Accounting for Men’s Refusal of Heterosex: A Story-Completion Study With Young Adults

In the present study we bring together theory regarding the construction of heterosexuality and masculinities to understand the shifting and changing terrain of heterosexual sex (heterosex). We use inductive qualitative content analysis of story completion data to discover the different ways that heterosex is constructed by the male and female respondents in scenarios where women initiate sex and men, at first, refuse. The stories represented a spectrum of responses that reify and subvert dominant understandings of heterosex. Five major themes were generated from the current data (1) men should initiate sex, (2) he wants to take it slowly, (3) it is natural for men to want sex, (4) it is men’s job to look after women, and (5) coercion. We discuss in detail the dominant narratives described by women and men and how they may be shifting. The study thus provides a rich, experience-based representation of heterosexual sexual activity and suggests subtle shifts in how masculinity is managed within heterosexual relationships.     

Divorced Parents’ Qualitative and Quantitative Reports of Children's Living Arrangements

We use data from a sample of divorced parents in Wisconsin (N = 1,392) to examine how parents describe their children's living arrangements. When the children spend substantial time in both parents’ homes, both parents are less likely to use the phrase live with to describe living arrangements. When children spend most nights with their mother, mothers are more likely than fathers to state that the children live with their mother. Together, these findings suggest that family researchers no longer can rely on simple questions to capture complex living arrangements. We need clearer and more careful question wording and, in some instances, follow‐up questions to accurately describe where children live.     

The Diagnostic Home Visit: An Aid in Training and Case Consultation

The home visit has long been recognized as a useful vehicle for diagnosis and therapy. It has a potential for another useful function in that home observations can provide the teaching therapist and consultant with the vivid details of family interaction necessary to useful supervision. Parents may be poor observers and/or reporters of problem situations; they may also be reluctant to describe for various reasons. The student therapist may become bewildered, frustrated, and discouraged over the lack of material or inability to help. This report describes how supervisors can then use home observations as a source of fresh diagnostic hypotheses, and as a basis for reformulation of treatment goals or of technical approaches.     

Carved in flesh? Inscribing body, identity and desire

This paper opens up questions regarding the ways in which reading the body leads to limited and limiting notions of identity. These questions are based around a critique of an ethnography of lesbian body-modification which I problematize in a number of ways. I suggest that reading the body of another is both methodologically and politically problematic. I reflect on how this approach confuses the complexity of body and identity and the ways in which this relates to establishing problematic boundaries of lesbian identity. I suggest an embodied identity cannot be fully understood or incorporated within any notion of the body as fixed or finite, and that neglecting the variability and mutability of the body is antithetical to political strategies of inclusion and equality.     

Community development and community renewal: tracing the workings of power

Although Third Way community programmes produce practice opportunitiesthat appear familiar to community development workers, theyalso produce a play of power that is significant in the deliveryof some crucial neoliberal shifts in governance and subjectconstitution. This paper juxtaposes current theorizing of howpower works within advanced liberal polities with stories oflocal practice in urban and community renewal sites. The argumentis that practice stories are often positioned in relation toa narrow spectrum of power relations, and this obscures theways we are currently governed or exercise power in relationto ourselves and each other. A narrow gaze may point to successfuloutcomes of an immediate kind, yet contribute to wider agendasthat more broadly undermine local people and processes. Thequestion posed by the paper is not whether to engage in renewalactivities, but rather how to interrogate the power dynamicsof such engagements in the stories we tell of practice.     

Perceptions of geography students in the USA and Egypt on global issues

The study aimed to compare the perceptions of Egyptian and US students on global issues. The authors developed a survey of global issues and administered it to sample of 321 Geography students in the USA and Egypt. The survey tapped five issues: global citizenship, cultural diversity, global conflicts, nuclear arms race, and global warming. The results showed that there were significant differences in Egyptian and US students’ perception of each of the global issues.