Personal narratives, relational selves: residential histories in the living and telling

This article is set in the context of debates about how far social identity and agency should be seen as individualised or relational concepts. It examines how people in a qualitative study in the North of England constructed personal narratives about their residential histories. These were fundamentally about identity and agency, because they centred upon ‘what mattered’ more widely to the narrator, and upon what had constrained or enabled action and change in their life. The narratives were characterised by contextuality, contingency and in particular by relationality. Four styles of relational narrative are explored: relational inclusion and co‐presence, relational participation, relational constraint and conflict, and relational individualism. Overall, it is argued that both agency and identity need to be understood relationally, and that through their narratives people in the study were constructing relational selves. It is suggested that a misreading of personal narrative as an individualistic discursive form has fuelled the hold of the concept of individualism on popular and sociological imagination, in the face of increasingly compelling empirical evidence about the extent and nature of people's connectivity with others.     

Establishing a Parenting Program for Fathers in Substance Abuse Treatment

This paper describes a systemic, trauma and attachment model for a parenting program for fathers in residential substance abuse treatment. It emphasises the complex nature of delivering parenting programs in this context and the importance of going beyond simple linear principles of reward and punishment, upon which many other parenting programs are predicated.     

Social Return on Investment of an Innovative Employment Option for Persons with Developmental Disabilities

Common Ground Co‐operative (CGC) provides training, administrative, and job coach support to five social enterprises for which persons with developmental disabilities are the non‐share‐capital partners. This study examines the use of social return on investment (SROI) as a means of determining the value of program impacts related to quality‐of‐life changes for enterprise partners and their families. The process of conducting this SROI analysis is described and analyzed in terms of its utility in employment services for persons with developmental disabilities.     

All My Friends Are Doing It: Potentially Offensive Sexual Behavior Perpetration Within Adolescent Social Networks

The current study used social network analysis to investigate peer network and individual predictors of potentially offensive sexual behaviors among high school students. Ninth‐grade students (n = 308; 158 girls) completed surveys assessing their perpetration of potentially offensive sexual behaviors against their peers, as well as measures of their sexualized gender stereotypes and propensity to self‐monitor. Participants selected up to eight of their closest friends from a roster. Results revealed homophily of potentially offensive sexual behaviors, such that adolescents perpetrated similar amounts of physical/verbal, electronic, and homophobic behaviors as their friends. Characteristics of the peer network (e.g., mean network perpetration, centrality of individual, and gender composition) and the individual adolescent (e.g., gender, sexualized gender stereotypes, self‐monitoring) predicted adolescents’ own behavior.     

How a Nonprofitness Orientation Influences Collective Civic Action: The Effects of Civic Engagement and Political Participation

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This research addresses the question of how the institutional frame of “nonprofitness” shapes the civic...     

The Multi-method Comprehensive Review: Synthesis and Analysis when Scholarship is International,Interdisciplinary, and Immense

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This article presents a new strategy for reviewing large, multidisciplinary academic literatures: a multi-method...