Happily Ever After? The Journey From Foster Care to Adoption

Providing the foster child with a forever family through adoption is often seen as a happy ending to the long and painful journey through foster care. This qualitative study explores this complex journey from foster care to adoption from the perspective of 30 young adults aged 18 to 25 who were adopted from the foster care system after the age of 8. The results indicate that the foster and adoption experience for these youth cannot be compartmentalized when trying to understand the impact adoption has had on their overall sense of self. Implications for future research to explore the emerging concept of foster/adoptive identity for older youth adopted through the foster care system are provided.     

Digital Peer Interactions Affect Risk Taking in Young Adults

Digital interactions are an increasingly common communication method among young adults, but little is known about whether such remote exchanges influence riskiness. The current study examined whether observing and interacting with, versus simply observing, a digital peer affect risk taking in young adults aged 18–25. Participants who remotely viewed risky behavior by a peer or computer increased risk taking; however, compared to a control condition, only exposure to risk‐encouraging messages from a digital peer resulted in sustained risk‐taking behavior. These findings suggest that short text‐based messages from a risk‐encouraging digital peer can influence risk‐taking behavior in young adults. Given the rapid proliferation of digital communication among this age group, these results highlight a potentially important source of peer influence on risky behavior.     

Theoretical, Empirical, and Practical Approaches to Intergroup Conflict

The study of intergroup relations has long been an interest of social scientists, particularly members of The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. The articles in this issue offer a wide variety of theoretical, empirical, and practical approaches to understanding and resolving national and international group conflict. This introductory article summarizes the original social psychological work that laid the foundation for contemporary thinking on intergroup relations, and presents an overview of each of the contributions in this issue. Also discussed are applications of social psychology to real-world intergroup conflicts.     

‘I Became a Mom’: Identity Changes in Mothers Receiving Public Assistance

ABSTRACT

This phenomenological study used individual, semistructured, face-to-face interviews to explore motherhood experiences among 15 women receiving public assistance in a large urban area on the West coast. A primary phenomenon observed was that motherhood was described as an experience of identity change, with resulting emotional, behavioral, and sense-of-self changes. Within this broad theme, two categories emerged: the experience and process of change, and consequences of change. It was concluded that motherhood may serve as an important catalyst for change in some women and that the context of poverty is essential for understanding the motherhood experience. These results suggest that interventions aimed at leveraging emerging motherhood identities may be beneficial in setting women on the path out of poverty, drug addiction, and incarceration. Future research should examine the consequences of maternal change within the specific context of the stages of change documented in the recovery process from drug addiction.     

Family income at the bottom and at the top: Income sources and family characteristics

Attention has recently been focused on wealth as a source of long-term economic security and on wealth ownership as a crucial aspect of the racial economic divisions in the United States. This literature, however has been concerned primarily with the wealth gap between poor and middle-class families, and between the white and black middle class. In this paper, we investigate the incomes of families at the top and bottom of the family income distribution. We examine the sources of income and the demographic characteristics of these high-income and low-income families using family level data from the 1988 to 2003 Current Population Surveys.     

Social Class Differentials During Fertility Decline: England and Wales Revisited

This paper reviews the relationship between landholdings and fertility. Two dimensions of land are identified as salient for fertility behaviour: size of operational holdings and land ownership. It is suggested that these two dimensions and the resulting income streams have disparate effects on fertility. Size of holdings is assumed to have a positive influence on fertility due to the greater labour demands of larger holdings, while land ownership is posited to exert a negative long-term effect because of the increase in old-age security associated with the income returns to equity. In addition to these effects on the demand for children, landholding is also thought to influence the supply of children. A systematic review of the literature finds support for the impact of both dimensions of landholding on fertility preferences, contraceptive behaviour, the proximate determinants and fertility. Both the demand and supply of children appear to be influenced by landholdings. The observed regularities suggest the need for further research on this connection, not the abandonment of this line of inquiry.