Gender and Performance Capital among Local Musicians

This article extends Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how learning spaces in the Toronto folk and metal scenes create gendered access to a field-specific form of cultural capital: performance capital, or the instrumental and interpersonal skills required to perform music. Folk musicians develop performance capital in open-access spaces, such as workshops and open stages at local folk clubs, while metal musicians learn in private spaces such as garages, basements, and rented rehearsal rooms. Folk’s learning spaces are open to all aspiring musicians, while access to heavy metal’s learning spaces relies on social networks from which women are often excluded. These different processes of capital development can lead to greater or lesser opportunities for women to become cultural producers: In Toronto, women make up approximately five percent of heavy metal musicians, but almost half of practicing folk musicians.     

Cultural Attunement in Therapy With Mexican‐Heritage Couples: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Client and Therapist Experience

There is a need for culturally attuned approaches for couple therapy with Mexican/Mexican‐Americans. This qualitative grounded theory study utilized interviews with 11 client couples of Mexican heritage and 14 marital and family therapists to shed light on how Latino and non‐Latino therapists co‐construct positive experiences of cultural attunement with Mexican and Mexican‐American couple clients. Analysis identified a model of cultural connection through personal engagement with four interrelated phases: (a) mutual invitation, (b) shared engagement, (c) expanding personal connection, and (d) creating cultural connections. Clients in this study valued professionalism and expertise of the therapist, but felt attuned to and respected when therapists demonstrated humility, shared personal stories and emotion, and engaged in a collaborative process.     

Sexual Orientation,Unemployment and Participation: Are Gays Less Employable than Straights?

This paper is the first attempt to assess, in a unified econometric framework, the existence and the magnitude of both the sexual orientation participation gap and the sexual orientation unemployment gap. Having identified male same-sex couples using the Employment Survey, we use a bivariate probit selection model where the labor supply and the employment equation are jointly estimated for the French labor market. The results show that both participation and employment probabilities are significantly lower for gay employees compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Further investigations indicate that young gay workers, particularly, are more exposed to the unemployment risk than older ones. The beginning of a professional career and the subsequent entry to the labor market appear to be difficult steps to overcome for gay workers who spend more time than their heterosexual counterparts to find the good job.     

Subjective Recognition of Emotional Expressions in Face Transplant Patients

One of the most prevalent problems in face transplant patients is an inability to generate facial expression of emotions. The purpose of this study was to measure the subjective recognition of patients’ emotional expressions by other people. We examined facial expression of six emotions in two facial transplant patients (patient A = partial, patient B = full) and one healthy control using video clips to evoke emotions. We recorded target subjects’ facial expressions with a video camera while they were watching the clips. These were then shown to a panel of 130 viewers and rated in terms of degree of emotional expressiveness on a 7-point Likert scale. The scores for emotional expressiveness were higher for the healthy control than they were for patients A and B, and these varied as a function of emotion. The most recognizable emotion was happiness. The least recognizable emotions in Patient A were fear, surprise, and anger. The expressions of Patient B scored lower than those of Patient A and the healthy control. The findings show that partial and full-face transplant patients may have difficulties in generating facial expression of emotions even if they can feel those emotions, and different parts of the face seem to play critical roles in different emotional expressions.     

Religiosity and Labour Earnings in Canadian Provinces

Using recent data from the Canadian General Social Survey, I examine how religious belief and practice relate to labour earnings in Canada. Noting that religious landscape strongly varies across Canadian provinces, I explore whether these discrepancies are reflected in the association of wages and religiosity indicators, for men and women. Moreover, I identify two groups of individuals, one without any tie with religion and spirituality, and the other shaping their lives around them. I find that males belonging to the least religious group earn significantly below otherwise identical individuals in the high affiliation province of Newfoundland, while they enjoy a ceteris paribus wage premium in the low religiosity provinces of British Columbia and Québec. Females of the most religious group, on the other hand, are found at a disadvantage in the Canadian west, where affiliation with Conservative Protestantism is more prevalent.     

How Does Occupational Access for Older Workers Differ by Education?

To assess the employment opportunities of older job-changers in the years prior to retirement, this study examines the how the breadth of occupations in which they find employment narrows as they age past their prime working years and how this differs by gender and educational attainment. The results indicate that workers who change jobs in their early 50s find employment in a reasonably similar set of occupations as prime-age workers, with opportunities narrowing at older ages. They also indicate that job opportunities broadened significantly for better-educated older workers since the late 1990s. While job opportunities now narrow significantly for less-educated men in their late 50s, this narrowing primarily occurs in the early 60s for women and better-educated men. In contrast to previous research, the study finds that employer policies that emphasize hiring from within are less important barriers to the hiring of older job-seekers. The study also finds that the narrowing of job opportunities is associated with a general decline in job quality as measured by median occupational earnings, a decline associated with differences in occupational skill requirements and the underlying economic environment. These results suggest that older hiring is not as limited to a select few occupations as it had been in previous decades, and that policy reforms aimed at increasing opportunities and improving labor market fluidity might best be served if they focused on less-educated men.     

Performance Pay,the Gender Gap,and Specialization within Marriage

We show that the large gender earnings gap at the top of the distribution (the glass ceiling) and the motherhood penalty are associated with each other and that both are uniquely associated with performance pay. These patterns appear consistent with specialization by gender. We show that among married couples with children, the hours worked by wives are strongly and persistently negatively correlated with earnings of the husbands only when those husbands work in performance pay jobs. There is no correlation between husbands’ hours and wives’ earnings.     

Virtual Worlds and Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

The introduction of computerised virtual worlds in the early twenty-first century was considered to be an innovation that would be widely used in higher education. There are a number of examples of virtual worlds used for higher education in medicine, nursing, and allied health, including examples in social work. The aim of this article is to explore the potential value of virtual-world technology to enhance the student learning experience for social work education in interpersonal communication skills in a virtual health centre. Findings of a study of Australian undergraduate social work students who engaged in a role play in a virtual health centre for skill development in interpersonal communication are presented. The study findings highlight issues for social work educators to consider when deciding whether or not to use virtual-world technology in social work education, and when designing further research on similar innovations.     

Giving Victims of Bullying a Voice: A Qualitative Study of Post Bullying Reactions and Coping Strategies

Current research on how adolescents cope with bullying is primarily quantitative, examines youth in Grades 1 through 6, and neglects to specifically assess how victims of bullying cope with being bullied. The current qualitative study explored the coping strategies of 22 rural middle- and high-school youth victimized by bullying. Results indicated that youth report using an array of emotion focused coping strategies (an internal coping strategy that focuses on emotion regulation) and problem focused coping strategies (active behaviors that are aimed to decrease or eradicate the stressor). These coping strategies included help seeking, physical and verbal aggression, standing up for themselves, and prosocial bystander behavior. While the majority of coping strategies were similar between middle- and high-school participants, these groups reported utilizing verbal and physical aggression in different ways. Further, certain coping strategies, such as help seeking and lashing out with physical and verbal aggression, were utilized as both emotion- and problem-focused coping strategies. Implications are discussed.     

Parents of Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Meta-Synthesis,Part II

In 2011 6.4 million children in the United States ages four to 17 years had a diagnosis of ADHD. Quantitative studies have indicated that parenting stress for parents of children diagnosed with ADHD is high. The purpose of the current meta-synthesis was to conduct a comprehensive review of both the published and unpublished qualitative studies involving the experience of parents raising children diagnosed with ADHD. Searches in online scholarly databases yielded an initial 1217 hits, which were narrowed down to eighty studies that met the criteria. A “meta-ethnography” framework was used for the synthesis. Results of the first part of the analysis were reported in Corcoran et al. (2016) and had to do with the personal impact on parents. The themes in Part II have to do with the processes parents go through in accepting the diagnosis of ADHD and in deciding whether their children should take medication. Parents struggled to make sense of their child’s problems and came to terms with the diagnosis in a series of stages. Regarding medication use, parental attitudes varied greatly, with both costs and benefits noted. Though there was considerable ambivalence towards medication use, some parents reported relief after their child began using medication. Implications from this study are that providers should recognize the processes involved in making decisions about an ADHD diagnosis and the use of medication. Social workers should allow sensitive exploration of parents’ attributions and understanding of their children’s behavior and level of acceptance of the diagnosis. Keeping an ethical and critical stance toward the use of medication, social workers should also have full exploration with parents around the potential benefits and risks associated with the treatment of their children’s ADHD, taking into account parents’ preferences.