Bereavement as a Psychosocial Transition: Processes of Adaptation to Change

There are many ways of construing the psychology of loss. This paper describes one such model, which enlightens some, but not all, aspects of bereavement and needs to be used alongside other models. Loss is one aspect of psychosocial transition, the psychological change that takes place whenever people are faced with the need to undertake a major revision of their assumptions about the world. The paper focuses on the ways in which people change or fail to change their internal model of the world in the face of emergent events. Examples are taken from bereavement, loss of a limb, and the succession of losses that mark the course of terminal illness. Implications for identifying people at risk and mitigating that risk are outlined.     

Structure, Agency, and Context: The Contributions of Geography to World-Systems Analysis

The interaction of geography and world-systems theory has created two groups of work. The first body of work uses world-systems theory as its theoretical framework with minor levels of critique or change. The second body of work attempts to inform world- systems theory by explicitly including a geographical perspective. Human geographers attracted to world-systems theory provide a perspective that highlights the role of agency in what is widely perceived to be a rigid structuralist approach. Key geographical concepts of region and place are viewed as social constructs created within an overarching context of structural imperatives. By conceptualizing places, states, and the macroregions of core, semiperiphery, and periphery as geographical scales, the role of agency in creating and maintaining the important structures and institutions of the capitalist world-economy, such as hegemony, is illustrated. The geographer's interest in the creation of geographical scales results in analysis of the dynamism of the contemporary world-system.     

Emory Bogardus and the Origins of the Social Distance Scale

This article provides some history of sociology by focusing on the origins of the Bogardus Social Distance Scale. The scale was developed by Emory Bogardus in 1924 and is still widely used in measuring prejudice. It has been translated into several languages, and used in many countries in measuring attitudes toward a variety of groups. The authors use primary and secondary data, including an interview with one of Bogardus’s colleagues, Thomas Lasswell, and the Bogardus archive at the University of Southern California. American racial and ethnic conflict, and the increasing scientific emphasis in sociology help explain the genesis of the scale. The personal biography of Bogardus is examined along with trends in sociology during his training at the University of Chicago and developments throughout American society. This study shows how the social environment of Bogardus influenced his personal life circumstances that help account for his creation of the scale. Thanks are due to a group that includes Thomas Lasswell, Jon Miller, Patricia Adolph, Susan Hikida, Claude Zachary, Ruth Chananie, Ann Hunter, Margaret Johnson, James Aho, Donald Granberg, Steve Kroll-Smith, and Nancy Turner Myers.     

Who ‘dominates’ whom? Social class,conjugal households and political identification

The existence of cross-class families, where the wife's occupation is taken to be superior to that of the husband, has been seen as a challenge to conventional ways of allocating class positions to partners in the conjugal household. Data from the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative survey conducted in 1986 are used to estimate the numerical importance of such families. Three approaches to the class allocation of men and women in conjugal households are outlined: individual, conventional and dominance. The predictive validity of these approaches is then assessed with the dependent variable drawn from the domain of political party identification. The outcomes of the exercise suggest that the conventional approach may require some slight finessing with respect to female respondents in cross-class families who are active full-time in the labour market, but in the main still gives acceptable results.