Young Children's Emotional Attachments to Stories

In the interest of developing a more holistic and integrated understanding of young children's experience of stories, this study describes preschoolers' emotional attachments to stories and the cultural beliefs and practices which surround such attachments. Thirty-two European-American, middle-class families, participated in an interview study of their children's story attachments, and five of these mothers also participated in a short-term, longitudinal diary study. Every child experienced at least two emotional attachments to stories. Children were captivated by stories presented in different media, with many attachments occurring around video stories in addition to books. They expressed their attachments by repeatedly requesting the story, expressing strong feelings, and enacting the story in pretend play. Story attachments were social in two fundamental ways: children created relationships with the characters in their favorite stories, and story attachments emerged in the context of relationships with caregivers whose beliefs and practices supported such attachments.     

《马氏文通》的虚字学说──纪念《马氏文通》出版100周年

虚词是汉语重要的语法手段,从语法学的角度对汉语虚词作研究是自《马氏文通》开始的。虚字学说作为《马氏文通》语法体系的一个有机部分,其中有许多创造性的见识,对后来的汉语语法研究产生了深刻的影响,而且在今天看来仍具有借鉴意义。对《马氏文通》的研究,虚字方面比较薄弱,因而对它的评价往往失之偏颇,只有全面认识理解《马氏文通》,才能对它作出客观公正的评价。     

象征主义的宪章——三论波德莱尔和《恶之花》的历史地位与意义

波德莱尔的《恶之花》深刻地揭示了人与自然的关系,提出了著名的交感论,打破了“真善美”相统一的古典主义美学原则,创立了新的诗歌理论,为象征主义的产生铺平了道路,堪称象征主义的宪章     

Theorizing in Family Studies: Discovering Process

This paper makes the case that theorizing in family studies might be different if scholars asked the types of questions that now are asked in the physical sciences. Initial efforts to move toward a more abstract explanatory level in family studies led to inventorying and verification. This paper argues that the recognition of a realm of discovery, allowing for the creative and disciplinary use of imagination and metaphor, would extend the scope and quality of questioning. To ground the argument, the paper focuses on the problematics associated with the conceptualization of process in marriages and families.     

At the birth of second century sociology: times of reflexivity, spaces of identity, and nodes of knowledge

The sociology of the next century is likely to differ from that of the twentieth century. The current situation and the future prospects of sociology are assessed by spelling out the trajectory over the past century of sociology's predominant assumptions about the character and direction of the social world and of its own task of cognition. Sociology is located in three spaces of identity: a space of disciplines, a stage of everyday practice, and a space of imagination and investigation. From the cosmological, epistemological, and spatial trajectories some indications of a new, very different future of sociology are given. Finally, a way of preserving and developing the legacy of first century sociology is presented, in the form of nodes of knowledge, central to a 'typical' sociological approach to the social.     

Assessing program impact using latent growth modeling: a primer for the evaluator

Latent growth modeling (LGM) has emerged as a flexible analytic technique for modeling change over time because it can describe developmental processes at both the inter- and intra-individual levels. The LGM method can also provide a means for testing the contribution of other variables in order to explain variability in growth trajectories. This paper didactically illustrates the use of LGM as an analytical tool in program evaluation. Specifically, a hypothetical evaluation of a high school drug prevention program was used to demonstrate: (a) how LGM can be used to assess the longitudinal impact of a prevention program by comparing treatment and control populations with respect to individual differences in initial status and in rate of change; and (b) how predictors of initial status (post-intervention) and growth selected on the basis of a particular program theory can be incorporated in the model to explain program impact. Some advantages and limitations of using LGM in program evaluation are highlighted.     

Social Origins and Transformations: The Changing Role of English Housing Associations

Following the suggestion of Ragin (1998, Voluntas, 9(3), 261–270), this article uses social origins theory (Salamon and Anheier, 1998, Voluntas, 9(3), 213–248) as an heuristic device to explore change in a specific field of nonprofit activity; the English housing association sector. Conventional histories of the sector in the twentieth century suggest a succession of eras with different policy drivers. These eras can be seen as consistent with shifts in welfare regime from liberal to social democratic (after 1919) and to neo-liberal/neo-corporatist (after 1980). Examples drawn from a panel study support the analysis of Esping-Anderson (1990, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton University Press, Princeton) that underlying the apparent stability of welfare regimes there are constant processes of negotiation and conflict which may lead to transformations at organization, sector, or regime level. Rather than simply responding to policy drivers, some housing associations have been able to influence the environment in which policy is made and thereby to shape their own and the sector's transformations.     

Love thy neighbour: Social identity and public support for humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid can be contentious. Should finite national resources be sacrificed to serve the needy abroad? Social identity theorists argue that identification with a superordinate group, in this case the larger world community, should increase individual support for policies such as international humanitarian assistance. However, individuals can simultaneously associate with multiple identities. How does the combination of world and national identities affect support for humanitarian assistance? Using cross‐national survey data, we find evidence that support for international humanitarian aid is highest among those with a strong world identity and weak national identity relative to other identity combinations, though even those with a strong world identity and strong national identity can be supportive of aid.     

Parental choice and the rural primary school: Lifestyle,locality and loyalty

This paper discusses the geography of parental choice in a rural locale and shows how a group of parents negotiated their way through the process of primary school choice. Using ethnographic data collected through interviews and observations with parents and staff from three rural primary schools in England, the research utilises Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus and field to show how the resources and values the parents held affected the school choices they made. The paper demonstrates that the longer-term resident local parents were influenced not only by their cultural capital but also by familial ties and an emotional commitment to the rural locale and these parents were therefore more inclined to support their local school. In contrast, the more recent newcomer parents used their cultural capital and spatial power to shop around to find what they believed to be the ‘right’ school. The paper argues that the newcomer parents had less allegiance to place and hence to the symbolic position that the school holds within the rural community within which they lived.     

Integrating psychometric and cultural theory approaches to formulate an alternative measure of risk perception

Psychometric and cultural theory are key approaches used to explain risk perceptions. However, both approaches explain only 20 and 5–10% of the variance of risk perceptions, respectively. Through advances in social psychology, terror management theory revealed that certain survey questions used in the psychometric approach primed thoughts of death. Such unintentional priming evoked defense mechanisms that would subconsciously activate participants’ cultural biases and values when answering some questions but not others. There are two implications: one, psychometric theorists need to modify their questionnaires to reduce the incidence of priming thoughts of death; and two, integrating the psychometric and cultural theory approaches may potentially explain a higher amount of variance in risk perceptions. Specifically, attitudes (psychometric approach), demographics, affect and past behavior collectively influence cultural biases, which in turn exert an effect on risk perception. However, such a model calls for an appropriate measure of the dynamic nature of cultural biases that current attitudinal measures fall short of. Drawing from methodology within industrial/organizational psychology, the Situational Judgment Test (SJT) is proposed as an alternative measure for risk perception. Steps to designing an SJT are outlined and followed through to culminate in a 10-item SJT that measures cultural biases.