The LGBTQ Supportive Environments Inventory: Methods for quantifying supportive environments for LGBTQ youths

The social environment in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youths live influences health and well-being. We describe the development of the LGBTQ Supportive Environments Inventory (LGBTQ SEI), designed to quantify the LGBTQ-inclusiveness of social environments in the United States and Canada. We quantify aspects of the social environment including: (1) presence/quality of LGBTQ youth-serving organizations; (2) LGBTQ-inclusive community resources; and (3) socioeconomic and political environment. Using geographic information systems (GIS) tools, we aggregated data to buffers around 397 schools in three regions. The LGBTQ SEI can be used to assess the role of the social environment in reducing health disparities for LGBTQ youths.     

Using Values‐Based Webinar Interventions to Facilitate Career‐Life Exploration and Planning

Using a quasi‐experimental design, the authors examined whether career indecision could be reduced by participation in a values‐based career webinar designed to translate various types of psychological data (e.g., Holland‐type themes) into values‐based language. Participants (N = 67; 36 women, 31 men; mean age = 36 years) were divided into 1 control and 2 treatment groups. The 1st treatment group received an interest‐based intervention. The 2nd received a values‐based intervention. Both interventions consisted of 1 additional webinar spanning 1 hour in length. This study demonstrated a statistical significance of career indecision decrease through use of the values‐based, process‐oriented webinar intervention, which is particularly helpful to career counselors working with adults. The study also illustrated the effective application of online technology as a service delivery tool. Future research might examine the efficacy of this intervention in a variety of settings (e.g., K–12, postsecondary, agency, mental health, corporate).     

Indirect Socialization in Preschool: How Teachers Harness Children’s Ability to Shape Peer Behavior

Qualitative Sociology - How do teachers use children to shape the behaviors of their peers, and which students benefit? In this qualitative case study of a half-day preschool classroom, I find that...     

Differences in Internalizing Symptoms Anticipate Adolescent Friendship Dissolution

This study examined the degree to which internalizing symptoms predict adolescent friendship instability. A total of 397 adolescents identified 499 same‐sex reciprocated friendships that originated in the seventh grade (M = 13.18 years). Discrete‐time survival analyses were conducted with Grade 7 peer, teacher, and self‐reports of internalizing symptoms as predictors of friendship dissolution across Grades 8–12. Differences between friends in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and (for boys only) submissiveness predicted subsequent friendship dissolution. Individual levels of these variables did not predict friendship dissolution, even at extreme or clinical levels. The findings suggest that friendship instability arising from internalizing problems stems from dissimilarity between friends rather than the presence of psychopathological symptoms on the part of one friend.     

Detecting suicide risk in adolescents and adults in an emergency department: a pilot study

The investigators conducted a pilot study to detect suicide risk in adolescents and adults seeking treatment in an emergency department, as well as to test the reliability and validity of the 4-item Risk of Suicide Questionnaire (RSQ). This study expanded the implementation of the RSQ beyond its initial use with children and adolescents with psychiatric symptoms who were seeking treatment in a pediatric emergency department to include adolescent and adult patients in a Level I trauma center. An advanced practice psychiatric nurse verbally administered the RSQ to a convenience sample of 104 emergency department patients ages 12 to 82. Psychometric analysis demonstrated an adequate degree of reliability and criterion-related validity for the RSQ. Approximately 30% of all patients who participated screened positive for suicide risk. The results support the continued use of the 4-item RSQ with all adolescents and use of a reduced 2-item form of the RSQ with adults exhibiting psychiatric chief complaints to determine imminent risk of suicide in patients who seek treatment in the emergency department. Nurses in all health care settings need to initiate suicide screening and implement nursing interventions directed toward suicide prevention.     

So near and yet so far - socio-spatial factors affecting service accessibility

ABSTRACT

Conventionally, social service planners conduct statistical analyses on service data for future planning. However, the limitations are their neglect of the spatial characteristics of these social data and their effects. All human activities have social and spatial dimensions. Social service provision is no exception. In this study, the authors suggest a socio-spatial framework in term of understanding service accessibility. A questionnaire survey was conducted and 491 participants, users and non-users, were interviewed. The results show that both spatial and social capital factors affect service accessibility. The study can help better service planning in densely-populated Asian metropolis like Hong Kong.     

From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media

Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional television made by and about young women that articulate affective dissonances with the confident subjectivities associated with neoliberal cultural mythologies of girlpower. We suggest that within recent, largely USA, television some important questioning of such mythologies is taking place through the articulation of young women’s anger, insecurity, anxiety, and misplaced confidence. Such affective dissonances may to some extent serve to problematise myths about both the accessibility and appeal of highly individualist career-oriented lifestyles idealised in cultural mythologies of powerful “can-do” girls. Our analysis aims at two-fold consideration of: first, how giving voice to young women as “suffering actors” may open space for dissonant affective positions that connect to feminist aims of social transformation; and second, consideration of the ways in which exclusionary technologies of femininity may also operate through representations of young women’s anger, insecurity, and anxiety. Through this analysis we contribute to understanding dialectical tensions in the psychic and affective life of post-feminism and feminine subjectification in the neoliberal, post-recessional socio-cultural context.     

Collective survival strategies and anti-colonial practice in ecosocial work

ABSTRACT

Oppressed communities have long used strategies of caring for and protecting each other to ensure their collective survival. We argue for ecosocial workers to critically interrogate how agency, history, and culture structure environmental problems and our responses to them, by developing a resilience-based framework, collective survival strategies (CSS). CSS consider power, culture and history and build upon the strengths of oppressed communities facing global environmental changes. We challenge the dominant narrative of climate change as a “new” problem and connect it to colonization. We discuss implications by examining a social work program explicitly built on Indigenous knowledges and anti-colonial practice.     

Class and the Service Encounter: New Approaches to Inequality in the Service Work‐place

In recent decades, scholars of service work have generated many new insights about the organization of work, but in the process one of the traditional concerns of industrial sociology – class – became relatively marginal. However, recent studies of interactive service work have begun to reconceptualize the service encounter as an important site where class‐based entitlements and interactive expectations are created. These analyses attempt to make linkages between the “status” encounters in service interactions and the larger, socio‐economic inequalities associated with class. The renewed interest in class in the (service) workplace may be attributable in part to the growing influence of Bourdieu in North American sociology as well as a burgeoning literature on consumers and consumption, allowing for new approaches that consider service worker‐customer interactions as integral to the construction of classed cultures of consumption and entitlement.