Working and caring for a disabled adopted child during a pandemic

Integrating work and family demands can be challenging for families caring for a child with one or more disabilities. The pandemic and its changes to work, schooling and service delivery potentially added to these challenges. This exploratory mixed methods study sought to understand how the pandemic affected adoptive parents' work–life fit and service use. A total of 200 participants responded to survey questions about parenting an adopted child with a disability prior to, and after, the onset of Covid-19. More than half of the parents (59.2%) reported that it was somewhat to very difficult to integrate both work and family demands. Parents with greater access to workplace flexibility and supportive supervisors had significantly less difficulties combining work and family. Families who reported more problems with accessing mental health services, special education and respite care reported significantly more challenges with work–family fit. Parents reported increased stress due to the pandemic changes, but many also shared positive changes such as more time for family. Online services were experienced as effective for some children and reduced time spent driving to appointments. Recommendations for workplace and social service practice and policy supporting adoptive parents of children with disabilities are discussed.     

“We're in this together”: Attachment insecurities,dyadic coping strategies,and relationship satisfaction in couples involved in medically assisted reproduction

Attachment is an important predictor of relationship satisfaction and attachment insecurities are a risk factor for couples under stress. Drawing from the Vulnerability–Stress–Adaptation model, we investigated whether dyadic coping strategies (DCS) would explain the links between attachment insecurities and relationship satisfaction in 97 couples involved in medically assisted reproduction (MAR). Path analyses revealed that for women and men, attachment insecurities (anxiety, avoidance) were associated with their own lower relationship satisfaction through their lower use of positive DCS. Attachment avoidance was also associated with participants' own lower relationship satisfaction through their own lower use of negative DCS. Men's attachment avoidance was also related to their partner's lower relationship satisfaction via their own and their partner's lower use of positive DCS. The findings suggest that promoting the use of positive DCS may be important to preserve relationship satisfaction in couples involved in MAR.     

Intimate Partner Violence,Minority Stress,and Sexual Risk-Taking Among U.S. Men Who Have Sex With Men

This article examines the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) among a national sample of Internet-recruited U.S. men who have sex with men (MSM) (n = 1,575), and associations between reporting of IPV, minority stress, and sexual risk-taking. Five outcomes are examined: experiences of physical and sexual violence, perpetration of physical and sexual violence, and unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) at last sexual encounter. MSM who reported experiencing more homophobic discrimination and internalized homophobia were more likely to report experiences of IPV. The results point to the need for prevention messages to address the external and internal stressors that influence both violence and sexual risk among MSM.     

Why is the History of Heterosexuality Essential? Beliefs About the History of Sexuality and Their Relationship to Sexual Prejudice

Heterosexual people with more positive attitudes to lesbians and gay men generally believe that homosexuality is immutable, is not a discrete social category, and that homosexuality exists in all cultures and time periods. Equivalent beliefs about heterosexuality and beliefs about components of sexuality have been less often researched. 136 people with diverse sexualities described heterosexuality as more universal across history and culture than homosexuality (Study 1). 69 heterosexual-identified participants similarly believed that love, identity, behavior, and desire were more historically invariant aspects of heterosexuality than of homosexuality (Study 2). Less prejudiced participants thought all components of homosexuality—except for identity—were more historically invariant. Teasing apart beliefs about the history of components of heterosexuality and homosexuality suggests that there is no “essential” relationship between sexual prejudice and the tension between essentialist and constructivist views about the history of sexual identity.     

出生性别比综合治理:有所为,有所不为

从1980年我国出生性别比越过正常值域至今,党和各级政府制订了种种措施进行综合治理,但取得的成效甚微。这一时期我国治理工作的特点有:重视禁止性法律法规的制定,但与之相配套的规章制度比较缺乏;重视目标任务的提出,但落实目标的措施比较缺乏;部门性、专项性规章制度较多,综合性规章制度比较缺乏。今后一段时期内综合治理工作,可以按照避实就虚、避难就易的原则,在大力发展社会经济、建立健全社会养老制度、相关法律法规的制定与完善、加大对两非行为的打击力度等方面有所作为;而在人口生育政策的调整、传统文化的改变等方面有所不为。     

Studying Postmodern Families: A Feminist Analysis of Ethical Tensions in Work and Family Research

Through dialogue and reflexivity, feminist researchers aim to create knowledge that is emergent from people in relationship with one another. Reflexivity is a process whereby researchers place themselves and their practices under scrutiny, acknowledging the ethical dilemmas that permeate the research process and impinge on the creation of knowledge. Guided by these tenets, we analyzed the relations among our research practices, our participants, and ourselves to understand and reduce the ethical tensions we encountered in a multimethod research project designed to investigate work and family processes. Our reflective efforts underscore both the active nature of research participants and the importance of the sociopolitical contexts within and around the research process. We make suggestions for more ethical research.     

Pharmaceutically-Made Men: Masculinities in Chad’s Emergent Oil Economy

This article explores masculinities and changes in men’s lives in the rural oil fields of Chad during the period of an oil and pipeline project described by the World Bank as a “model” for oil-as-development. In many parts of Africa, private sector investment is concentrated in the extractive industries, especially oil and gas projects. Africa’s emerging oil economies entail new institutional configurations, or what Michael Watts called an “oil complex,” that challenge antecedent norms and forms of identity. In this article, I describe the expectations, desires, and experiences of three distinct groups of men—those who found temporary employment on the project, those who continued to make a living from farming while contending with land expropriation, and those who migrated to oil field towns in search of work—to make three general points about the oil complex and masculinities in Chad. The structure of the global oil industry meant that local men who found jobs on the project could act as breadwinners and patriarchs, but only temporarily; local workers struggled post-employment with their exclusion from the possibilities associated with the project. Men who never found jobs continued to eke out a living from the land, but state-of-the-art policies governing land expropriation led simultaneously to conflict in families and greater economic interdependence among family members. Finally, in the low-media environment of the oil field region, ideas and images about sex, sexuality, and love emanating from the transient and hyper-masculine global oil industry workforce served as models for landless young men who migrated to oil field towns and who, in the absence of work, sought to transform themselves into objects of desire through the mediation of pharmaceuticals.