Aging in precarious times: Exploring the role of gender in shaping views on aging

ABSTRACT

The present study explores views on aging and how these differ according to gender and precariousness status. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 men and 10 women with secure and insecure pensions. Themes like fear of illness and health decline were more present in men, while fear of losing their attractiveness in old age more present among women. For all participants, loss of autonomy and social roles represented a negative view of old age, while activity in the form of work, volunteering, or leisure represented positive views. Differences in views on aging were related to pension security and less to gender. Women with insecure pension plans displayed the most negative views of aging. Implications for practice and policy to prevent health and gender inequalities are discussed.     

Communication in Nuclear Emergency Preparedness: A Closer Look at Information Reception

Preparedness of the general population plays a key role in the effective implementation of protective actions in case of a nuclear emergency (e.g., evacuation or intake of iodine tablets). In this context, a good communication of emergency management actors with the public along the entire cycle of preparedness–response–recovery is of paramount importance. This article aims at providing a better understanding of the way people process communicated messages and the factors that may influence how they do this. In particular, it investigates information reception as part of the information processing in precrisis communication. As a case study, the precrisis communication context was chosen, as it has been tackled to a lesser extent in the literature. The empirical data used for this study originated from a large‐scale opinion survey in Belgium. One topic in this survey addressed the information campaign for the distribution of iodine tablets, in the context of preparedness for nuclear emergencies. The findings of this study demonstrate that systematic predictors have a stronger influence on information reception, as compared to heuristic predictors. The latter are only to a minor extent involved in the reception of emergency preparedness information. The hypothesized pattern—that more specific knowledge about the field relates to a higher reception of information—was confirmed for precrisis communication. Contrary to expectations, results showed that people with a high perception of radiation risks were less attentive to information about protective actions. People with little confidence in authorities were also more likely to have a low reception of information.     

Rethinking Vulnerability Analysis and Governance with Emphasis on a Participatory Approach

This article draws on vulnerability analysis as it emerged as a complement to classical risk analysis, and it aims at exploring its ability for nurturing risk and vulnerability governance actions. An analysis of the literature on vulnerability analysis allows us to formulate a three‐fold critique: first, vulnerability analysis has been treated separately in the natural and the technological hazards fields. This separation prevents vulnerability from unleashing the full range of its potential, as it constrains appraisals into artificial categories and thus already closes down the outcomes of the analysis. Second, vulnerability analysis focused on assessment tools that are mainly quantitative, whereas qualitative appraisal is a key to assessing vulnerability in a comprehensive way and to informing policy making. Third, a systematic literature review of case studies reporting on participatory approaches to vulnerability analysis allows us to argue that participation has been important to address the above, but it remains too closed down in its approach and would benefit from embracing a more open, encompassing perspective. Therefore, we suggest rethinking vulnerability analysis as one part of a dynamic process between opening‐up and closing‐down strategies, in order to support a vulnerability governance framework.     

Children's awareness concerning emotion regulation strategies: Effects of attachment status

The current study evaluated the effects of preschoolers' attachment status on their awareness concerning emotion regulation strategies. A total of 212 children between 3 and 5 years participated in this study and completed two self‐report tasks. The first was the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), which assessed children's internal working models concerning parent–child attachment; the second evaluated children's ability to generate emotion regulation strategies in relation to three negative emotions (anger, sadness, and fear). Statistical analyses involved a mixed models multilinear regression approach controlling for age and gender. The results consistently revealed that the insecure avoidant group was significantly less likely than securely attached children to generate both comforting and self‐regulatory strategies. Surprisingly, the insecure ambivalent group showed no deficits across measured outcomes. When the analyses were conducted separately for each negative emotion, findings for co‐regulatory strategies for fear, and self‐regulatory strategies for anger also suggested that avoidantly attached children exhibited the lowest levels of awareness compared with children from the secure attachment group. These findings stress the importance of children's attachment status, and implicitly, the quality of the parent–child interactions for children's awareness of emotion regulation strategies related to negative emotions.     

Time,Knowledge, and Power in Psychotherapy: A Comparison of Psychodynamic and Cognitive Behavioral Practices

Time has long been recognized as a marker of professional control and a tool for the organization of work. Yet we know less about how temporality intersects with experts’ epistemic goals. This article illustrates how the patterning of time in psychotherapy shapes the construction of knowledge about mental illness and how this relationship is mediated by patients’ own interventions. I focus on psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapeutic practices and draw on data from ethnographic observations in an outpatient psychiatry clinic and in-depth interviews with psychotherapists. The article details the constitutive relationship between two dimensions of temporality: first, clock time, namely the length of treatment, the length and frequency of sessions, and the flow of the therapy hour, and second, the temporal epistemics of illness, its construction as a phenomenon with a past, present, and future. Clinicians in the two orientations attempt to construct particular temporal landscapes by integrating these two facets of their work. Yet they must always do so in response to patients’ own temporal interventions. By attending both to the organization of professional work and the temporality of illness, this article brings together two largely distinct literatures within medical sociology, namely scholarship on the profession of medicine and social scientific understandings of the temporal dimensions of illness. It shows that temporality is constitutive of how knowledge and power are negotiated in expert work.