Beliefs about unions and what they should do: A survey of employed canadians

I use IR theory to identify five roles that have been associated with unions in North America and then report the findings from a 1995 survey of employed Canadians, asking them their beliefs about the amount of effort unions place on each of twenty-four activities associated with these roles, the amount of effort unions should place on each, and the amount of success unions have on each. Basically, Canadians want unions to continue to perform their traditional activities, and they view unions as having an important conflict role, but they also want unions to place more effort into more consensual workplace democratization and participation activities. These results are consistent with the notion of “adversary participation,” and are interpreted as suggesting a new “model” of unions, one which enables workers to have greater control over their working lives. Jack Fiorito, Joe Rose, and Corliss Olson made valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Toni Ostroman was primarily responsible for the data collection.     

Social Construction of Pain and Aging: Individual Artfulness Within Interpretive Structures

Collective representations of growing older and experiencing chronic pain have posed limits on ways that individuals can derive meaning for and successfully manage these experiences. Taking the perspective of social constructionism, this article demonstrates (a) that some subcultures provide more positive and useful alternatives to these collective representations, and (b) that individuals themselves have been creative in constituting positive self-images in the midst of growing older and managing chronic pain. Using data from the author's fieldwork in two continuing-care retirement communities, the article goes on to address the intersection of subcultural interpretive structures and individual artfulness in the social construction of pain and aging. The data suggest that individual artfulness can be only as creative and liberating as interpretive structures permit. This finding adds to the growing literature (stemming from phenomenology and ethnomethodology) that concentrates on individuals as agents of the social construction of reality as well as social contexts of opportunity, constraints, and resources.     

Response Effects in Sex Surveys

Two potential problems in sex surveys—respondent refusalsand invalid reporting—are examined for national and areaprobability samples of males and females. Little support isfound for the contention that sexual topics constitute a sensitiveresearch area in terms of respondent cooperation and candor.It is found that (1) respondent cooperation, as indicated byrefusals and terminations, is neither more nor less problematicin sex research than in surveys on other topics; (2) respondentreports of sexual matters are not systematically related tointerviewer characteristics such as gender, sexual experience,or technical competence; (3) respondent candor, when self-reported,also is not associated systematically with either interviewercharacteristics or demographic and sexual characteristics ofrespondents. This analysis does identify, however, evidencethat (4) sexual matters often are sensitive topics for interviewersand principal investigators, leading both to interviewer turnoverand the creative construction of unobtrusive data collectionprocedures.     

Facing Death: Buddhist and Western Hospice Approaches

This article draws on ethnographic data to examine how moral person‐hood, emotions, and social relationships are constructed quite differently within two organizations with the similar goal of holistically caring for the dying. The analysis shows how the moral rhetoric and related practices at a mainstream hospice encourage volunteers to esteem a static conception of the self‐as‐character, whereas the Buddhist approach requires volunteers to engage in a process of transcending a self that is continually being worked on. The analysis points to paradoxes in the hospice conceptions of a “good death” and offers critical reflection on the assumption that Western and Buddhist approaches to hospice care are largely equivalent. Organizational, structural, and phenomenological strands of symbolic interactionist thought are drawn on to interpret these findings.     

Saddlepoint Approximation for Sample and Bootstrap Quantiles

The paper gives the saddlepoint approximation for the distribution function of the sample quantile. A comparison of the saddlepoint approximations for the distribution functions of the sample quantile and the bootstrap quantile shows that the error of the bootstrap approximation to the distribution of the sample quantile obtained by Singh (1981) as an absolute error is actually a relative error.