The Political Values and Choices of Husbands and Wives

This article applies theoretical ideas in the literature on the household division of labor to the analysis of partners’ political preferences. We regress men's and women's political party preferences on their own and their partners’ characteristics using data from the 1991 British Household Panel Survey (N =2,846). We find a symmetrical pattern of influence: Men and women both give greatest weight to their own political values but also accord some significant weight to their partners’ values. Economically dependent men, however, place virtually no emphasis on their partners’ political values. Apart from this, we suggest that there may be a process of mutual accommodation within couples regarding political preferences that leads to greater concordance in the partners’ preferences over time.     

Differential validity: Another threat to compensatory education evaluations

The effects of the changing nature of intelligence test items during the follow-up period for compensatory education program evaluations on the judgements about the efficacy of such programs are examined. Data generated from Stanford-Binet test items, assuming known “true” underlying motor and verbal scores, as well as data from three compensatory education evaluations, are examined. The changing nature of the IQ test items, i.e., the differential validity of the tests, is put forth as an explanation for the often disheartening results of such program evaluations. Methods for dealing with the problem of differential validity are suggested.     

Dignity,happiness and being able to live a ‘normal life’ in the UK – an examination of post-accession Polish migrants' transnational autobiographical fields

This article examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine themes from our interviews such as ‘dignity’, ‘normality’, ‘happiness’ and the ‘affordability’ and ‘ease’ of life in the UK (compared to Poland). We focus on the autobiographical or intra-personal discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their ‘homeland’. We draw on Emirbayer and Mische's analysis of the relationship between ‘agency’ and what they call ‘embedded temporalities’ to examine the interaction between our participants' recollections of life in Poland and their evaluation of their present lives in the UK in order to examine the impact of these on their future plans (to stay in the UK or return to Poland). We locate this analysis in what we call a transnational autobiographical field which is a modification of what Levitt and Glick Schiller call a transnational social field. Rather than examine, for example, how decisions to migrate, settle and re-migrate are embedded in inter or trans-personal social relations and networks, in this article we examine the self-dynamics associated with our participants' articulation of their intra-personal and autobiographical embedded temporalities. Our argument is that articulations of individuals' pasts, presents and anticipated futures are also significant factors shaping their migration, settlement, and re-migration decisions.     

The Management of Confidentiality and Anonymity in Social Research

This article explores the ways in which social researchers manage issues of confidentiality and the contexts in which deliberate and accidental disclosures occur. The data are drawn from a qualitative study of social researchers’ practices in relation to informed consent. It comprised 31 individual interviews and six focus groups as well as invited email responses with researchers working with vulnerable groups or with an interest in research ethics. Researchers reported feeling compelled to break confidentiality when participants were perceived as being at risk of harm but not in cases of involvement in illegal activity. Situations in which accidental disclosures occurred were also identified. Researchers reported varying ways in which they protected the confidentiality of their participants in the dissemination of their research, including omitting data and changing key characteristics of participants. The implications of researchers’ practices on data integrity and relationships with participants are discussed.     

TOWARD THE IDENTIFICATION OF VARIABLES FOR EVALUATING FAMILY THERAPY WORKSHOPS*

If the field of family therapy is to improve the quality of its continuing education, a useful measurement of workshop quality must be developed. In a preliminary step towards this goal, 14 expert subjects from the field of family therapy were interviewed to identify variables and relationships that can be hypothesized to influence the quality–as assessed by participants–of family therapy workshops. This paper reports the opinions of the subjects, using counts and quotations to convey as much of the raw information as space allows, and presents the methods through which the information was organized by the authors into four categories and 58 (assumed to be interdependent) variables.     

The decline of British national pride

This article examines how national pride has changed in Britain since the beginning of the 1980s. We show that there have been large declines in pride and that this is exclusively generational in nature; with more recent generations having substantially lower levels of pride in 'Britishness' than previous generations. Confirming the reality of 'Thatcher's Children', we find that this process has been arrested to some extent, with generations coming of age in the 1980s and after having similar levels of pride to their immediate predecessors. We also find large regional disparities in these processes, with substantially bigger differences between new and old generations in Scotland, compared to England and Wales. Although generational differences in England and Wales appear to be generalized across a range of different aspects of nationhood that form citizens' national identity, generational differences in Scotland are more marked for certain types of national pride.