(Im)perishable Pleasure, (In)destructible Desire: Sexual Themes in U.S. and English News Coverage of Male Circumcision and Female Genital Cutting

Under what conditions do sexual pleasure and desire get addressed in news coverage of sexual health issues like female genital cutting (FGC) and male circumcision (MC)? In this study we employed an embodied ethnosexuality approach to analyze sexual themes in 1,902 items published from 1985 to 2009 in 13 U.S. and 8 English newspapers and news magazines. Journalists' discussions of sexual pleasure, desire, control, problems, and practices differed in quantity and quality depending on the practice and nation to which they pertained. News coverage in both nations presented FGC as impeding female sexual pleasure, desire, and activity in ways that reinforce (hetero)sexist understandings of sexuality. The English press depicted MC as diminishing male sexuality, whereas U.S. papers showed it as enhancing male sexuality. These patterns are influenced by, and serve to reinforce, cultural norms of embodiment and ethnosexual boundaries based on gender, race, and nationality. They may, in turn, shape public understandings of FGC and MC as social problems.     

The disagreeable behaviour of the kappa statistic

It is often of interest to measure the agreement between a number of raters when an outcome is nominal or ordinal. The kappa statistic is used as a measure of agreement. The statistic is highly sensitive to the distribution of the marginal totals and can produce unreliable results. Other statistics such as the proportion of concordance, maximum attainable kappa and prevalence and bias adjusted kappa should be considered to indicate how well the kappa statistic represents agreement in the data. Each kappa should be considered and interpreted based on the context of the data being analysed. Copyright © 2014 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adult Adoptees as Partners and Parents: The Joint Task of Revisiting the Adoption History

Adoption is unanimously considered a lifelong process, but adulthood and parenthood are life cycle stages that up to now have been explored only marginally. The principal aim of the present study is twofold: first, to analyze whether and how parenthood might lead the adoptee and his/her partner to reinterpret the adoption history and, second, to verify whether the attitudes of the two partners concerning adoption are similar or complementary. Thirty-four couples consisting of one adopted and one non-adopted partner, now parents, were interviewed and a graphic instrument, the Double Moon Test, was administered. Results revealed that most couples showed a shared attitude in valorizing both the origin background and the adoptive family. However, in a number of cases a divergent position emerged, highlighting the crucial role of the non-adopted partner in encouraging the adoptee to revisit his/her adoption history. Overall, the practical relevance of the research findings is discussed and future direction of research are suggested.     

Environmental and socioeconomic determinants of neonatal mortality in a northern Italian city in the early nineteenth century

Population and Environment - The research explores the effects of the environment on neonatal mortality in the early nineteenth century, controlling for social and economic factors. Individual...     

Are Poor Neighborhoods Resource Deprived? A Case Study of Childcare Centers in New York*

Objective. Many social scientists believe poor mothers are better off in middle‐class than in poor neighborhoods, partly because the latter are deprived of important institutional resources. We test whether poor neighborhoods are more likely to lack one critical institutional resource, the childcare center. Methods. We use geocoded data on all licensed centers in the City of New York, address matched to Census tracts. We estimate logit models of presence of center in tract, testing for the linear and nonlinear effects of tract poverty level after controlling for residential instability, joblessness, ethnic makeup, and other demographic factors. We complement the analysis with documentary, interview, and ethnographic data on centers in one poor and one nonpoor neighborhood in the city. Results. We find (1) that the probability of presence of a childcare center does not decrease as poverty level increases; (2) the relationship depends strongly on funding source, with privately funded centers being less likely and publicly funded ones more likely to be present in poor neighborhoods; and (3) at least two factors affect why poor neighborhoods are more likely to have certain centers, the local state and the (often neglected) nonprofit infrastructure. Conclusions. The findings suggest that poor mothers are not necessarily better off in middle‐class neighborhoods in this respect. The market assumptions underlying the initial hypothesis should be modified. More empirical research on the effect of the nonprofit sector on the prevalence of neighborhood institutions is needed.     

Social Status as a Predictor of Race and Gender Stereotypes in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence

We examined race and gender stereotypes in fourth‐, sixth‐ and eighth‐grade White and Black children. The participants reported their perceptions of the competence of Black, White, female and male children in academic domains, sports and music. In general, low‐status groups (girls and Black children) did not endorse stereotypes that reflected negatively on their own group but were likely to report stereotypes that favored their social group. High‐status groups (boys and Whites) endorsed most traditional stereotypes, whether negative or positive, for their social group. Where age differences appeared, older children were more likely than younger children to report traditional stereotypes and status effects were more pronounced. The results are discussed in terms of group enhancement and relationships between social stereotypes and self‐views.     

Psychosocial Interventions for Maltreated and Violence-Exposed Children

Child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse as well as child neglect and domestic violence, community violence, and Childhood Traumatic Grief may result in significant and long-lasting emotional and behavioral difficulties. This article reviews randomized controlled studies that have assessed child mental health outcomes for maltreated and violence-exposed children. Key points of this review include the following: (1) maltreated and violence-exposed children typically experience more than one of these types of traumas; (2) effective psychosocial treatments are available to address Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and behavioral problems in these children; (3) it is likely that treatments which effectively reduce mental health symptoms in children exposed to one type of child maltreatment or violence exposure will also be effective for other or multiple types; and (4) mental health outcomes are not the only important outcomes to address in future treatment or intervention efforts. These future directions for treatment intervention research are addressed.     

Delineating state groups through cluster analysis

This discussion is extracted from a larger research project in which an attempt is made to remedy the conceptual difficulties surrounding the “middle state” in international relations by defining the middle state vis-à-vis other types of states and without reference to any single dominant ontological framework. In this section of that project, the statistical technique of cluster analysis is used to demonstrate that the international state system contains three delineable state groups (labeled great, middle and small states). This article also demonstrates the use and usefulness of the cluster technique in international relations research.