New Voices in Iceland. Parents and Adult Children: juggling supports and choices in time and space

This paper deals with parents' perspectives and experiences of bringing up children with a variety of impairments in Iceland, and how they impact the young disabled adults' approach to the status of adulthood. The paper is based on a qualitative study that explored perspectives and experiences of 36 young disabled adults (16-24 years old), their parents, friends and teachers. The purpose of this paper is to share themes related to patterns of parents' reactions and choices when coming to terms with parenting a disabled child, the support they found from their social network and professionals, and their sons or daughters' subsequent views of themselves and their prospects as young adults. The paper includes different perspectives on adulthood and the extent to which the young disabled people expect to reach that status or remain as 'eternal youth' enmeshed in segregated services. Findings show that the type and nature of early support for parents of disabled children is critical for the young adults' approaching adulthood in regular society or expecting to remain in the limbo of 'eternal youth' within segregated settings. Early 'betrayals' may, however, be revisited at each subsequent transition point. Furthermore, parents and their disabled children who struggled for social inclusion could obtain full active membership in society, even against social and physical barriers, and medically defined disability labels.     

Aid, Relief, and Containment: The First Asylum Country and Beyond

A fundamental problem that confronts the European Union today is how it can maintain its commitment to the institution of asylum while checking irregular migration and the abuse of its asylum system. In order to explore a response to this dilemma the paper addresses the following questions: what role can relief and aid policies play in influencing migration patterns? What should be the appropriate approach to the granting of relief and aid to developing countries of first asylum? Should it be viewed as a part of the larger problem of development or be treated as a distinct issue? What kind of a relief/aid model will help refugees return to post–conflict societies and stop the conflict from reproducing itself? The paper examines two different approaches to address these questions: the alliance–containment approach and the distributive–developmental approach. It also looks at some empirical evidence, which reveals that at present it is a conservative alliance–containment approach that informs EU relief and aid practices. This approach, however, does not help achieve the stated objective of checking abuse of asylum and migration procedures while sustaining a commitment to a liberal asylum regime. The paper goes on to identify the gaps in EU policy and the lessons that can be drawn. It concludes by looking at different policy alternatives and suggesting the adoption of a reformist distributive–developmental model. The implementation of this model holds out the hope of reverting to a more liberal asylum regime while controlling irregular migration and “bogus” asylum seekers, for the reformist distributive developmental model takes a more long–term view of migration trends and also seeks to address the growing North–South divide.     

Towards a Cultural Analysis of the Modern Family: Beyond the Revisionist Paradigm in Japanese Family Studies

Under the influence of the "new history of the family" of the past few decades, a revisionist view of the "modern family" has emerged among family theorists in Japan. In spite of the significant merits of this new paradigm, I have argued that the failure of its proponents to address certain theoretical and presuppositional issues has discouraged a cultural analysis of the modern family. In recent years, one of the foremost theorists to attempt to bring cultural analysis fully into sociological discourse has been Jeffrey Alexander. I have drawn extensively on Alexander's discussion of Durkheim's later thought as the key to a cultural program in the field of sociology. In doing so, I have suggested that one effect of the transition to modern society is the sacralization of what Durkheim termed the "domestic order". Furthermore, in considering the mechanism by which the central emotional axis of the family comes to revolve around either the parent–child bond or the conjugal bond, I have postulated the existence of a "sacred" dyad—in the Durkheimian sense—within the family unit.     

Book Review: Social Capital and Participation in Everyday Life,by Paul Dekker and Eric M. Uslaner (eds.). Routledge,London, 2001

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Exploring multivariate data graphically:a brief review with examples

Many methods for obtaining graphical representations of multivariate data have been suggested over the last decade, but it is only relatively recently that software has become available which makes use of these procedures routine. In this paper, a number of examples are used to illustrate the application of graphical methods for the exploration of multivariate data. The diagrams produced may prove useful in consultations with clients and in examining the results from more formal methods.     

Membranes, mitochondria and amoebae: shape models

Most real-world shapes and images are characterized by high variability- they are not rigid, like crystals, for example—but they are strongly structured. Therefore, a fundamental task in the understanding and analysis of such image ensembles is the construction of models that incorporate both variability and structure in a mathematically precise way. The global shape models introduced in Grenander's general pattern theory are intended to do this. In this paper, we describe the representation of two-dimensional mitochondria and membranes in electron microscope photographs, and three-dimensional amoebae in optical sectioning microscopy. There are three kinds of variability to all of these patterns, which these representations accommodate. The first is the variability in shape and viewing orientation. For this, the typical structure is represented via linear, circular and spherical templates, with the variability accomodated via the application of transformations applied to the templates. The transformations form groups: scale, rotation and translation. They are locally applied throughout the continuum and of high dimension. The second is the textural variability; the inside and outside of these basic shapes are subject to random variation, as well as sensor noise. For this, statistical sensor models and Markov random field texture models are used to connect the constituent structures of the shapes to the measured data. The third variability type is associated with the fact that each scene is made up of a variable number of shapes; this number is not assumed to be known a priori. Each scene has a variable number of parameters encoding the transformations of the templates appropriate for that scene. For this, a single posterior distribution is defined over the countable union of spaces representing models of varying numbers of shapes. Bayesian inference is performed via computation of the conditional expectation of the parametrically defined shapes under the posterior. These conditional mean estimates are generated using jump-diffusion processes. Results for membranes, mitochondria and amoebae are shown.     

Sources of drug information among adolescent students

A sample of 1023 eighth and tenth grade students in small to medium-sized central Texas school districts was assessed to determine the amount of information they receive from ten sources about six categories of drugs. The amount of information males reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what females reported, and the amount of information that eighth graders reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what tenth graders reported. Television was the primary source of drug information for all categories of drugs except inhalants, for which friends and television were equally important sources. Parents and printed media (magazines or newspapers) were of secondary importance, followed by friends and teachers. Adolescents were less likely to receive drug-related information from experience, siblings, church, doctors, and police. The reliance on the mass media for drug information in smaller school districts is a pattern which has been previously observed in larger urban districts. This consistency suggests that mass media approaches to drug education are likely to be as effective in rural areas and smaller towns as they are among urban adolescents. Implications for television programming are discussed.