SAGE Podcast

This article bridges the literatures on the economic consequences of divorce for women with that on marital transitions and health by focusing on women’s health insurance. Using a monthly calendar of marital status and health insurance coverage from 1,442 women in the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we examine how women’s health insurance changes after divorce. Our estimates suggest that roughly 115,000 American women lose private health insurance annually in the months following divorce and that roughly 65,000 of these women become uninsured. The loss of insurance coverage we observe is not just a short-term disruption. Women’s rates of insurance coverage remain depressed for more than two years after divorce. Insurance loss may compound the economic losses women experience after divorce and contribute to as well as compound previously documented health declines following divorce.

Expect Respect support groups, a selective prevention strategy, are designed to prevent and reduce dating violence among at-risk middle and high school students. This preliminary, uncontrolled evaluation examined changes in healthy relationship skills and emotionally and physically abusive behaviors in participants’ peer and dating relationships. Self-reports (N = 144) showed significant increases in healthy relationship skills from baseline to program completion, whereas levels of victimization and perpetration remained unchanged. A subgroup of students who reported baseline levels of victimization and perpetration with means at least one standard deviation above the group mean reported significantly less victimization and perpetration at program completion.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman drew attention to the various ways that individuals present themselves across settings. One aspect of his discussion was the division of space into front and back regions. In this article, I use data from two years participant observation and forty-one interviews with hospice workers to examine the ways that workers identify as well as how they use those identities to account for discrepancies between front and back region behaviors. Front stage behaviors emphasize compassion, while backstage behaviors include dark humor, strategizing, and detachment. This article argues that workers create a hospice identity that emphasizes authentic emotional expression and enlightenment about death as a way to explain away discrepancies in behavior. This work challenges assumptions that fronts are only performances and that back regions are more authentic by showing how workers integrate the two into a professional sense of self.

This body of work explores young motherhood in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Through the combination of photographs and the young mothers’ own words, Amanda Van Scoyoc presents evidence of the complicated reality that is adolescent parenting.

Mark Martinko discusses The Relationships Between Attribution Styles, LMX, and Perceptions of Abusive Supervision, recently published in JLOS.

Dr. Fred Ledley argues that business programs should require science courses tailored to their students' needs.

Recently, scholars have analyzed phenomena like punk, hip-hop, and rave as "scenes," networks of individuals who converge in local, translocal, and virtual spaces. While researchers conceptualize scenes as collectively produced entities, they have not closely explored the micro-processes by which they develop, as well as how those processes affect participants. In this article, I ask how members "do scene" by coming together to construct these settings. Drawing on ethnographic research on a punk scene in a small college town, I argue that members produce a scene through the establishment, transformation, and management of scene space. The construction of space in turn shaped the identities of participants, including differing levels of power among them. This case further underscores the interactional and context-specific groundings of scenes, scene space, and the identities of participants.

In this article, I ask for whom is our teaching developed? Although we typically think that it is developed for our students, there appears to be a considerable gap between how our curriculum, especially Introductory Sociology is organized, and what we know about current college students. Drawing on data on enrollment in sociology and overall in colleges and universities along with recent scholarly portraits of college students by Nathan (2005), Clydesdale (2007), and Arum and Roska (2011), I offer the following argument: (1) Our "students" are primarily those who take Introductory Sociology, and this class, indeed, is our public face for most nonacademics; (2) given where U.S. college students matriculate, all too often, Introductory Sociology is likely being taught by someone not as well connected as we might like to our main professional organization; (3) comprehensive textbooks dominate the Introductory Sociology market and contain more information that can reasonably be covered in one semester; (4) college students are “practical credentialists” who spend relatively little time outside of the classroom on their studies; and (5) whether or not we as sociologists agree on what needs to be covered in Introductory Sociology and other courses, we have derived these understandings among ourselves, paying little attention to what skills and knowledge our students want and/or need. If Introductory Sociology really is our public face, we clearly need to spend a considerable amount of time in making sure that this is how we want to be seen.

This article seeks to understand differences in the evolution of policies to combat domestic violence against women in the Netherlands and Spain. Although policy change is often viewed as incremental change toward more progressive policies, the two countries studied here reflect opposing dynamics. The Netherlands moved from being a pioneering country to one that gradually marginalized the policy issue, whereas Spain, in contrast, recently developed innovative and far-reaching policies after a long period of low to moderate state responses. The case study points to the central role of frame negotiation, left-wing governments, and strong feminist mobilization.

Dr Tricia Burke at the University of Puget Sound, USA talks about relationship processes and conflict amongst mixed-weight couples

The previous special issue featured articles on the theme of presenting the latest advances in cognitive readiness research in terms of both theory development and practical applications across domains. For researchers, this translates into addressing important research gaps and identifying areas warranting further investigation. For practitioners, this translates into useful and practical recommendations and lessons learned for promoting cognitive readiness in complex domains. The editors continue this theme in this special issue with two more articles that address this important topic. It is their hope that the findings and lessons learned presented in this three-part special issue will provide a basis for future research aimed at creating more cognitively ready individuals and teams.

In the decades following World War II, a significant expansion of community colleges occurred throughout the United States. As the baby boom generation came of age, demand for higher education spiked, and policy makers allocated the requisite funding to expand institutions of higher education. This expansion, including vigorous funding from federal, state, and local units of government, was politically popular. This openhanded support ended in the latter decades of the twentieth century as hostility to paying taxes and to public spending mounted. In recent decades, community colleges have competed with other social expenditures, such as prisons and health care demands, for scarce public resources. And, in a number of states, community colleges have fared poorly in this competition. Using multivariate analyses and data gathered from several sources, including the American Association of Community Colleges, the authors examine the impacts of community colleges on local employment trends. Their research focuses on rural counties over four time periods between 1976 and 2004. This focus is important, as rural areas have faced severe and chronic economic decline over the study period. Their research (specifically for the 1976-1983 and 1991-1997 panels) provides evidence that established community colleges made a significant contribution to employment growth. However, for the most recent panel (i.e., 1998-2004), the coefficient for community colleges is negative. An examination of the interaction between community colleges and states’ fiscal contexts provides evidence that this decline may be the result of states cutting back their funding levels for community colleges.

Content analysis is a valuable research tool for social scientists that unfortunately can prove challenging to teach to undergraduate students. Published classroom exercises designed to teach content analysis have thus far been predominantly envisioned as lengthy projects for upper-level courses. A brief and engaging exercise may be more beneficial for introductory social science courses in which less time can be allotted to any one topic, such as content analysis. With this in mind, this article presents a highly engaging and temporally compact classroom exercise designed to teach introductory social science students about content analysis. In the exercise, students are guided through a content analysis of the music in Harry Potter films. An evaluation study suggests that the exercise improves students' understanding of content analysis and that students find it both highly helpful and enjoyable.

The authors address educators' concerns about using asynchronous online discussions in lieu of face-to-face discussions.

The authors discuss the impact of cold-calling on students' voluntary participation in class discussions.