Sense of Belonging in School as a Protective Factor Against Drug Abuse Among Native American Urban Adolescents

This article presents the results of a study conducted with 243 Native American students who were part of a multi-ethnic sample of adolescents attending middle school in a large urban center in the Southwest region of the United States. Native adolescents who felt a stronger sense of belonging in their school were found to report a lower lifetime use of alcohol and cigarettes, lower cigarette and marijuana use in the previous month, lower frequency of current use of these substances, fewer substances ever used, and a later age of initiation into drug use than other Native students. Research implications are discussed in relationship to school environment, culturally-grounded prevention curricula, and school social work practice.     

Circuits of schooling: A sociological exploration of parental choice of school in social class contexts

Parental choice of school is one of the main platforms of government education policy and is the centre piece of the Parents Charter. But sociological understanding of choice and choice-making is woefully underdeveloped. This paper draws on an ESRC study of market forces in education to explore social class variations in choice of school in one specific locality. The complexity of choice-making is portrayed using data from interviews with parents and it is argued that middle-class parents are taking full advantage of ‘the market’ to sustain or re-assert their class advantages.     

The psychodynamically oriented clinical social worker as sports consultant: A preliminary report

This paper explores an unusual and innovative application of psychodynamically oriented clinical social work method to the sports area. The coach of a national Olympics team requested a clinical consultation because he suspected that there might be psychosocial reasons why a certain number of world class atheletes he was coaching were not performing up to their full potential.     

宗教社会学范式及理论的新进展

20世纪90年代以后,宗教社会学领域出现了新的理论范式。新范式是理解美国宗教的框架,旧范式则来源于欧洲的宗教传统。新范式的内容包括理性选择理论、似真性理论和仪式理论。目前,新范式开始运用于中国、印度等国家的宗教研究,似乎要成为普世性的理论模式。     

Ethnomethodology and sociology: an introduction

Arising as a powerful challenge to programmatic views of sociology that sought to determine stable laws underpinning social order, ethnomethodology set out an alternative programme to reveal social order as a dynamic, contingent ‘ongoing accomplishment’. This programme was neither micro nor macro, but was concerned with different contexts of accountability in which both individuals and institutions are given identity and reproduced. Recognising everyday life as an achievement, collective sense making, and the central importance of talk as a social process, ethnomethodology had an impact on all those arenas of sociology where ordinary interaction is an element. This introduction to the special section discusses the contributions of each of the papers – which cover mundane reasoning, social learning, the early acquisition of social competence, and the application of membership categorization analysis to gender – in relation to the continuing relevance of Garfinkel's legacy to contemporary sociological theory and practice.     

EVALUATION OF AN ACADEMIC FAMILY THERAPY TRAINING PROGRAM: CHANGES IN TRAINEES' RELATIONSHIP AND INTERVENTION SKILLS

Students in an academic training program were assessed for changes in their relationship and intervention skills following completion of the program. Positive improvements were found on some measures but not all. Additionally, trainee variables such as previous clinical experience. gender, age, marital stauts and scores on standardized admission tests were examined in relation to trainees' skills changes. Trainee characteristics were unrelated to changes in intervention skills. However, a number of relationships were found between trainee characteristics and changes in relationship skills.     

An algorithm for computing principal points with respect to a loss function in the unidimensional case

In Flury (1990) the k principal points of a random vector X are defned as the points p(1),..., p(k) minimizing EX–p(i)²; i=1,..., k. We extend this concept to that of k principal points with respect to a loss function L, and present an algorithm for their computation in the univariate case.