College students coping with interpersonal stress: Examining a control-based model of coping

Objective: The ways that college students cope with stress, particularly interpersonal stress, may be a critical factor in determining which students are at risk for impairing mental health disorders. Using a control-based model of coping, the present study examined associations between interpersonal stress, coping strategies, and symptoms. Participants: A total of 135 undergraduate students from 2 universities. Methods: Interpersonal stress, coping strategies, depression, anxiety, and somatization were assessed via self-report. Results: Students reporting more interpersonal stress reported more depression, anxiety, and somatization, and they reported less use of engagement coping strategies and greater use of disengagement coping strategies. Engagement coping strategies accounted for a significant portion of the association between interpersonal stress and mental health symptoms. Unexpectedly, coping strategies did not moderate the association between stress and mental health symptoms. Conclusion: Interventions designed to improve students' coping strategies may be an effective way to reduce mental health problems on college campuses.     

What Women Want: Employment Preference and Adjustment Among Mothers

In this study of over 2000 mothers, we considered the alignment between employment preference and status, examining the well-being of mothers who were employed and wanting to work; employed because they need the money; not employed and not wanting work; and not employed but wanting to work. Alignment between employment preference and employment status was significantly associated with well-being, and mothers who stayed at home but wanted work had the most difficulties. Strong associations across multiple outcomes were found for emotional support variables, and costs of childcare was the most common reason for staying home even if employment was desired. Results suggest the importance of women’s self-agency in employment decisions, access to child-care, and emotional support in mothers’ lives.     

Caregiver perceptions of empowerment and self-efficacy following youths’ discharge from residential care

ABSTRACT

Residential care is one of the most restrictive out-of-home care settings; however, this is a temporary placement and youth eventually reintegrate into the home and community setting. Reintegration presents many challenges, and aftercare becomes critical for maintaining youth gains and promoting family stability. Aftercare programs and supports should align to individual family needs that entail understanding individual and familial characteristics. Previous studies have explored characteristics related to family functioning, mental health, behavior, and perceptions of need during reintegration; yet little is known regarding how affective characteristics (i.e., self-efficacy, empowerment) factor into reintegration, or the implications this may have for providers. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by exploring empowerment and self-efficacy in caregivers (N = 120) who had a child return home within 1 month of departing residential care. Overall, caregivers reported high levels of empowerment and self-efficacy during the initial transition period. Significant differences for empowerment and self-efficacy were present in characteristics such as race, income, number of children in the home, and free/reduced lunch status.     

Attention to Threat as a Predictor of Shyness in the Context of Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior

The duration of children's attention to putative threat has been documented as a consistent predictor of later anxiety in inhibited children across childhood (Fox, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 127, 2010, 33; Pérez‐Edgar & Fox, Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14, 2005, 681). However, attention to threat has not been broadly examined within existing behavioral contexts and has seldom been studied in very early childhood. Whereas toddlers with high levels of internalizing behavior may view fear‐inducing stimuli as a threat, toddlers with high levels of externalizing behavior may demonstrate attention out of interest or sensation seeking. Thus, attention to threat was expected to predict increased toddler shyness in the context of either high internalizing problems or low externalizing behavior. We examined 117 twenty‐four‐month‐old toddlers to determine whether attention to threat interacted with internalizing and externalizing behavior at 24 months of age to predict toddler shyness one year later. Results indicated that attention to threat predicted toddlers' lower shyness at 36 months when toddlers’ externalizing behavior at age 24 months were high, but there was no significant interaction between toddlers’ internalizing behavior and their attention to threat in predicting later shyness. These results expand our understanding of the contexts in which attention to threat in early childhood is a viable predictor of later shyness.     

Der Einfluss der Gruppengröße auf die Aktivität von Parteimitgliedern

In this paper, we aim to test Olson’s (The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965) assumptions of group size effects on free-riding tendencies in political parties. Multilevel analyses of the Deutsche Parteimitgliederstudie (German Party Membership Study) 2009 reveal that for members of the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, the assumed negative relationship between the number of party members in the district association and their individual level of activity can only be shown for the eastern states of Germany. Moreover, we show that selective incentives are not suitable for reducing the negative impact of a increasing membership figure, while normative incentives are associated with an increasing free-riding tendency with increasing number of members in the western and eastern Bundesländer. Our results only partly support the assumptions on collective action problems and point to a need for further theoretical and empirical research on group size effects and on the role incentives’ play in explaining the activity in political parties.     

Participation and Self‐Entrapment A 12‐Year Ethnography of Wall Street Participation Practices' Diffusion and Evolving Consequences

A 12‐year ethnography illustrates how two investment banks' participative work practices entrapped bankers in indiscriminate overwork, and what the evolving consequences were for the banks and the organizations that the bankers joined subsequently. The banks' participative work practices eliminated all visible organizational controls. Invested in the task, the bankers collectively designed work practices that benefited the banks, but had the unintended consequences of intensifying work pace and habituating bankers to indiscriminate overwork that they experienced as self‐chosen. Prior organizational behavioral research predicts outcomes only for about one year. During this time, the banks benefited from the bankers' hard work. Starting in year four, the practices' extremes produced opposite effects, namely declining performance because of body breakdowns, and cultural distance, because depleted bodies made it impossible for bankers to work in culturally normative ways. The bankers carried this pattern of overwork and subsequent breakdowns into the organizations that they joined subsequently, where they introduced the banks' practices.     

Meaning of Political Controversy in the Classroom: A Dialogue Across The Podium

The abstract value of academic freedom is enjoyed (or not) in concrete settings, as interactional and emergent experiences. We examine classroom political controversy in our experiences, understandings, and values, using grounded theory methods and collective autoethnography by a team of five teachers and students. Our data were generated through electronic and face‐to‐face dialogues. Our analysis, guided by a symbolic interactionist and constructionist framework, yields a picture of Controversy in Action, whereby we navigate Barriers to Open Discussion and Costs of Controversy. Results highlight insights into taken‐for‐granted meanings unexamined in day‐to‐day classroom interaction. We attend to the relevance of the local context in which our classrooms are embedded and the interactional, meaning creating work that goes on in those classrooms, as we negotiate controversy.