Gender-Differentiated Experience in the Peer Culture: Links to Intimacy in Preadolescence

This study tested claims that gender differences in intimacy are attributable to gender-differentiated experiences in the peer culture (i.e., male and female 'worlds'). Participants were 188 Canadian preadolescents (10–12 years, 106 girls) who completed questionnaires regarding the intimacy of their same-sex best friendship, intimate support received from peers, and two dimensions of culture–gender composition of the friendship network and participation in communal (i.e., intimacy-promoting) and agentic (intimacy-repressing) activities. Consistent with the 'two worlds' explanation (a) communal activity participation related positively and team sports negatively to same-sex friendship intimacy, but the latter only for boys, and (b) having other-sex friends predicted same-sex friendship intimacy for boys but not girls. The two worlds explanation, though supported, requires revision to accommodate findings that male and female preadolescents' activity participation overlapped considerably, intimate friendships were not limited to intimate contexts, agentic activities potentiated both agentic and communal goals, and peer cultural variables predicted intimacy better for boys than girls.     

AUTOTELECOMMUNICATION AND AUTOETHNOGRAPHY:

The aim of this essay is to initiate a cultural criticism of the autobiographic turn in postmodern ethnography by elaborating what I take to be some of the discursive and institutional conditions of possibility of autoethnography. I especially want to explore the links between Carolyn Ellis's autoethnography, Final Negotiations , and the melodramatic, talkshow explicit, emotional realism of television. In linking autoethnography and television, I want to hold off what might appear to be more pressing questions concerning the validity and reliability of the autoethnographic account and rather complicate, even more than autoethnographic writing already does, the context in which such questions are raised. I also want to suggest that criticism of autoethnography must be as inventive as is autoethnogrphic writing. Therefore, I have had to develop an imaginative form of cultural criticism, beginning with imagining how to connect autoethnography, cultural criticism, and television.     

Preadolescent Clique Stratification and the Hierarchy of Identity*

This article focuses on one of the most critical features of elementary school students' social lives: their peer friendship groups. Within each grade, and separated by gender, a hierarchy of friendship groups is stratified according to the dimension of status and popularity. This ranges from the popular clique at the top, to the wannabes who hang around the popular people's periphery seeking access, to the individuals forming smaller middle-level friendship circles, to the social isolates at the bottom. Membership at each of these ranks carries with it a distinct experience in terms of power and domination, intra-group stratification, type of leadership, and friendship relations, leading to a further stratification by group into a hierarchy of identity. We conclude by examining the basis for preadolescents' identity formation, augmenting previous models of identity and social position that rely exclusively on status with the addition of interactional and relational factors. This structural-relational model bridges the structural and processual symbolic interactionist models of identity, linking them at a Simmelian level of analysis.     

The complexity of ignorance

We examine the kinds of mistakes that are frequently made when the general public is asked to identify political symbols from the past half century. A particularly striking phenomenon is inversion: the event is recalled backwards, so that Rosa Parks is remembered for having given up her seat on a bus to a white person. A second type of error occurs by linking a name to the wrong person, as when John Dean is identified as a movie actor (James Dean). Still another type of mistake involves a correct substantive categorization but with temporal displacement, for example, the Tet Offensive is said to have occurred during the Korean War. In each of these cases we are able to speculate about the social and psychological processes that have led to the misremembering. However, not every error is lodged in respondents: we initially treated as incorrect all answers that did not fit our own expectations; but we were soon forced to recognize that other frames of reference could be brought to the task and lay equal claim to the truth. Names are alphabetical and authorship is equal.     

Key Worker Services for Disabled Children: the Views of Parents

This study reports the findings from 68 interviews with parents of disabled children who are users of seven key worker schemes in England and Wales. The interviews which lasted for one hour each, were tape‐recorded, transcribed and analysed according to both a priori and emerging themes. The findings from this study have implications for policy and practice, for example, the necessity of protected time for key workers, the necessity of conveying clear information about the key worker's role, the importance of access to training and information for the key worker, the need for key workers to be proactive, and for their involvement in care plan and review meetings. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau     

Parent-as-researcher: The politics of researching in the personal life

Several roles for conducting ethnographic research with children have been discussed, but one that has been omitted is the parent-as-researcher. In this paper, we describe some of the methodological advantages and disadvantages of the longitudinal ethnography of preadolescent children we conducted in our community using this methodological approach. We discuss the implications of our role lodging in this complete membership stance and the type of role relations, role identification, and role bifurcation that arose from this combined research/membership approach. We conclude by addressing the ethical issues associated with researching the community of one's own children. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at theWorkshop on Methodological Issues in Fieldwork with Children, Cortland, NY, October, 1994.     

Neighborhood Sectarian Displacement and the Battle for Baghdad: A Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy of Fear and Crimes Against Humanity in Iraq

We use two unique Iraq data sets to show how fear and uncertainty served to motivate the self‐fulfilling, neighborhood‐specific forces that followed the U.S.‐led invasion of Iraq. Sectarian criminal violence by armed Shia and Sunni organizations created a situation of ethnic/religious cleansing that reconfigured much of Baghdad. The article focuses on the case of how one particularly violent group, the Mahdi Army, mobilized through the coercive entrepreneurship of Muqtada al‐Sadr, used organized crime tactics of killing, torture, rape, kidnapping, harassment, threats, and forced displacement in a widespread and systematic attack against civilians that forced Sunni residents from their Baghdad neighborhoods. Ordinary Iraqis were victims of an amplified “self‐fulfilling prophecy of fear” that created the momentum for massive sectarian displacement in the battle for Baghdad. We demonstrate that there is a neighborhood specific effect of early postinvasion neighborhood fear net of intervening violence on displacement three years later, following the Al‐Qaeda Samara Shrine attack, confirming an effect of a self‐fulfilling prophecy of fear in the neighborhoods of Baghdad that compounded in a self‐reinforcing way. The changed demography of Baghdad was effectively consolidated by the later surge of U.S. forces that left in place the territorial gains made by the Shia‐led Mahdi Army at the expense of former Sunni residents. We conclude that this continues to matter because the resulting grievances have contributed to renewed violence.     

Ready,Set, Go … Again: Renewing an Academy–Agency Child Welfare Partnership

This article presents a case study of the renewed partnership between a midwestern public child welfare agency and a midwestern university school of social work. The partnership, which includes educating BSW and MSW students, preparing frontline child welfare case managers, and providing leadership training for supervisors and managers, demonstrates relational capital, relational embeddedness, and transparency, all of which are criteria for trust and strong partnerships. We discuss the unique development of collaborative relationships through the history of the partnership. This study provides an exemplar of how the academy and the agency communities can inform each other to enhance the well-being of children and families.