Early Adult Obesity and U.S. Women's Lifetime Childbearing Experiences

Literature from multiple disciplines suggests that women who are obese during early adulthood may accumulate social and physiological impediments to childbearing across their reproductive lives. This led the authors to investigate whether obese young women have different lifetime childbearing experiences than leaner peers by analyzing data from 1,658 female participants in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Study sample members were nulliparous women ages 20–25 in 1982. The authors examined their childbearing experiences between 1982 and 2006 and found that young women who were obese at baseline had higher odds of remaining childless and increased odds of underachieving fertility intentions than young women who were normal weight at baseline. These results suggest that obesity has long‐term ramifications for women's childbearing experiences with respect to whether and how many children women have in general and relative to the number of children they want.     

Do student service members/veterans experience worse mental health stigma than their peers? A comparative study in a national sample

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Examine differences in mental health treatment-related stigma in student service members and veterans (SSM/Vs) and peers from 57 post-secondary institutions across the United States. Methods: In total, 909 SSM/Vs and 1818 demographically- and institutionally-matched non-SSM/Vs completed assessments of stigma-related barriers to mental health service utilization as part of the Healthy Minds Study between 2011 and 2015. Results: When compared to non-SSM/V peers, SSM/Vs reported more mental health treatment-related stigma toward help-seekers and less confidence in the helpfulness of therapy/counseling and psychotropic medications. However, effect sizes were small in magnitude (ds = .10 to .16), and depressed students in both groups reported greater stigma. Conclusions: SSM/Vs experience greater treatment-related stigma than non-SSM/V peers, which may deter service use in many cases. However, differences in stigma were small and other under-studied barriers to help-seeking may apply to the substantive subset of SSM/Vs and non-SSM/Vs who may benefit from utilizing available services.     

Labels and leaders: The influence of framing on leadership emergence

In two studies, this paper examines the influence of task framing on leadership emergence in mixed-gender dyads. In Study 1, we found that males are more likely to emerge as leaders when a paper-folding task is framed as masculine (i.e., Building Project) relative to feminine (i.e., Art Project). Furthermore, females are more likely to emerge as leaders when a paper-folding task is framed as feminine relative to masculine. In Study 2, we conceptually replicate these results using a weaving task (framed as Knot-Tying Task vs. Hair-Braiding Task) and find that perceived competence is the mechanism through which task framing affects leadership emergence. Taken together, these results suggest that task framing can influence the emergence of leaders because of changes in perceptions of competence. These findings are discussed in the context of related theoretical findings and managerial implications are elaborated on.     

Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy: Blooming or bloomin’ awful? A review of the literature

BackgroundNausea and vomiting in pregnancy (NVP) is a normal, commonly experienced affliction of early pregnancy. Despite this, its impact on women's lives is not necessarily minimal. For some women, the implications of NVP are substantial with multi-faceted effects, hindering their ability to maintain usual life activities, and particularly their ability to work. In an effort to understand the effect of NVP, several researchers have developed NVP measurement tools, which enable an understanding of NVP's effect on quality of life (QOL).ProblemThis paper seeks to provide a review of the literature to explore the impact of NVP on women's quality of life, particularly their ability to maintain social and professional commitments.MethodMedline, CINAHL, PsychINFO, Ebsco, Science Direct, Health Source, Academic Search Premiere, Cochrane databases were extensively searched using Boolean operators with various combinations of relevant terms: nausea, vomiting, pregnancy, emesis, quality of life, QOL, NVPQOL, PUQE, SF-12, SF-36 and limited to those published from 1999 onwards. Papers were scrutinised to include those discussing the impact of normal NVP on women's lives, particularly their QOL with careful exclusion of those addressing hyperemesis gravidarum (HG).FindingsNVP has a significant effect on women's QOL and therefore their ability to maintain day-to-day activities as well as work capacity. This has implications for the woman, her partner, her family and her employers.ConclusionIt is important that all maternity care workers consider the impact of NVP on the woman's QOL and that care is given not to minimise this experience. Further research is warranted which considers ways in which women can best manage this experience in relation to social and professional commitments. Given the authors were able to identify only one Australian study in this area, published in 2000 and utilising non-NVP specific QOL measurement tools, there exists scope for additional local studies using NVP-specific QOL tools to determine the impact of QOL for Australian women and therefore Australian society.     

Labour pains: Some considerations on the difficulties of researching juvenile prostitution

This paper reflects on an empirical, retrospective study of juvenile prostitution. It aims to explore the ways in which the practical constraints, practical difficulties and ethical considerations that are inevitably encountered in a 'sensitive' area of research, such as young people who are exploited through prostitution, are intrinsically linked to choice of methods and the process of the research. It argues that in such research pragmatism in choice of methods is necessary to achieve the epistemological aims, of allowing the voices of disadvantaged young people who are exploited through their involvement in prostitution to be heard, while maintaining ethical integrity. In addition the paper reflects on the emotional impact of research such as this on researchers and suggests ways in which research design and the collaborative efforts of research teams may minimise potentially negative impacts on researchers. The author suggests that by anticipating problems posed by research into young people who are sexually exploited through prostitution, ethical and practical difficulties might be negotiated to enable research in this field to be taken forward in the future.     

Intra-group variation in conservative Christians’ gender ideologies (1972–2006)

This paper illuminates significant intra-group variations in the gender ideologies of conservative Christians in the United States. Between the 1970s and the present, both conservative Christian men and women have become increasingly accepting of women's roles in politics and women's participation in the workforce. Religiously conservative women have become more opposed to sexual freedoms and abortion rights. Religiously conservative men have become less opposed over time to sexual freedoms and have not changed with regard to abortion ideology. In general, for both men and women, conservative Christians who are older, attend church services more often and have less education tend to be more conservative in their gender ideologies. For females only, higher incomes lead to less conservative gender ideologies, and living in the southern region of the United States tends to decrease their support for female politicians.     

Radclyffe Hall, E. Lynn Harris, and Franz Kafka: Christianity, Queerness, and the Politics of Normalcy

This essay examines Christian tropes in three queer texts: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), E. Lynn Harris's Just As I Am (1994), and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). At issue are the linkages between queer theory and literature, on the one hand, and Christian paradigms, on the other hand. This essay considers whether, insofar as they deploy Christian tropes, these texts sustain a politics of the normal that inevitably subvert queer-positive representations.     

Local cross‐sector partnerships

We focus in this article on the challenges local governmental (municipal) and third‐sector (nonprofit) organizations face when they seek to work collaboratively or in partnership. We build on the findings of an action research project to draw out the practical implications of cross‐sector working for the organizations involved. We describe jointly agreed suggestions for tackling the challenges that emerged when third‐sector organizations and local governmental agencies themselves worked collaboratively in a search for mutually acceptable solutions. Finally, we draw out learning points on cross‐sector working for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers.     

Making Sexuality Visible in Australian Social Work Education

As a social axis of analysis, sexuality has not received the same level of recent attention from social work educators in Australia as it has from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere. Following McNay's notion of ‘situated intersubjectivity’ as a theoretical framework, this paper sets out a socio-cultural approach to making sexuality visible. It details a teaching exemplar, demonstrating a number of experiential exercises designed to enhance final year social work student investigations of cultural discourses and social practices of people's everyday sexual lives, including sexual diversity, homophobia, heterosexuality and heteronormativity.     

Report of the ASA Technical Panel on the Census Undercount

A new model is proposed for the joint distribution of paired survival times generated from clinical trials and certain reliability settings. The new model can be considered an extension to the bivariate exponential models studied in the literature. Here, a more flexible bivariate Weibull model will be derived, and two exact parametric tests for testing the equality of marginal survival distributions are developed.