Sexuality and school shootings: what role does teasing play in school massacres?

Conventional explanations - lax gun control laws, media violence, single and working parents - do not adequately explain the recent spate of school shootings, and neither does bullying by itself, an explanation recently gaining more traction. A certain type of bullying, however, is revealed as particularly culpable. Many of the recent shootings share a disturbing component: The perpetrators were repeatedly, even relentlessly, accused by "preps and jocks" of being gay. Gay harassment is proposed as a point of departure for understanding the causes of school shootings. When boys who believe on some level that they warrant privilege, are instead harassed, they may feel driven to avenge the "wrong," and re-assert a more dominant, powerful, and victorious masculinity. These circumstances call for a cultural transformation such that "boys will be boys" is no longer used as an alibi for violence. The author presents implications for school-based social work practice, teacher and administrator interventions, as well as other prevention strategies.     

Doing it from your heart: the role of older women as informal volunteers

This paper explores the contributions made by older women to the community as informal volunteers. It argues that ageing policy is not gender neutral and tends to ignore the contributions made by women outside paid work. As well as being ignored in policy, women's unpaid roles have been denigrated by some feminist commentators, who suggest that these roles subordinate the position of women. The aim of the present paper is to explore the lived experiences of older women in relation to their informal volunteer roles, using role identity theory as a framework. The study utilizes data from a qualitative study using focus group methodology. Findings demonstrate that informal volunteering contributes to the women's identity and gives their lives meaning. These findings suggest that a more positive policy framework around ageing is needed to ensure that the worth of these contributions is recognised.     

Do marriages forget their past? Marital stability in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia

This paper assesses the impact of three main destabilizing factors on marital stability in Cambodia: the radical reformation of marriage under the Khmers Rouges (KR); the imbalanced gender ratio among marriageable adults resulting from gendered mortality during the KR regime; and, after decades of isolation from the West, a period of rapid social change. Although there is evidence of declining marital stability in the most recent period, marriages contracted under the KR appear as stable as adjacent marriage cohorts. Thesefindings suggest that the conditions under which spouses were initially paired matter less for marital stability than does their contemporaneous environment.     

Foreign-born emigration: A new approach and estimates based on matched CPS files

The utility of postcensal population estimates depends on the adequate measurement of four major components of demographic change: fertility, mortality, immigration, and emigration. Of the four components, emigration, especially of the foreign-born, has proved the most difficult to gauge. Without "direct" methods (i.e., methods identifying who emigrates and when), demographers have relied on indirect approaches, such as residual methods. Residual estimates, however are sensitive to inaccuracies in their constituent parts and are particularly ill-suited for measuring the emigration of recent arrivals. Here we introduce a new method for estimating foreign-born emigration that takes advantage of the sample design of the Current Population Survey (CPS): repeated interviews of persons in the same housing units over a period of 16 months. Individuals appearing in a first March Supplement to the CPS but not the next include those who died in the intervening year, those who moved within the country, and those who emigrated. We use statistical methods to estimate the proportion of emigrants among those not present in the follow-up interview. Our method produces emigration estimates that are comparable to those from residual methods in the case of longer-term residents (immigrants who arrived more than 10 years ago), but yields higher--and what appear to be more accurate--estimates for recent arrivals. Although somewhat constrained by sample size, we also generate estimates by age, sex, region of birth, and duration of residence in the United States.     

从国际关系社会学到世界政治社会学

形成于20世纪下半叶的国际关系社会学是社会学的研究方向之一.其实质是将社会学的研究方法应用于国际关系研究.然而,国际关系社会学却没能成为独立的社会学门类,很多国家仍将其归属于国际关系理论范畴.随着国际进程快速发展与科学知识不断激增,出现了世界政治社会学这一新的社会学方向,并有成为独立的社会学门类的趋势.     

Inside and outcast: multifaceted stigma and redemption in the lives of gay and lesbian Jehovah's Witnesses

Homosexuality has become a divisive issue in many religions and congregations. Like many other fundamentalist denominations, Jehovah's Witnesses condemns homosexual acts, thoughts, and feelings. Consequently, gay and lesbian Witnesses experience not just stigmatization and conflict between their sexual and religious identities in the social world, but also a nearly impossible task in their inner world. This inner task adds a new facet to our understanding of stigma (Goffman, 1963). This study explores the written narratives of a subset of gay and lesbian former Jehovah's Witnesses who were able to comprehend, negotiate, and, in most cases, resolve their multifaceted stigmas and conflicts through struggle, self-determination, and eventually connecting with networks of peers who faced or are facing similar stigmas. This research contributes to other work on the intersection of religion, family, and homosexuality; in particular, the findings have implications for the study of other strict fundamentalist religions.