Thinking with suffering

Abstract

This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action.     

Using the ‘risk factor paradigm’ in prevention: lessons from the evaluation of Communities that Care

This paper discusses results from an evaluation of the UK-based Communities that Care programme. This ‘risk and protective’ programme was set up in 1997 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with a central aim of exploring if such an approach could be successful in the UK context. Communities that Care puts into operation the ‘risk factor paradigm’ by providing evidence of risk and protection for local communities that help them target resources for the reduction of future social problems. Results show that such a model looks ‘promising’ although though there are substantial implementation issues that need to be addressed if it is to be successful over a longer time frame.     

Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio‐technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.     

AVERAGE PREDICTIVE COMPARISONS FOR MODELS WITH NONLINEARITY, INTERACTIONS, AND VARIANCE COMPONENTS

In a predictive model, what is the expected difference in the outcome associated with a unit difference in one of the inputs? In a linear regression model without interactions, this average predictive comparison is simply a regression coefficient (with associated uncertainty). In a model with nonlinearity or interactions, however, the average predictive comparison in general depends on the values of the predictors. We consider various definitions based on averages over a population distribution of the predictors, and we compute standard errors based on uncertainty in model parameters. We illustrate with a study of criminal justice data for urban counties in the United States. The outcome of interest measures whether a convicted felon received a prison sentence rather than a jail or non-custodial sentence, with predictors available at both individual and county levels. We fit three models: (1) a hierarchical logistic regression with varying coefficients for the within-county intercepts as well as for each individual predictor; (2) a hierarchical model with varying intercepts only; and (3) a nonhierarchical model that ignores the multilevel nature of the data. The regression coefficients have different interpretations for the different models; in contrast, the models can be compared directly using predictive comparisons. Furthermore, predictive comparisons clarify the interplay between the individual and county predictors for the hierarchical models and also illustrate the relative size of varying county effects.     

The career aspirations and action behaviours of Australian adolescents in out-of-home-care

We surveyed 202 adolescents who were in out-of-home care, and compared them with 202 adolescents not in care (matched for age, gender and school achievement) on career-related aspirations (occupational aspirations, educational aspirations, life barriers) and career action behaviours (career exploration, career planning). The out-of-home care adolescents reported lower occupational aspirations, less career planning, more career barriers, lower educational aspirations for themselves, lower parental aspirations, and more school engagement. Further, career exploration was lower for out-of-home care children who had higher aspirations, lower self-efficacy, parents who communicated higher aspirations, and low aspiring friends. Results are discussed in the context of providing career development and supports for out-of-home care adolescents so that their career aspirations and behaviours can mirror more normative levels.     

Increasing User Choice or Privatizing Risk? The Antinomies of Personalization

Within a very short space of time, the concept of personalizationhas come to occupy a central place within dominant social workand adult care discourses within the UK. Through an analysisof one influential model of personalization, this paper willexplore the factors behind the concept’s current popularity.I shall argue that this popularity is due primarily to its congruencewith key themes of New Labour thought, including individualization,responsibilization and the transfer of risk from the state tothe individual. I shall conclude that, given its acceptanceof the marketization of social work and social care, its neglectof issues of poverty and inequality, its flawed conception ofthe people who use social work services, its potentially stigmatizingview of welfare dependency and its potential for promoting,rather than challenging, the deprofessionalization of socialwork, the philosophy of personalization is not one that socialworkers should accept uncritically.     

Even More Direct Calculation of the Variance of a Maximum Penalized-Likelihood Estimator

We discuss here two examples of estimation by numerical maximization of penalized likelihood. We show that, in these examples, it is simpler not to use the EM algorithm for computation of the estimates or their standard errors. We discuss also confidence and credibility intervals based on penalized likelihood and a chi-squared approximate distribution, and compare such intervals with intervals of Wald type.

[Received July 2014. Revised September 2015.]     

Factors Associated With Growth in Daily Smoking Among Indigenous Adolescents

North American Indigenous adolescents smoke earlier, smoke more, and are more likely to become regular smokers as adults than youth from any other ethnic group, yet we know very little about their early smoking trajectories. We use multilevel growth modeling across five waves of data from Indigenous adolescents (aged 10–13 years at Wave 1) to investigate factors associated with becoming a daily smoker. Several factors, including number of peers who smoked at Wave 1 and meeting diagnostic criteria for major depressive episode and conduct disorder, were associated with early daily smoking. Only age and increases in the number of smoking peers were associated with increased odds of becoming a daily smoker.