Sociation
Today®
ISSN 1542-6300
The Official Journal of the
North Carolina Sociological
Association
A Peer-Reviewed
Refereed Web-Based
Publication
Fall/Winter 2013
Volume 11, Issue 2
Abstracts of
Articles for Fall/Winter 2013 Issue
- Motherhood,
Empowerment, and Resilience within
the Context of Intimate Partner
Violence
by Julianne M. Weinzimmer,
Rebecca Bach, and Shreya S.
Bhandari
We conducted
twenty in-depth interviews with
residents of a domestic violence
shelter in a southeastern metropolitan
area to understand how low-income
women experience mothering within the
context of intimate partner violence
(IPV). Interview questions
explored the women’s feelings about
motherhood, their relationships with
their children, and the effects of IPV
on their children. Despite the
difficulties of raising children with
an abusive partner, the women did not
regret becoming a mother. In
fact, respondents identified their
children as one of few positives in
their lives and mothering as central
to their identity. Relationships
with their children enabled the women
to feel empowered in ways that their
intimate partnerships did not and
motivated them to escape the violence
and persevere.
- An Exploration of
Predictors for Perpetration of
Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence
in a Community Sample of Lesbians,
Gays and Bisexuals
by Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz
and Juan Barredo
Intimate
partner violence (IPV) has been
defined as actions or behaviors
that occur within the context of
an intimate/romantic relationship
that involve psychological,
physical, and/or sexual abuses.
These behaviors are intended to
inflict pain and suffering on a
victim and involve a wide range of
actions including: physical
aggression, sexual coercion,
verbally abusive and controlling
acts and more. While the
literature on IPV has focused
predominately on heterosexual
relationships, in recent decades
more studies have illustrated that
IPV affects the lesbian, gay, and
bisexual community. Using a
community-based sample of 335, the
authors explore the correlates of
IPV among lesbian, gay and
bisexual couples.
- Identity and
Ideology: Welfare Managers'
Understanding of "Self-Sufficiency"
in North Carolina
by Jackuelyn
Towne-Roese and Tiffany
Taylor
Using telephone interviews
with 100 welfare-to-work program
managers in North Carolina, we
examine the ways in which manager
identities shape the perceptions of
challenges and barriers to achieving
client self-sufficiency and the ways
in which these managers would make
changes to the welfare-to-work
program. Drawing from Watkins-Hayes
(2009) and (author citation, we find
that manager identities are distinct
in the ways in which they talk about
the program and clients. Social work
managers focus on challenges and
barriers that are out of the control
of the client, such as the economy,
and the ways in which they can help
clients. Efficiency engineers stress
the importance of agency standards
and meeting benchmarks to make
clients self-sufficient. Conflicted
managers however are caught between
helping clients and policing them
for not meeting agency standards,
similar to Lipsky's
street-level bureaucrats. We find
that manager identities coincide
with perceptions of challenges and
barriers in relation to clients’
inability to achieve
self-sufficiency and with the
changes that managers would make to
the program in North Carolina.
- Working at
Getting to Work: Negotiating
Transportation and Low-Wage
Work in Rural Michigan
by E. Brooke Kelly
This
article examines the efforts that
low-income mothers go through to
get to work in two rural Michigan
county contexts. The author relies
on qualitative, in-depth interview
data with one group of Latina
mothers, who worked in
agricultural labor often migrating
with their families, and another
group of white settled mothers in
a county dominated by service
jobs. Their accounts reveal the
backstage labor needed to get to
low-wage jobs in rural areas.
Commuting, moving, and/or
migrating necessitate much effort
and planning. Without public
transportation, mothers often
"scramble" with unreliable, and
often unsafe, vehicles. They also
rely on friends and family
members, negotiate with employers,
coordinate their journey to work
with the schedules of family
members, and take risks to get to
work. Programs and policies that
provide assistance with reliable
transportation, child care, and
work and family balance should
reduce the work of getting to
work.
- Women-Only
Tourism: Agency and Control in
Women's Leisure
by Diane
Levy
A trend in the travel
industry has been the growth of
tours marketed for women only.
These often involve travel with the
goal of learning new skills,
developing competence, or sharing
group experiences. In this
study, I analyze these tours using
feminist leisure theory to
illustrate how women are using their
agency to take control of their own
leisure. Using interviews with
tour participants and participant
observation, I conclude that taking
part in a women-only tour is a
unique leisure experience with the
ability to remove women from the
constraints of everyday role
expectations and offer them
opportunities to assert independence
and develop life skills that are
potentially life changing and
empowering.
- A Review of the
Article "Social Interaction and
Urban Sprawl" by Jan K. Brueckner
and A. G. Largey
Reviewed by
George H. Conklin
Using
data from the Social Capital Benchmark
Survey, the authors examine the
effects of density on social
interactions. They find that as
urban density increases, measures of
social interaction decrease, the
opposite of what was predicted in the
popular sociology book Bowling
Alone. Comparing one standard
deviation above and below the mean,
the results show that the given
decline in density raises the
likelihood of talking to neighbors at
least once a week by 7%, increases the
number of times the respondent
socializes with friends in a public
place by 11%, raises the likelihood of
belonging to a hobby club by 24%, and
raises the number of club meetings
attended, or the number of group
memberships by 26% and 8%,
respectively. These percentages
would be doubled if
comparisons were made between the most
and least dense city in the survey.
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