Too Scared or Too Capable? Why Do College Students Stay Away from the H1N1 Vaccine?

Although college students were among the populations that had the highest frequency of infection for H1N1 influenza, only 8% of them received H1N1 vaccine this past flu season nationwide. During the peak of this pandemic, information about H1N1 vaccine was widely available. However, knowledge test and behavioral data indicated that most college students were not equipped with basic facts about H1N1 and the H1N1 vaccine. To investigate socio‐psychological factors that might have deterred this high‐risk population from learning about and getting the H1N1 vaccine, this study tested the utility of a risk information seeking model in addressing this health communication problem. Data collected from an online survey of 371 college students showed that respondents seemed to overestimate how much they knew about the vaccine. Risk information seeking, however, positively influenced their intentions to get the vaccine. Results suggested that to communicate effectively to this population, it is important to emphasize the difference between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge, monitor emotional responses to potential risks, and promote getting flu vaccination as a socially desirable behavior.     

“社会企业”与“食物银行”:澳门特区的社会管理创新刍议

伴随着经济的飞速发展,社会管理体制绝不能产生任何滞后。随着经济社会各领域发生深刻地变化,由政府高度主导的社会管理模式亦需要与时俱进地创新。作为国家特别行政区之一的澳门,近年来在经济上取得长足发展、政府公共财政收入颇为理想的情况下,不断探索"以民为本"的社会管理模式,努力辅助弱势社群,解决社会问题,持续营造良好的社会环境,促进社会和谐。澳门特区近年来推出的"社会企业"和"食物银行",是澳门政府现阶段社会管理的着力举措,体现出澳门特区的社会管理体制创新的特点。     

Modifying the Modifier: Body Modification as Social Incarnation

The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self‐constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co‐constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post‐structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re‐conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre‐existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies‐as‐modifications‐which‐modify. This re‐defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects‐as‐bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production.     

Testing the Vision: Preschool Settings as Places for Meeting,Bonding and Bridging

The OECD (2006 Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. OECD Publishing: Paris) envisions early childhood education and care settings as meeting places for diverse social groups; places that build social capital. This vision was assessed in a comparison of three preschools types: full‐fee paying, subsidised‐fee and publicly funded. The social composition within each was examined and the connectedness of the children (n = 472) who attended compared. Publicly funded preschools had more socially diverse populations. The quantity of social connectedness did not differ but children in publicly funded preschools described higher quality social relationships. Not all preschool settings are socially diverse but, where they are, the quality of relationships is highest.     

From advocacy to service provision: state transformation and the disability rights movement in Taiwan

This research uses the development of the disability rights movement in Taiwan as a case study to analyze the impact of state transformation, in particular marketization of social welfare policy, on the disability rights movement. First, the institutionalization of the disability rights movement enabled it to expand its organizational structure and become involved in shaping policy. Secondly, when disability rights organizations started to undertake state-funded projects, their focus shifted from advocacy to service provision. Thirdly, competition for limited state-funding gave the organizations led by urban-middle class advocates a significant advantage over small, community-based NPOs and gathered significantly greater resources. Finally, this paper suggests that, in a context in which the state did not provide basic social services for its citizens with disabilities, the institutionalization of SMOs turned advocacy groups into service providers. Although the number of disability civic organizations increased, the voices of advocacy groups were weakened.     

Latino Faces,Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.     

Piety over Protest: Cognitive Liberation and Deflected Collective Action in Central India

Cognitive liberation is often treated in the social movements literature as a mediating factor through which political opportunities and mobilizing structures generate protest. This paper unpacks multiple dimensions of cognitive liberation and finds that they may operate in tension with one another. Building on scholarship that focuses on subjective factors in social movements, the paper examines the case of the Korku, an oppressed indigenous community in central India, who choose not to protest despite the presence of several dimensions of cognitive liberation. Rather than engage in collective political action, the Korku’s grievances are deflected toward depoliticized religious goals. The Korku seek communal improvement through Hindu piety in a context of the Hindutva cultural-nationalist ideology, rather than protest against the encroachment of this ideology on their community.     

“But we still try”: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog

This article studies three “mommy blogs,” online platforms catering to (in these cases) American mothers of various sub-demographics, through an affective labor framework. Using digital labor and Althusserian subject formation to inform my reading of the common rhetorical gestures made in these blogs, I ask how they conceive of their readership and contributors. I argue that mommy blogs should be understood as sites of digital labor because of the ways in which their publishing conditions and rhetorics establish labored expectations of the “mommy” subject. Contestations of the nature of affective labor in motherhood are reflected by anxieties around digital labor, which play out via ideological conflicts that manifest rhetorically in the blogs under discussion. This analysis is informed by affect theory, Althusser and Butler’s work on subject formation, and the existing feminist literature on digital labor and the mommy blog.     

It's written all over their faces: Preschoolers' emotion understanding

Emotion understanding is a multifaceted construct made up of several components. To identify how several common components of emotion understanding relate to one another, five emotion understanding tasks were compared within the same group of children. Fifty‐four preschool children (M = 3.81 years, SD = 0.40) were asked to display the typical facial expression of six emotions after hearing their corresponding emotion label. They were then read six vignettes and asked to: “use your face to show how [the protagonist] would feel,” provide an emotion label for the main character, and “choose a picture of a face that would look like [the main character].” Finally, they were asked to provide a label for emotions presented to them in photographs. For all tasks, six emotions were examined: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. With the exception of the two modeling tasks, results show correlations among the emotion understanding tasks. There was a significant interaction between task and emotion category for emotion understanding accuracy. However, there was some consistency in the pattern of discrete emotion categorization emergence across the tasks. Additionally, accuracy scores (representing emotion understanding) across tasks were not equivalent. Findings are discussed in the broader context of emotion understanding.