perspectives of 7th and 8th Grade Girls

The aim of this study is to explore 40 Swedish 7th and 8th grade girls’ perspectives on bullying by listening to how they discuss and understand bullying. Pair and group interviews were conducted and analysed using grounded theory. Symbolic interactionism was used as a theoretical perspective focusing on social processes and interaction. The participants constructed bullying as an identity process involving gendered identities, victim identities and socially‐valuable identities where bullying was located within a gendered order. These identities were negotiated with the concept of self‐confidence, where the girls both aligned with and distanced themselves from the gendered order.     

Residence in the Social Ecology of Stress and Restoration

We relate residence to health within a social ecological model of stress and restoration. As an isolated setting and in relation to other everyday settings, we discuss the residence in terms of demands, coping resources and responses, and opportunities for restoration. Our model indicates how processes operating above the household level can affect health by modifying the quantity, quality, and distribution of demands, resources, and restoration opportunities within and across the settings of everyday life, including the residence. We illustrate some of these social ecological dynamics with the case of home-based telework. Concluding, we discuss the utility of the model for environmental interventions intended to alleviate health-threatening chronic stress .