Deserving Victims?: Sexual Status and the Social Construction of Violence

Theoretical understanding of the meaning of the term violence is underdeveloped. This paper examines the question of how violence to the person is socially defined, and in particular how understandings of violence are both gendered and sexualised. It highlights how victim characteristics, as well as the social and interactional contexts in which violence occurs, influence interpretative frameworks, with specific reference to the binary distinction between the public and private and to notions of culpability and victimisation. This entails a consideration of the social meanings which constitute notions of a 'person' with a 'right to life' and occupation of 'public space'. The importance of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy in theorising violence is also considered. These themes and issues are examined in relation to a relatively new area of study; the case example of public violence towards lesbians and gay men.     

“It’s Not My Fault!” Status,Attributions, and Perceptions of Injustice: The Case of Custodians and Teachers

Perceptions of injustice rely upon a sense-making process in which individuals attempt to understand why and how it occurs. We draw from the attribution-of-blame model of justice judgments to examine how two work groups of disparate status make sense of the treatment and outcomes engendered by their interactions. Data from 27 in-depth interviews with custodians and teachers reveal that when custodians perceive disrespect from teachers and teachers perceive that custodians do not fulfill properly their duties, their attributions are shaped by their status position. Although both make internal attributions to each other for their injustice, teachers do not recognize how they perpetrate injustice against custodians and custodians perceive greater injustice by identifying how external factors affect their performance and blame. This unjustified blame fosters counterproductive work behaviors, illustrating how interdependencies fuel a cycle of injustice. We discuss the implications of these findings for the school and justice processes.     

First Person Accounts and Sociological Explanations of Delinquency*

Cinquante‐six garçons du secondaire ont expliqué pourquoi ils avaient perpétré ou non certains actes de délinquance (combat, vandalisme, vol à l'étalage, usage de drogues). Ils ont aussi ciblé des théories sociologiques de la délinquance qui s'appliquent à leur comportement. Leurs réponses montrent que les deux types de données se recoupent beaucoup. L'effort, la théorie gánérate, les pairs, le contrôle social, les techniques de neutralisation et la prévention sont importants, mais non l'étiquetage ni l'imitation des médias. Une théorie de contingence de la délinquance est proposée. Fifty‐six high school boys were asked to explain in their own words why they had engaged in or refrained from certain delinquencies: fighting, vandalism, petty theft, truancy and drug use. They were also given the opportunity, via a checklist, to tell whether selected sociological theories applied to their behaviour. Their responses revealed considerable overlap in the two forms of data. Strain, general theory, peers, social control, techniques of neutralization and deterrence are important in varying combinations. Labelling and media imitation are not. A contingency theory of delinquency is proposed.     

Can Heterosexism Harm Organizations? Predicting the Perceived Organizational Citizenship Behaviors of Gay and Lesbian Employees

An initial test and validation of a model predicting perceived organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of lesbian and gay employees were conducted using structural equation modeling. The proposed structural model demonstrated acceptable goodness of fit and structural invariance across 2 samples (ns = 311 and 295), which suggested that altruistic OCB performance is precipitated by workplace outness. Furthermore, stigmatization salience and organizational climate for heterosexism predict levels of workplace outness. Organizational climate for heterosexism is negatively related to stigmatization salience. When the model was tested on 2 samples, all structural paths except 1 were significant.     

Seasonal activity patterns of sympatric eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) and fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) in a Midwestern metropolitan region

Niche partitioning reduces interspecific competition, facilitating coexistence. In urban ecosystems, however, habitat loss reduces species’ ability to spatially partition activity. Temporal partitioning may thus increase in urban areas as species, unable to avoid each other spatially, partition time to avoid competition. In Midwestern US cities, eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) and fox squirrels (S. niger) co-occur and compete for resources. We identified urban gray and fox squirrel activity patterns and how they vary with season, land cover, and among sites where they do and do not co-occur using camera-trap data. Both species’ activity patterns varied with season and canopy and impervious surface cover. Gray squirrel activity patterns varied in the presence of fox squirrels only in the fall, providing limited support for our temporal partitioning hypothesis. Temporal niche partitioning may thus play a role in supporting these species co-existence when competition is seasonally-elevated (e.g., fall hording), but appears less important in other seasons.

     

Measuring the Dynamics of Interactional Synchrony

Past research has revealed that natural social interactions contain interactional synchrony. The present study describes new methods for measuring interactional synchrony in natural interactions and evaluates whether the behavioral synchronization involved in social interactions is similar to dynamical synchronization found generically in nature. Two methodologies, a rater-coding method and a computational video image method, were used to provide time series representations of the movements of the co-actors as they enacted a series of jokes (i.e., knock?Cknock jokes). Cross-spectral and relative phase analyses of these time series revealed that speakers?? and listeners?? movements contained rhythms that were not only correlated in time but also exhibited phase synchronization. These results suggest that computational advances in video and time series analysis have greatly enhanced our ability to measure interactional synchrony in natural interactions. Moreover, the dynamical synchronization in these natural interactions is commensurate with that found in more stereotyped tasks, suggesting that similar organizational processes constrain bodily activity in natural social interactions and, hence, have implications for the understanding of joint action generally.     

Social Constructionism and Supervision: Experiences of AAMFT Supervisors and Supervised Therapists

A phenomenological research process was used to investigate the supervision experience for supervisors and therapists when supervisors use a social constructionist perspective. Participants of the one‐to‐one interviews were six AAMFT Approved Supervisors and six therapists providing counseling to individuals, couples and families. The findings suggest supervisors were committed to their self‐identified supervision philosophy and intentionally sought out congruence between epistemology and practice. The shared experience of therapists indicates they associated desirable supervision experiences with their supervisors’ social constructionist perspective. Our findings also indicated that supervisors’ and therapists’ understanding of social constructionism included the more controversial concepts of agency and extra‐discursiveness. This research has taken an empirical step in the direction of understanding what the social constructionist supervision experience is like for supervisors and therapists. Our findings suggest a linkage between epistemology and supervision practice and a satisfaction with the supervision process.     

Social Cognitive Factors,Support, and Engagement: Early Adolescents’ Math Interests as Precursors to Choice of Career

The authors examined the central hypothesis that students’ early perceptions of support and sense of engagement in math classes and math activities strongly influence the broadening or narrowing of their math interest. The focus was on the first wave of qualitative data collected from 5th‐, 7th‐, and 9th‐grade students during the 2007–2008 academic year as part of a longitudinal study. Findings indicate the importance of using group work and extrinsic motivation in middle school math classes to broaden interest; peer classroom behavior was often a detractor of math interest.