‘Parenting teenagers’ programmes: a UK perspective

The parenting of teenagers is an area of political and public debate at present, and many different forms of support are now available for this group of parents. There has been a particular increase in recent years in the number of group-based parenting programmes provided for parents of teenagers. This paper describes research which (i) surveyed the range and nature of ‘parenting teenagers’ courses currently available in the UK, and (ii) identified key characteristics of these courses, including aims, value bases, materials, methods, parents attending, outcomes, and evaluation. A number of key issues are identified, and recommendations for future practice, policy and research in this important area are made.     

Challenging the Image: the involvement of young people with disabilities in volunteering and campaigning

Much of the debate about young people with disabilities focuses on the difficulties these young people experience and their needs in terms of service provision. Rarely is there a focus on the positive contribution that disabled young people themselves make to society. The paper describes research which aimed to highlight the contribution that young people with disabilities make to their communities, by focusing on their participation in volunteering and campaigning. A national survey of disabled young people's participation was undertaken, as well as two case studies of particular projects. The paper describes the range of voluntary and campaigning activities being undertaken by young people with disabilities, highlights the effects of participation on the young people and those around them, and identifies issues for organisations wishing to enable more young people with disabilities to participate in this way.     

College Student Perceptions of the Content of Father Stereotypes

This study used a three‐step procedure to examine 663 Midwestern university students' perceptions of the content of social stereotypes related to seven types of fathers. Married and adoptive fathers were the most positively stereotyped groups, and divorced residential fathers were also viewed quite positively. There were relatively neutral views of stepfathers and gay fathers, whereas divorced nonresidential and never‐married fathers were the most negatively stereotyped groups. Our results empirically supported the notion that younger adults' stereotypes of fathers depend on the father’s marital status, parental status, and sexual orientation.     

Sociology and the virtual: interactive mirrors,representational thinking and intensive power

This article explores the role of images in the workings of contemporary power. It examines one of the central ways in which sociology has approached images as representations and proposes an alternative understanding of images through the concepts of interactivity, intensity and the virtual. Focusing on the examples of three interactive mirrors, one a piece of artwork, another designed to be located in a designer shop and the other a medical mirror for tracking ‘vital signs’, it suggests that the mirrors emphasize the screen and, in so doing, disrupt a notion of images of representations. Images are instead brought to life; intensively experienced rather than extensively read. The article engages, first, with the increasing prevalence of screens and, second, with the moves in sociology towards theorizing the value of the concept of the virtual. Arguing that images are felt and lived out, the article seeks to contribute to how sociology has dealt with, and might further develop, the concept of the virtual as a productive way of understanding the relationships between images, screens, power and life.     

Calling Social Work

New Labour has promoted the use of information and communicationtechnology. Call centres are a key development in this strategyand are now in use for accessing social services. In officialpolicy, the use of call centres is presented as an aspect ofattempts to change the relationship between service users andthe purchasers and providers of services. In contrast, we suggestthat the use of call centres in social care does little to shiftthe balance of power. Call centres bring together four dimensionsof New Labour discourse: learning from the private sector, cuttingcosts, technology and consumerism. Three issues emerge fromtheir development: the undermining of social work’s senseof place; the circumscribing of service user participation;the rationalization of social workers. The call centre servesas a signifier of what, it is claimed, the combination of NewLabour’s consumerism and technology can achieve. Thissignification disguises call centres’ properties of efficiency,calculability, predictability and control. Contrary to the rhetoricthat accompanies them, call centres may be curtailing serviceuser participation, as well as delimiting the social work role.Accordingly, their use has important, but as yet largely unresearched,implications for service users and social workers.     

The Leadership Styles of Women and Men

As women increasingly enter leadership roles that traditionally have been occupied mainly by men, the possibility that the leadership styles of women and men differ continues to attract attention. The focus of these debates on sameness versus difference can obscure the array of causal factors that can produce differences or similarities. Adopting the perspective of social role theory, we offer a framework that encompasses many of the complexities of the empirical literature on the leadership styles of women and men. Supplementing Eagly and Johnson's (1990) review of the interpersonally oriented, task-oriented, autocratic, and democratic styles of women and men, we present new data concerning the transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles.     

Modern-day perception of historic footwear and its links to preference

The importance of emotion in consumer preference is explored in the subject of Kansei Engineering. The Kansei methodology has been successfully adopted by many large companies in recent years. Currently, a European Union Fifth framework project called 'Kensys' (Kansei Engineering System) is being implemented to look at the application of Kansei engineering in the field of footwear. The Kensys project is being conducted in collaboration with several SMEs and this paper reports a study that has been carried out with one of the SMEs who designs and makes reproduction historic and specialist footwear. In addition, respondent views on 'real' products from history and reproduction footwear are compared. We report on the views of respondents in general and look at gender differences, the comparison of non-experts' views versus experts' views and we also look at differences due to age. The study was carried out in the UK and in Spain. The views in both counties are compared.     

Regression analysis for the comparison of school and home effects

This paper addresses two related problems: what are the appropriate measures for comparing effects of blocks or compounds of variables (each block conceived as having a single effect) when the causal ordering is assumed to be known, and how can single measures be created for each such block or compound, so that the comparisons can be made? Several different kinds of measures are shown to be possibly appropriate, through the use of hypothetical experiments.