Accounting for unsafe sex: Interviews with men who have sex with men

Semi‐structured one‐on‐one interviews with 102 gay and bisexual men were conducted to examine the reasoning processes men use to exempt themselves from practicing safe sex. Qualitative analysis of the interviews revealed the following recurring themes: (a) Many men who were in couple relationships avoided condom use for reasons involving intimacy or trust, or because both partners were HIV‐negative; (b) unsafe sex sometimes occurred inadvertently or involuntarily; (c) negative moods and self‐images were associated with unsafe sex; (d) by “intuiting” that their partner was HIV‐negative, participants exempted themselves from the need for safe sex; and (e) when the boundary between safe and unsafe was unclear, participants used a combination of unofficial and official guidelines to determine what is safe.     

Confidentiality and Media Attention: A Discussion Concerning Denial and Public Education

The article presents the beginning of a discussion on how the doctrine of confidentiality may have been misapplied in the area of children's protective services. It asks the reader to consider who the client is in these cases and, having answered that question, asks what is the professional responsibility? The whole discussion is linked to the difficulties in dealing with media attention in these cases and offers some experience in the form of case examples. Woven in to the matrix of the above discussion is a clinical and public educational discussion. Preserving confidentiality in its traditional sense can contribute to a preservation of the family secret, namely, child abuse. In that way, a child protection agency can actually be contributing to the maintenance of abuse patterns in a family. Also, with no capacity to speak professionally about specific abuse, the public education impact is diminished.     

Two different worlds: The academic orientation of graduate education vs. the realities of one applied career

The current academic orientation of graduate education in sociology poses a number of barriers in preparing students for applied careers. As a case in point, a former housing analyst discusses problems with the emphases of graduate training versus the realities of a career in applied housing research. Issues discussed include the importance of an in-depth knowledge of the applied area, the need for broad sociological scope as opposed to substantive and theoretical specialization and statistical/methodological skills. To more closely mesh educational experience with the demands of the applied workplace, graduate programs might offer a variety of options within a broadly defined applied track, expand opportunities for students to gain applied experience and recruit faculty members from an applied background. specializing in social organization and demography. She currently is working on a dissertation that examines the implications of computer technology for workplace democracy.     

Patterns of delayed marriage: how special are the Irish?

"This paper deals with delayed marriage and singlehood among the Irish as a focus for the study of the persistence of ethnic characteristics. Patterns of delayed marriage in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are reviewed, and evidence is also presented that Irish persons in other countries (especially in the United States) continue to show significantly higher rates of singlehood and postponed marriage than persons of other nationality groups. Discussion includes how delayed marriage became common in Ireland during the past 150 years and what may be involved in the apparent persistence of this pattern today in Ireland and among the Irish in other countries."     

The Gambling Motives Questionnaire financial: factor structure,measurement invariance,and relationships with gambling behaviour

Items assessing financial motives were recently integrated with the Gambling Motives Questionnaire (GMQ), resulting in a revised measure that assesses coping, enhancement, social and financial motives for gambling (GMQ-F). The aim of this research was to test the proposed four-factor structure of the GMQ-F, determine if GMQ-F responses were invariant across sex, and test a structural model that specifies links between motives, gambling frequency and problem gambling severity. Telephone surveys were conducted with 932 adult gamblers from across Manitoba, Canada, who responded to items from the GMQ-F and reported their frequency of gambling and levels of problem gambling severity. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded strong support for the four-factor structure of GMQ-F scores, and invariance testing provided evidence of measurement invariance across sex. Finally, support was found for the hypothesized structural model in which each gambling motive predicted gambling frequency, which in turn predicted problem gambling severity. Coping motives also directly predicted problem gambling severity. These results provide strong evidence in support of the validity of GMQ-F responses, offer further support for the integration of financial motives with the GMQ, and delineate relationships between gambling motives, gambling frequency and gambling-related harm.     

An Assessment of Life Satisfaction Responses on Recent Statistics Canada Surveys

Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) and Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) offer a valuable opportunity to examine the stability of life satisfaction responses and their correlates from year to year within a consistent analytical framework. Capitalizing on the strengths of these surveys, this paper addresses two questions. First, how much variability is observed from year to year and across surveys in the distribution of life satisfaction responses and what accounts for it? Second, how much variability is observed in the direction and magnitude of the correlation between life satisfaction and a consistent set of socioeconomic characteristics? The study shows that the mean level of life satisfaction reported varies from year to year in the GSS but remains stable in the CCHS. This pattern in variability is associated with survey content preceding the life satisfaction question. In contrast, the direction and magnitude of the relationships between life satisfaction and common socioeconomic characteristics is generally consistent between the two surveys and over time.

     

The Correlates of Self-Assessed Community Belonging in Canada: Social Capital,Neighbourhood Characteristics,and Rootedness

This study examines the extent to which a single-item question on sense of community belonging captures the multi-dimensionality of the underlying concept. Many studies use multi-item scales to measure the different dimensions of this concept, but including extensive questions on community belonging in large surveys is often impractical given constraints on survey lengths and budgets. Having an economical and robust measure provides considerable scope for future studies to consider the effects of community belonging without reliance on multi-item scales. Drawing on several large, nationally representative Canadian surveys, the study shows that self-assessed community belonging is a parsimonious measure of a broad range of factors that pertain to local social relations, neighbourhood characteristics, and place attachment. Social capital yields the strongest correlations, and also plays an important mediating role vis-à-vis other variables. However, neighbourhood characteristics (e.g., perceptions of area crime, the built environment) and “rootedness” (e.g., duration of residence in an area) are also significantly correlated with sense of community belonging, independent of individuals’ strength of social capital.