The Best of the Brightest: Definitions of the Ideal Self Among Prize-Winning Students

This paper documents and explains characteristics of the ideal self rewarded by the American educational system as defined and projected by high school students who have been selected as Presidential Scholars in a national academic competition sponsored by the Department of Education and a White House Commission. Drawing on analysis of competition essays written by 119 Presidential Scholars and interviews conducted with 19 of them, we identify how these students implicitly and explicitly define the ideal self and what they do to demonstrate that they embody the characteristics of the self they perceive as rewarded by the American educational system. The data show that morality is the most salient dimension of the ideal self displayed by Scholars, and that they define it in terms of self-actualization, authenticity, and interpersonal morality; that Scholars present negative or ambivalent views concerning the importance of socioeconomic status; and that culture as a dimension of the ideal self is highlighted only by a subset of Scholars. In general, their displayed definitions of the ideal self are individualist in content but highly institutionalized in form. We explain our findings by the cultural repertoires that are made available to students and by their life experience and the broader structural characteristics of American society that lead them to draw on specific repertoires.     

Imagining contact reduces prejudice in preschool children

We examined the effectiveness of an imagery‐based strategy designed to reduce prejudice in preschoolers in Italy. Three studies involving different target groups (disabled children, Black children) were conducted within Italian preschools. Children (4–6 years) were asked to imagine and draw meeting an outgroup member (Studies 1 and 2) or to imagine writing a letter to an outgroup member (Study 3). Results revealed that preschoolers in the experimental condition, relative to a control group, reported less intergroup bias in the form of contact intentions and resource allocation as well as greater behavioral inclusiveness; effects were mediated by improved intergroup attitudes. Our findings are important in understanding ways that promote positive intergroup relations in ways that align with the interests of young children.     

College Education and Social Trust: An Evidence-Based Study on the Causal Mechanisms

This paper examines the influence of college education on social trust at the individual level. Based on the literature of trust and social trust, we hypothesize that life experience/development since adulthood and perceptions of cultural/social structures are two primary channels in the causal linkage between college education and social trust. In the first part of the empirical study econometric techniques are employed to tackle the omitted-variable problem and substantial evidence is found to confirm the positive effect of college education. In the second part contemporary information is used to examine the hypothetical mechanisms in the causal inference. That life experience is a primary channel via which college education promotes social trust fails to find support in our examination, while individual perceptions of cultural and social structures explain up to 77% of the causal effect.     

Initiating a Caregiving Relationship: Pregnancy and Childbirth Factors as Predictors of Maternal Sensitivity

The aim of this study was to investigate the relations between pregnancy and childbirth factors and subsequent quality of maternal interactive behavior in a sample of 116 full‐term infants and their mothers. Mothers reported on the conditions of childbirth when infants were 6–8 months of age, and their interactive behavior was observed during a home visit at 12 months. Results showed that mothers who did not report health problems during pregnancy and who had longer pregnancies, shorter hospital stays, natural deliveries, and infants with greater birthweight were found to be more sensitive during interactions with infants at 12 months. All these relations held after accounting for socio‐economic factors and maternal psychological distress, except for the effect of type of delivery. This pattern of results, however, was almost exclusively due to mothers who already had at least one other child. Very few such relations were found among primiparous mothers.     

Competing Motivations: Proactive Response Inhibition Toward Addiction-Related Stimuli in Quitting-Motivated Individuals

We examined whether addiction-related cues impact proactive inhibition (the restraint of actions in preparation for stopping) in individuals who are motivated to quit gambling or cannabis use. In Study 1, treatment-seeking individuals with cannabis use disorder and matched controls performed a stop-signal task that required them to inhibit categorizing cannabis or neutral pictures, and within varying levels of stop-signal probability. In Study 2, two groups of individuals, who applied to a voluntary self-exclusion program toward gambling, performed the stop-task following relaxation or gambling craving induction, with results compared to non-gamblers. Study 1 showed that despite being less efficient in proactive inhibition, individuals with cannabis use disorder exhibited heightened proactive inhibition toward cannabis cues. In Study 2, proactive inhibition toward gambling cues was heightened in gamblers after craving, but the degree of proactive adjustment decreased as a function of induced changes in gambling-related motivation. Present findings demonstrate that exposure to addiction-related cues can modulate proactive inhibition in individuals who are motivated to restrict their addictive behaviors.     

Friendships with benefits? Examining the role of friendship in semi-structured interviews within music research

This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of ‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article discusses how friendship can be incorporated within semi-structured interviews. The case studies act as examples of how to negotiate alterity in music research and how friendship represents a potential for gathering more detailed data. The notion of ‘alterity’, at the core of research relationships is critical to shift the conversation to an informal tone and improve the depth of the discourses gathered from informants. Consequently, this article addresses debates within qualitative (music) sociology by reconsidering friendship as an axis of power and examines the nature of the data gathered in semi-structured interviews through the methodology of friendship.     

Determinants of the living arrangements of older people in Europe Déterminants des modes de vie des personnes âgées en Europe

This paper analyses the influence of relevant variables (age, sex, marital status, health, income, education and children) on the risk of belonging to one of the four main types of household in which old European people live nowadays: alone, with partner, with others, in a collective household. Nine countries with different social and political contexts are compared by using different data sources. These socio-demographic characteristics play the same role in all countries except for the influence of childlessness and of gender, but the geographical heterogeneity of the living arrangements remains partly unexplained due to currently inadequate comparative data sources for Europe.     

Womens education and diffusion of the fertility transition: The case of Egypt 1960–1996 in 4905 administrative subdivisions

Egypt comprises thousands of small geographic units. Total fertility rates are reconstructed for the 4905qism, qarya, medina, markaz andshiyakhat covering non-desert Egypt at the 1960, 1976, 1986 and 1996 censuses. This fine spatial scale reveals that heterogeneity across subdivisions increased during the fertility transition, illustrating the rapidity of change. Spatial patterns appear in the fertility upsurge of 1974–85, which is accompanied by a large but temporary reduction in heterogeneity. Fertility varies greatly between subdivisions and geographic differentials underlie the expected and observed association between fertility, literacy, family transfers and industrialization. Cairo led the decline of fertility, but that decline is counterbalanced by rapid economic growth and persistently high levels of illiteracy. A similar pattern of fertility change is observed for the chief city of the Muhafaza and its surrounding area. Egypt presents an archetype of demographic transition as improved economic and educational status diffuses across the country, moderated by its specific geography.