Parsimony in personality: predicting sexual prejudice

Extant research has established numerous demographic, personal-history, attitudinal, and ideological correlates of sexual prejudice, also known as homophobia. The present study investigated whether Five-Factor Model (FFM) personality domains, particularly Openness, and FFM facets, particularly Openness to Values, contribute independent and incremental variance to the prediction of sexual prejudice beyond these established correlates. Participants were 117 college students who completed a comprehensive FFM measure, measures of sexual prejudice, and a demographics, personal-history, and attitudes-and-ideologies questionnaire. Results of stepwise multiple regression analyses demonstrated that, whereas Openness domain score predicted only marginal incremental variance in sexual prejudice, Openness facet scores (particularly Openness to Values) predicted independent and substantial incremental variance beyond numerous other zero-order correlates of sexual prejudice. The importance of integrating FFM personality variables, especially facet-level variables, into conceptualizations of sexual prejudice is highlighted. Study strengths and weaknesses are discussed as are potential implications for prejudice-reduction interventions.     

Darts,drink and the pub: the culture of female drinking

Sociologists and anthropologists have paid little attention to women's role in the pub. This article, based on fieldwork reseach, sets out to describe the use of two pubs by two different groups of women in an English village. Through these examples, we seek to illustrate not only the social class differences between the two groups of women but also their differential use of the pub. For many working-class women, as opposed to their middle-class counterparts, the pub represents an important social centre in the village - joining the darts team provides one of a limited range of available options to get away from responsibilities of home and kin. This is not the case for middle-class women. For them the pub represents only one of many options in their social lives and as a result they make less use of the pub and its facilities.     

A REPERTOIRE OF INTERPRETATIONS:

Despite significant contributions, movement frame analyses have tended to focus on ideological construction within and between social movement organizations at single moments in time or during protest cycles. By integrating framing and abeyance concepts, this article extends the framing perspective to examine historical continuities, transformations, and interweavings of ideological themes in U.S. agrarian mobilization. We develop the concept of a "repertoire of interpretations' as a means of analyzing the persistence and variable alignments of three master frames: agrarian fundamentalism, competitive capitalism, and producer ideology. Relationships between these master frames are considered in terms of constitutive and ancillary salience and are explored with reference to abeyance processes.     

Swear(ING) ain't play(ING): The interaction of taboo language and the sociolinguistic variable

Swearwords influence social evaluation of a speaker in a variety of ways depending on social context (Jay & Janschewitz (2008), The pragmatics of swearing. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 4(2), 267–288). Little attention has been paid to the role of linguistic variation in social perceptions of swearing, however. This paper presents two experiments that test the role of sociolinguistic variation in the social evaluation of swearing. Experiment 1 is a variant categorization task, in which participants categorized acoustically ambiguous swearwords and phonetically matching neutral and nonwords as ending in either “-ing” or “-in.” Results suggest that swearwords led participants to hear “-ing” on ambiguous items. Experiment 2 is a matched-guise task in which listeners heard a passage featuring a mix of swearwords and neutral “-ing” words in one of four conditions: fully velar (All-ing), fully alveolar (All-in), only swearwords as velar (Swear-ing), or only neutral words as velar (Swear-in). Participants rated speakers on Likert scales (Schleef et al. (2017), Regional diversity in social perceptions of (ING). Language Variation and Change, 29(1), 29–56). Participants again displayed a tendency towards hearing “-ing” on swearwords. As a result, responses to the Swear-in guises were similar to those for the All-ing guises. The consequences for our understanding of swearing, sociolinguistic perception and cognition, and style, are discussed.