Sociation Today

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
  1. 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.   
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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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