THE STRUCTURE OF SEPARATED WOMEN'S COMMUNICATION WITH THEIR NONPROFESSIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL NETWORKS

This study assessed separated women's communication with their social network members—family, friends, clergy, attorneys and therapists. Women and their social network members were asked about the frequency and timing of their communication pre- and post-separation. Of particular interest to therapists is the finding that women seem to communicate with therapists before they begin to seriously think about separating and after they have made the decision, but not during the decision-making process. Implications of this finding are discussed.     

Women with disabilities making the transition back to work: Psychosocial barriers and interventions

The economic impact of disability on employment, earnings, and education appears to be more devastating for women than for men. Women with disabilities who are making the transition either back into the workforce or into the workforce for the first time often face barriers that are unique to this population. Many researchers have described women with disabilities as having a "double disadvantage" that results in social and psychological barriers to their transition back to work. The purpose of this article is to help vocational and career development programs better address the psychosocial needs of women with disabilities by (a) describing key psychosocial barriers faced by women with disabilities in their transition back to work and (b) providing career development strategies designed to ease this transition process for women with disabilities and enhance their employment outcomes.     

Emotion work and emotion rules: The case of exams

Arlie Hochschild has shown that there is a set of rules governing most life situations concerning the emotions that people involved in these situations should experience, and particularly the optimum pitch at which these emotions should be expressed. She shows further that people who experience emotions at a pitch lower than the optimum or higher, do work to come up to the optimum or down to it as the case may be. The fact that some people in the same situation, experience emotions at a pitch higher than the optimum and others lower calls for an explanation. Symbolic interactionists suggest that the level of the pitch experienced by the person is a function of the extent to which self is at risk. Where the person perceives his/her self concept to be at great risk, the emotional pitch experienced will be likely to be higher than the optimum expected in the situation. Conversely, where the person perceives little risk to his/her self concept, the emotional pitch is likely to be lower than the optimum. The focus of the paper is on the work done by students at examination times to cope with over anxiety (i.e. higher than optimum pitch) or, sometimes, what they perceive as an abnormal lack of anxiety in themselves (i.e. lower than optimum pitch). A great number of cases will be described and classified in an attempt to formulate generalizations concerning strategies that may be applied, not merely to the examination situation, but to the wider universe of emotional situations. Hypotheses are also offered to explain why more of the emotion work done is in the direction of suppressing over anxiety rather than the opposite.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1987 Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Annual Meetings, McMaster University. We thank D. Rennie and R. Clifton, the editors and anonymous reviewers forQualitative Sociology for their insightful comments and suggestions.     

Act Your Age

With the aim of contributing to a sociology of age, this essay develops a framework for understanding age as accomplished, i.e., as something that is both a process and the outcome of ongoing interactional work. The common expression act your age provides the useful metaphor of performance. We perform our own age constantly, but we also give meaning to other ages and to age more generally in our actions and interactions, our beliefs and words and feelings, our social policies. This essay offers two routes to the conclusion that age is accomplished. The first involves drawing parallels between the study of age and the study of gender. The second route uses existing scholarship, which recognizes that age is far more social than chronological. I draw on work in the social constructionist, symbolic interactionist, and life course traditions to develop the framework of age-as-accomplished and to show its potential to organize much of what we already have learned about age and aging.     

Listening to seniors: successful approaches to data collection and program development

This paper provides guidelines for high quality data collection with community-residing older adults with illustrations drawn from the authors' practice. A mixed-method approach is described as a means to obtain the highest quality information from the sample. This approach combines focus groups and interviews along with mailed, closed-ended surveys to access both the "depth" of the seniors' responses as well as the "breadth" of responses; that is, the qualitative aspects provide the opportunity to identify and define relevant issues in the voices of respondents, while mailed surveys provide the kind of coverage necessary to make accurate predictions to the larger population of community-residing seniors.     

Optimal Acquisition of FMS Technology Subject to Technological Progress*

In order to gain competitive advantage, a firm must link its technology choice to its total manufacturing strategy and business unit's goals. A dynamic model is presented to examine the strategic decision concerning the acquisition of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) technology. A major contribution of this model is its ability to capture the strategic benefits of FMS with respect to economies of scope and technological progress. Decisions such as the timing and size of new technology acquisition and the scrapping of conventional capacity are explored as a firm plans for the upgrading of its facility to meet future dynamic strategic goals. This model may be used to assist with strategic planning because it identifies the critical relationships and trade-offs between various exogenous forces (such as market growth or decay, the cost of acquiring flexible manufacturing systems, and the rate of technological progress) and the decision variables considered.     

The Creation of Output and Quality in Services: A Framework to Analyze Information Technology‐Worker Systems

Information technology has profoundly impacted the operations of firms in the service industry and service environments within manufacturing. Two models are introduced that establish a conceptual framework linking firm profit to attributes of the IT‐worker system. The framework considers the impact of IT capabilities (such as functionality and ease‐of‐use) and worker skill as drivers of output volume and quality. The framework contrasts attributes of the IT‐worker systems when services are mass‐produced (flow shop) versus customized (job shop). Mathematical models are introduced to formalize the conceptual framework. Numerical examples are presented that illustrate the types of insights that can be obtained from the models.     

A Preliminary Study of the Neural Correlates of the Intensities of Self-Reported Gambling Urges and Emotions in Men with Pathological Gambling

Although self-reported gambling urge intensities have clinical utility in the treatment of pathological gambling (PG), prior studies have not investigated their neural correlates. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted while 10 men with PG and 11 control comparison (CON) men viewed videotaped scenarios of gambling, happy or sad content. Participants rated the intensity of their emotions and motivations and reported the qualities of their responses. Relative to the CON group, the PG group reported similar responses to sad and happy scenarios, but stronger emotional responses and gambling urges when viewing the gambling scenarios. Correlations between self-reported responses and brain activations were typically strongest during the period of reported onset of emotional/motivational response and more robust in PG than in CON subjects for all conditions. During this epoch, corresponding with conscious awareness of an emotional/motivational response, subjective ratings of gambling urges in the PG group were negatively correlated with medial prefrontal cortex activation and positively correlated with middle temporal gyrus and temporal pole activations. Sadness ratings in the PG group correlated positively with activation of the medial orbitofrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and retrosplenial cortex, while self-reported happiness during the happy videos demonstrated largely inverse correlations with activations in the temporal poles. Brain areas identified in the PG subjects have been implicated in explicit, self-referential processing and episodic memory. The findings demonstrate different patterns of correlations between subjective measures of emotions and motivations in PG and CON subjects when viewing material of corresponding content, suggesting in PG alterations in the neural correlates underlying experiential aspects of affective processing.     

Family planning and resilience: associations found in a Population,Health, and Environment (PHE) project in Western Tanzania

Using 2016 household survey data from Tanzania, we define and measure resilience within the context of Population, Health, and Environment programming and quantify the link between resilience and family planning. We created a multicomponent model using confirmatory factor analysis in a structural equation modeling context. Factor loadings for eight defined latent factors of resilience were statistically significant (p?<?0.001). We created a factor called “FP-MCH” reflecting awareness, attitudes, and access to family planning (FP) and health care services and use of maternal and child health care (MCH) facilities. Analysis, with controls, shows that a 1 standard deviation (SD) increase in FP/MCH was associated with a 0.68 SD increase in resilience (p?<?0.01), suggesting that the association between FP/MCH and resilience is robust across a range of factors. Analyses showed that the association between FP/MCH is broadly related to the construct of resilience and not through any single component. This study supports the importance of including FP/MCH as part of integrated projects to enhance resilience.