Reports of past conferences

Since the advent of the People's Republic, the school has served as a metonym for the city in China, both in the public imagination and in state policy. This article explores how two different ideologies (socialist and post‐socialist) were manifested in two different visual images of the city and school, which in turn shaped the urban institutions and landscapes. In the socialist era, party‐state propaganda offered an image of a model society which was predominantly rural, and where formal education had been marginalized by alternative forms of learning. Cities and schools were understood to be dangerous repositories of bourgeois capitalism which must be scoured of their elitist and decadent characteristics through the importation of rural practices and values. In the post‐socialist era, the city is now envisioned as the centre of modernity and progress, and schools are seen as the path to development and ‘quality’ (suzhi). The rural is pathologized as backward. This new ideology has reshaped the Chinese urban educational landscape from one of enforced egalitarianism to one characterized by inequality and exclusion.     

Development of a Level 1 Geriatric Outpatient Social Work Screen in a Veterans Primary Care Clinic

Patient Aligned Care Teams (PACT) provide primary care to veterans. We describe our experience in a PACT (average age 66, 98% men, 8 medications, 16% yearly hospitalization rate) using a nurse-administered screen to identify patients in need of intervention by a Masters-level Social Worker. Our screening results—98% Positive predictive value (included social work concerns) and 73% negative predictive value (excluded social work concerns)—suggest that the nurse accurately identified patients. Another 15% of patients were identified by the social worker. Similar screens used in interprofessional clinics could help target patients in need of further social work care.     

Do Peers Contribute to the Achievement Gap between Vietnamese‐American and Mexican‐American Adolescents?

Documented associations between academic and social functioning have been inconsistent. These discrepancies may reflect the moderating role of sociocultural context. In this study, we examined ethnicity and gender as moderators of this relation. We collected peer nominations, GPA from school records, and self‐report questionnaires for 519 Vietnamese‐American and Mexican‐American middle school students (mean age = 12.7 years). Using general linear modeling, we found that academic and social functioning were more strongly and positively linked for Vietnamese‐Americans relative to Mexican‐Americans, and for girls relative to boys. We also examined group differences in achievement values, and found that Vietnamese‐Americans were more likely to admire and be friends with high‐achieving peers. The results suggest that peers provide one context in which ethnic and gender differences in achievement values emerge, and interventions aimed at reducing the achievement gap may benefit from incorporating a focus on peers.     

Results of Gottman Method Couples Therapy with Gay and Lesbian Couples

The results of an uncontrolled study of Gottman Method Couples Therapy in changing relationship satisfaction with 106 gay and lesbian couples is reported in this paper. Measurement of relationship satisfaction was conducted at five separate time points. The data show significant improvements in relationship satisfaction following eleven sessions of therapy for both gay male and lesbian couples. Effect sizes suggest that this therapy was highly effective, compared to the usual 0.5 standard deviation effect size in couples therapy. Initial co‐morbidities did not affect the size of the changes; in fact, some changes were significantly larger for three initial co‐morbidities.     

Money in the household: some underlying issues of power

This paper addresses criticisms of a number of papers (Vogler and Pahl, 1993, 1994; Vogler, 1994) in which we attempted to explore the relationships between money, power and inequality within marriage. Subsequent criticisms have mainly centred around the concept of power that we used in those papers. It has been suggested that we either lacked a theory of power (Rottman, 1996) or that our conceptualisation of power as control over decision making was too limited (Shove, 1993). I would argue however, that while it was not made explicit in our original papers our findings point towards a more general theory of power in the household, namely to a modified version of Lukes’ three dimensional model of power. While we initially conceptualised power as control over decision making (Lukes’ first dimension of power) our findings also show the importance of ideological and cultural factors (Lukes’ third dimension of power) as both a cause and a consequence of the allocative systems couples use to organise money within the household. More theoretically, I also suggest that discourses about money within the household may be part of, and operate in a similar way to discourses of decision making at the broader political level. It may therefore be possible to conceptualise the different ways of managing money within the household as mini political systems akin to different sorts of democracy at the broader political level, and with similar consequences for gender relations.     

I HATE MY VOICE:

This article presents a narrative, autoethnographic, theoretical account of the public and private negotiation of minor bodily stigmas, which are mild physical imperfections that make us fear we stand out and might be rejected. To examine the situated complexity of stigmatized identity, I tell a story that shows concrete interactional details of an episode in which minor bodily stigmas evolved into a significant topic of conversation between strangers. My personal narrative explores the felt experience of minor bodily stigmas from the perspective of the experiencing and interacting holder. Thus, my work problematizes Erving Goffman's sociological approach to stigmas, which examines inclusively all forms of stigmas from a distanced observational stance of beholder that privileges the outsider perspective of how others see us. Using minor bodily stigmas as a heuristic category, I emphasize how they are experienced as a double bind in interaction (to notice or not to notice) and a double bind in personal feelings (of moral character as well as physical appearance). I seek to connect theoretical and categorical understandings of minor bodily stigmas to their concrete felt experience in day-to-day life in order to examine possibilities for resisting and reframing stigmas in everyday life.