Media and Families: Looking Ahead

Digital natives and digital immigrants live and grow together navigating a world of media devices and inventing new media practices. As such, it is increasingly important to know about the role of media in the lives of families. Although much is known about the impact of media on children as individuals, far less attention has been given to the impact of media on the family as a whole. A great deal of the research on the family and media focuses on parent-child interactions, relationships, and media practices. While parenting is a key element in family life, other members of the family contribute to family practices and interactions, particularly siblings. This article proposes future directions for research about media and families, turning attention to expanding parenting research beyond media mediation, employment of more observational and ethnographic studies of families and media, and exploring media uses with siblings which continues to be an area of limited focus within the field. Moreover, future research should examine families with different lived experiences both in how their media practices and how they are portrayed within the media. Through research, scholars can serve families as media mentors—supporting families in their media practices in an informed way. We have the ability to be excellent media mentors to families and a key component of that is to continue to find answers to questions for families through research.     

Staff Development as a School Climate Intervention to Support Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students: An Integrated Research Partnership Model for School Counselors and Counselor Educators

ABSTRACT

This article posits that an integrative research partnership model can assist school counselors in addressing the marginalization of transgender students in schools through staff development. A methodological integration of action research and program evaluation through quantitative and qualitative data collection is explained, and a collaborative process is highlighted. A case example is provided to demonstrate the use of the design.     

Standard Bearers: Qualitative Sociologists’ Experiences with IRB Regulation

In response to the system for regulating research with human subjects, researchers have raised two apparently contradictory concerns: that IRBs are excessively inconsistent (often raised by biomedical researchers), and that they are excessively standardizing (often raised by qualitative interview researchers). Why does standardization appear as the dominant theme in qualitative researchers’ experiences with their IRBs? And how do qualitative researchers experience standardization in their IRB encounters? We focus on IRBs role as regulatory bureaucracies, which typically rely heavily on standardized communication and decisions to process information and make large numbers of decisions in a timely manner. We explore the role of standardization in IRB regulation of qualitative research in an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 26 qualitative sociologists from six research universities and three liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States. In a regulatory regime oriented toward the norms of experimental research, these frictions resulted partly from a lack of appropriate standardized language and decision-templates, but also from the inherent difficulties of applying standardized decisions to work that is unpredictable, unique, and difficult to routinize.     

Discussing Global Issues Through Contemporary Art

Contemporary global issues can be examined through the lens of modern photographic art. In an effort to prepare global-ready graduates, this article explores the pressing problems of environmental degradation, urbanization, and homelessness through the work of three contemporary artists. Illustrative works, suggested approaches, and curriculum resources are provided.     

Business Cycles,Medicaid Generosity,and Birth Outcomes

Birth outcomes influence many aspects of later life health and wellbeing, making healthcare access during pregnancy a policy priority. Low-income mothers often depend on Medicaid, for which eligibility is determined by their income relative to state eligibility thresholds. The prevalence of adverse birth outcomes is known to exhibit cyclical variation, due in part to changes in the composition of women giving birth in response to changing economic conditions. However, cyclical variation in adverse birth outcomes also varies with respect to Medicaid eligibility thresholds. Our analysis uses birth-records data for 2000 through 2013, aggregated into 173,936 county-by-quarter observations and linked to county-level unemployment rates and state-level parental Medicaid thresholds. Using fixed-effects negative binomial models, we examine the role of Medicaid generosity in influencing birth outcomes across business cycles. We test for interactions between Medicaid and unemployment, hypothesizing that the negative effects of recessions are worse where Medicaid thresholds are more restrictive. We find that higher Medicaid generosity dampens the negative effects of recessions on birth outcomes. The extent to which Medicaid interacts with unemployment also varies according to the age and race composition of mothers; in particular, Black mothers are both most affected by unemployment and most responsive to Medicaid generosity. Given current concerns about racial gaps in both infant and maternal mortality, our findings suggest that Medicaid may be an important feature of a strategy to close gaps in the prevalence of adverse birth outcomes across racial groups, especially during bust years.     

The effects of school desegregation on mixed-race births

We find a strong positive raw correlation between black exposure to whites in their school district and the prevalence of later mixed-race (black-white) births, consistent with the literature on residential segregation and endogamy. However, that relationship is significantly attenuated by the addition of a few control variables, suggesting that individuals with higher propensities to have mixed-race births are more likely to live in desegregated school districts. We exploit quasi-random variation from court-ordered school desegregation to estimate causal effects of school desegregation on mixed-race childbearing, finding small to moderate effects that are largely statistically insignificant. Because the upward trend across cohorts in mixed-race childbearing was substantial, separating the effects of desegregation plans from secular cohort trends is difficult; results are sensitive to how we specify the cohort trends and to the inclusion of Chicago/Cook County in the sample. The fact that the addition of a few control variables substantially weakens the cross-sectional relationship between lower levels of school segregation and higher rates of mixed-race childbearing suggests that a substantial portion of the observed correlation is likely due to who chooses to live in places with desegregated schools. Researchers should be cautious about interpreting raw correlations between segregation—whether residential or school—and other outcomes as causal. Our results also point to the need to carefully explore specification of cohort effects in quasi-experimental designs for treatments where cumulative exposure is important.     

Women,ageing, and Hip Hop: discourses and imageries of ageing femininity

Abstract

This article investigates how discourses of ageing femininity are constructed and negotiated amongst females in Hip Hop. Through the analysis of narratives and imageries constructed within the music and videos of rap veteran Missy “Misdemeanour” Elliott, press responses to Missy’s work and comparative accounts of other prominent female rappers’ performative strategies, this article explores some of the ways that female artists are responding to socially gendered notions of ageing in Hip Hop. I argue that Hip Hop females are in some cases using Hip Hop as a vehicle for subverting age narratives that are commonly associated with ageing femininity. Murray Forman’s concept of “age-representing” is brought into dialogue with representations of ageing Hip Hop females to support this analysis. The writings of Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner are also drawn on to form a supportive framework by offering comparative accounts of female ageing in other popular music sub-fields. This article aims to contribute to the growing feminist critique of ageing and popular music culture.     

The contingent futures of the mobile present: automation as possibility

In this article we outline and demonstrate a design anthropological approach to investigating automated mobile futures as a processual opening up of possibilities, rather than as a process of technological innovation. To undertake this we investigate the example of how the car-smartphone relationship is configuring in the contingent circumstances of the mobile present and the implications of this for automated mobile futures. Our discussion is set in the context of the growing possibility that automonous driving (AD) features are increasingly part of everyday mobilities (even if unequally distributed globally) and in which personal mobile smart technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will exist in some form and will interface with humans and be interoperable with other technologies. In developing this we draw on ethnographic understandings of how people live with the possibilities afforded by technologies in everyday life.     

Providers’ perspectives of barriers experienced in maternal health care among Marshallese women

Problem

Pacific Islanders are disproportionately burdened by poorer maternal health outcomes with higher rates of pre-term births, low birth weight babies, infant mortality, and inadequate or no prenatal care.

Assessing Politicized Sexual Orientation Identity: Validating the Queer Consciousness Scale

Building on psychological theories of motivation for collective action, we introduce a new individual difference measure of queer consciousness, defined as a politicized collective identity around sexual orientation. The Queer Consciousness Scale (QCS) consists of 12 items measuring five aspects of a politicized queer identity: sense of common fate, power discontent, system blame, collective orientation, and cognitive centrality. In four samples of adult women and men of varied sexual orientations, the QCS showed good test-retest and Cronbach’s reliability and excellent known-groups and predictive validity. Specifically, the QCS was positively correlated with identification as a member of the LGBTQ community, political liberalism, personal political salience, and LGBTQ activism and negatively correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. QCS mediated relationships between several individual difference variables and gay rights activism and can be used with both LGBTQ people and allies.