Love and Hooking Up in the New Millennium: Communication Technology and Relationships among Urban African American and Puerto Rican Young Adults

Communication technology is a central feature of young people's lives, but its role in romantic and sexual relationships has not been thoroughly examined. This article describes how young adults use communication technology for partnering across relationship stages (formation, maintenance, and dissolution) and types (serious/casual), and proposes implications of usage in relationships. This study analyzed qualitative data from a five-week, prospective, coital diary method with related debriefing interviews (N = 70) of African American and Puerto Rican men and women aged 18 to 25 years in Hartford and Philadelphia. Cell phones, including calls, text messaging, and mobile Internet, were the most common forms of communication technology used for partnering goals. Participants reported using cell phones to pursue partnering goals across all relationship stages, including formation (meeting, screening, and getting to know new partners), maintaining existing relationships, and breaking up. Cell phone uses depended on the type of relationship (serious/casual) and the participants' intentions and desires. Results indicated that cell phones are an important element of communication among young adults in romantic and sexual relationships. Specific features of cell phone communication shape the process and context of partnering. Future research should explore emerging communication technologies and implications for psychosocial development, dating violence, and sexual behavior.     

Gender and Exploitation: Resources,Structure, and Rewards in Cross-Sex Social Exchange

Abstract

The effects of resources imbalance on reward allocation strategies are studied in 136 mixed-sex dyads to determine the extent to which the allocator rewards his or her partner on an equal basis with self. Three predictions are tested: (1) Subjects with a resource advantage will reward themselves more so than they will reward their partners; (2) Subjects with a resource advantage in a certain (versus uncertain) structural situation will reward self and other more equally than subjects with a resource advantage in an uncertain situation will; and (3) females with a resource advantage will reward self and other more equally than males with a resource advantage will Clear-cut support is observed for the first prediction only. Other results reveal significant interaction effects between structural condition and gender of allocator. Prediction 2 is supported for males only while Prediction 3 holds only for the uncertain structural condition. The discussion focuses on the importance of social structural conditions for explaining similarities and differences in the allocational behavior of men and women toward each other in social exchange relations.     

Breastfeeding and employment: A propensity score matching approach

ABSTRACT

It is well established within the scholarship on work and the family that many women experience difficulty juggling work and family responsibilities. Challenges to breastfeeding after giving birth are a specific manifestation of this work–family conflict. Many women report that they are unable to continue breastfeeding upon return to paid work. In this article, I analyze a subsample of 746 women from the United States Infant Feeding Practices Survey II to assess the effect of new mothers’ employment status and workplace characteristics on breastfeeding duration. This research reveals that new mothers who return to paid employment within three months of giving birth breastfeed an average of five fewer weeks than new mothers who do not return to paid work for three months or more. In addition, among mothers who return to paid work within three months, full-time workers breastfeed an average of more than 15 fewer weeks than part-time workers. These substantial differences in the duration of breastfeeding suggest that women face significant obstacles to combining paid work and mothering in the postpartum period.     

Letters to the Editor

This paper discusses the necessity for deroling in family therapy role plays in training situations. A theoretical exploration of the experience of role play participants is undertaken. This theoretical discussion suggests a rationale and procedure for the deroling process.     

Construction, Validation and Application of the Measurement of Social Cohesion in 47 European Countries and Regions

This paper aims to present a theoretically based, multidimensional and comparable measurement of social cohesion, applicable in 47 European countries/regions using the most recent micro-level data of the European Value Study (EVS) from 2008 that build upon the previous research conducted on the EVS data from 1999 covering 33 countries. The analysis is conducted in five steps. In the first part, we create a set of measurable intermediate indicators that correspond to the social cohesion dimensions suggested by the theory. In the second part, we verify whether these indicators empirically corroborate the multidimensional structure of the concept proposed by the theory. The third part examines whether the obtained intermediate indicators of social cohesion form the same constructs across countries and whether they can yield a cross-country equivalent measure of social cohesion. In the fourth step, composite scores of all dimensions of social cohesion are calculated for all analysed countries/regions. The last step shows a practical application of the obtained indices and compares levels of social cohesion in six broader geographical regions of Europe to demonstrate the applicability of the measurement in comparative research.     

Health disparities in military veterans with PTSD: influential sociocultural factors

Health disparities based on sociocultural factors such as gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, culture, and access to health care can potentially complicate the early diagnosis and effective management of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Research indicates that among those individuals affected by health disparities, there is a greater burden of illness and disability, higher morbidity and mortality rates, and increased behavioral risk factors. The purpose of this article is to highlight the sociocultural factors that affect the development of PTSD and to publicize health disparities in military combat veterans.     

Der Personalverantwortliche als strategischer Partner

Since Ulrich (Human resource champions: the next agenda for adding value and delivering results, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1997) shaped the strategic role of HR managers, his concept of an HR business partner has been controversially discussed by researchers and practitioners. Explanations about when and how HR managers act as strategic business partners have found limited attention in the literature. Based on the theory of reasoned action developed by Ajzen und Fishbein (Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1980; J Pers Soc Psychol 27(1):41?C57, 1973), we hypothesize a positive relation between personal attitudes as well as subjective norm and the behaviour of HR managers to act as a strategic business partner. Results of the German Cranet survey in 2009 show that expected positive consequences influence the personal attitude, whereas the acceptance of the human resources as well as the existence of an HR strategy within the organisation is positively related with subjective norm. Hence, both attitude and subjective norm positively influence the behaviour of HR managers to act as a strategic business partner.     

Self-Reported Fears as Indicators of Young Children’s Well-Being in Societal Change: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Our main interest in this paper is in studying children’s well-being by using children themselves as informants and fear as an indicator of insecurity from cross-cultural and longitudinal perspectives. More specifically our paper documents the changes in the content and prevalence of children’s fears in two neighboring countries, Finland and Estonia, during the last decade. The study was carried out in 1993 and replicated in 2002/2003 in both countries with the random samples of total number of 420 five to six-year-old children (in Estonia 115 in 1993 and 91 in 2002; in Finland 105 and 109, respectively). For both countries the decade in question was a period of social, political and economic transition including post-socialist transformation in Estonia. Especially informationalization and globalization had a profound impact on the everyday life of parents and children. The increase of insecurity among children in both countries was expected. Children’s fears were investigated by means of an individual semi-structured and picture-aided interview. The most important findings are: the prevalence of children’s self-reported fears has generally increased during the ten years, especially among the Estonian children. The most significant increase was observed in both countries in fears of imagination-related things including television-related fears, fears of imagined creatures and of nightmares parallel to children’s increased media-exposure in daily life. Despite the increase of␣general welfare in both countries our results suggest the opposite tendency among young children; decrease of safety and increase of insecurity. The level of children’s insecurity was higher in Estonian than in Finland at both times. It is noteworthy that some fears of young children are ‚universal’ (fear of getting lost, fear of darkness, fear of being alone), while some fears are more context dependent (television-induced fears, fear of strange people). Young children proved to be competent informants of their condition and well able to provide essential and invaluable information about their problems and well-being. An erratum to this article can be found at