The sexual division of dieting: women's voices

This article reports the findings of focus group research on Australian women who have engaged in dieting practices to lose weight. There have been few qualitative sociological studies on dieting, despite it being a common practice among western women. From the empirical data in this study three distinct themes emerged: women participate in the perpetuation and reinforcement of the thin ideal; women clearly trade-off health in the pursuit of dieting to lose weight; and the dominant discourse of the thin ideal is not only mediated in various ways, but is also contested by a reverse discourse of size acceptance. A sociology of food and the body enables the discourses in the area of dieting women to be deconstructed, offering an insight into the gendered context of food, which has implications for the sociology of health and illness.     

The Emergence of the Listener to Speaker Component of Naming in Children as a Function of Multiple Exemplar Instruction

We tested the effect of multiple exemplar instruction on the transfer of stimulus function for unfamiliar pictures across listener responses (i.e., matching and pointing) and speaker responses (i.e., pure tacts and impure tacts). Three preschool students, who were 3- and 4-year-old males and did not have the listener to speaker component of the naming repertoire, participated in the experiment. The dependent variable was numbers of correct responses to probe trials of both untaught listener responses (“point to__”) and speaker responses (tact and impure tacts) following mastery of matching responses for two sets of five unfamiliar pictures (Set 1 and Set 3). After each participant mastered matching (e.g., “match Labrador”) for Set 1 pictures they were probed on the three untaught responses to Set 1 words. That is, they were asked to point to Labrador, tact the picture of Labrador, and respond to the picture of a Labrador and the question “What is this?” Next, the participants were taught mastery of all four types of responses using MEI for a second set of five pictures (Set 2) and probed again on the 3 untaught Set 1 responses. Finally, matching responses were taught to mastery for a novel set of pictures (Set 3) and then probed on the three untaught responses. The results showed that untaught speaker responses emerged at 60% to 85% for two participants, and 40%–70% for one participant. We discuss the role of instructional history in the development of the listener to speaker component of naming.     

Understanding Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Arrest: The Role of Individual,Home, School,and Community Characteristics

Contact with the justice system can lead to a range of poor health and social outcomes. While persons of color are disproportionately represented in both the juvenile and criminal justice systems, reasons for these patters remain unclear. This study sought to examine the extent and sources of differences in arrests during adolescence and young adulthood among blacks, whites, and Hispanics in the USA. Multilevel cross-sectional logistic regression analyses were conducted using data from waves I and IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 12,752 respondents). Results showed significantly higher likelihood of having ever been arrested among blacks, when compared to whites, even after controlling for a range of delinquent behaviors (odds ratio = 1.58, 95 % confidence interval = 1.27, 1.95). These black–white disparities were no longer present after accounting for racial composition of the neighborhood, supporting the growing body of research demonstrating the importance of contextual variables in driving disproportionate minority contact with the justice system.     

When they call me cripple: a group of South African adolescents with cerebral palsy attending a special needs school talk about being disabled

Central to the experience of disability are social and political forces and discourses which position people in particular ways. Little is known about the experiences of individuals with disabilities living in low-income and middle-income countries. We investigate the lived experience of a group of South African adolescents with cerebral palsy. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 adolescents with cerebral palsy. Data were analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. The participants position themselves between the medical and social models of disability, in a liminal space between ‘normal’ and ‘disabled’, but do not identify with either group. They describe a ‘hierarchy of disability’ and position themselves in-between more serious sensory impairments and less serious emotional and learning disabilities. Being disabled is associated with being taken care of, infantilised and being powerless. Consequently they aspire to achieve independence and autonomy, and face danger, which are seen as signifiers that they are not disabled.     

Young hero Simba defeats old villain Scar: Oedipus wrecks the Lyin’ King

Prior studies of Disney's animated film The Lion King focus on its flattering portrayal of a patriarchical society in which a segment of residents (hyenas) are marginalized. These analyses, however, neglect Oedipal themes and the respectful portrayal of parents that may be key to the film's great popularity.     

Corporate Involvement in Community Affairs*

An extensive monitoring of the Jones and Laughlin (J&L) steel mill in Hennepin, Illinois suggests that absentee-owned corporations have the ability to involve themselves in local community affairs while maintaining an illusion of non-involvement. Three techniques J&L employed to exert influence are described: unilateral actions, cooptation, and intervention. The failure of reputational leadership data to identify corporate influentials is used to suggest both the success J&L had in concealing corporate influence and the inadequacy of the reputational technique for fully identifying power structures in verticalized communities.     

Status Distinctions in Interaction: Social Selection and Exclusion at an Elite Nightclub

Although social status plays a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of social inequalities, how status processes operate in naturalistic social contexts remains less clear. In the following article, I provide a case study of doormen—individuals who simultaneously represent status experts and status judges—at a highly exclusive nightclub to investigate how people draw status distinctions in micro-social settings. Using interview and ethnographic data, I analyze on what bases doormen evaluate the relative worth of patrons and confer the status prize of admission. I find that in making such decisions, doormen drew from a constellation of competence and esteem cues, which were informed by contextually specific status schemas about the relative material, moral, and symbolic worth of particular client groups. Moreover, the ways in which doormen used these cues and schema depended on the identity of the specific patron being evaluated. As such, I argue that processes of interpersonal evaluation and status conferral are contextually specific, culturally embedded, and interpersonally variable. Despite such variations, a patron’s perceived social connections seemed to outweigh other types of cues in admissions decisions. I conclude by discussing these findings in light of both status characteristics theory and Bourdieu’s work on the transubstantiation of capital to suggest that social capital is a powerful status cue that can, under certain conditions, be a more potent source of social distinction and status advantage, or hold a greater conversion value, in systems of stratification than other types of qualities.