Suchergebnisse

This is a qualitative study of a family planning education program in New York State using in‐depth interviews with 16 low‐income participants. The study demonstrates how challenges faced by the rural poor in family planning and health autonomy are exacerbated by lack of social support and isolation. Service providers are therefore critical to clients' achievement of health and family planning goals. Such services are needed not merely because of individual deficiencies, but also due to the relational nature of the effects of poverty. The concept of relational autonomy is used to explain the experiences of the rural poor in this study.

In this article I examine my experiences of practice and research in the social service field, which may be relevant to applied and clinical sociologists who work beyond academia, as well as academic ethnographers in general. Although the researcher as a person from a particular background profoundly impacts the data collected, examining the role of the researcher in everyday situations (at some research site) sheds light on important social processes. I provide three examples from my study of social service organizations, emphasizing how critically examining my own responses to role conflicts during ethnographic research provides crucial insight into the ways in which well-meaning social service workers end up regulating and disciplining the people they purport to serve. I conclude by urging academic sociologists to consider the benefits of applied work for sociological knowledge and encouraging applied sociologists to examine their own emotional topography in their frontline work as a research method in itself.

This study examines how people who have been constrained by extreme or chronic poverty, rural location, and adversity in interpersonal relationships make decisions and engage in agency through their narratives and everyday experiences. As a social scientific concept, the agency indicates the intentional behavior of individuals in the context of their environments, relations, and situations. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were collected with sixteen participants in rural south-central New York state who were living in extreme and/or chronic poverty. While exercising agency is viewed as important to the upward mobility of families and individuals in poverty, our participants encountered not only complex contexts for doing so but, at times, engaged in rebellious or counterproductive forms of agency. Furthermore, family ideology, such as traditional family values, shaped the perceived possibilities for forming one's life course. We find the structure-agency dichotomy less useful than a framework that incorporates additional sources of constraints on agency, such as embodiment and culture. We also encounter difficulty in applying the concept of agency to the experiences of our research participants in ways that point to the necessary reworking of the concept.

This content analysis of newspaper articles and online social media from English-speaking sources on the topic of 'fracking' interrogates the use of scientific legitimacy in claims-makings and how public understandings of science develop through these media. In both forms of media, science is invoked in one sense as rational and objective to either neutralize or support emotionally-charged accounts and fears of hydraulic fracturing dangers. In another sense, however, science is viewed as a bureaucratic tool used at the will of government and business interests and easily corrupted to support ideological or interest-based positions. Claims regarding science typically follow ideological positions rather than the reverse - the 'science' that supports fracking as safe is called into question by those skeptical of fracking, while the anti-fracking position is designated as 'anti-science' by those who favor fracking. These strategies as they play out in the media serve to spread uncertainty, heighten cynicism, and undermine public confidence in science. An understanding of science as incomplete and cumulative, however, lends itself to the precautionary principle.

In this paper we examine the question of how rural communities adapt to global processes of urbanisation and economic restructuring. We do this through a visual and historical case study analysis of Cooperstown, New York. This location is selected because it is a self-proclaimed 'perfect village' and by many counts a successful tourist destination. The impact on this community is examined using theoretical concepts that include urbanormativity, rural representations, rural simulacra, and the community capitals framework. We conclude that rural communities may risk sacrificing local qualities in order to appeal to externally imposed urban expectations for a rural experience.

U.S. welfare policy and devolution involve contradictions in implementing financial assistance as welfare workers must attempt to place clients with severe barriers in formal employment while meeting restrictive requirements. In interviews with North Carolina welfare-to-work program managers, the authors find that they engage in identity talk to construct images of themselves as effective workers despite these contradictions, using the symbolic identities of the "middle-class achiever" and the "thwarted advocate." Location in rural counties with fewer resources leads to more polarizing strategies. The authors propose that service providers who face conflicting information and excessive frustration tend toward extremes, such as blaming clients or policymakers for program failures. This analysis contributes to the social psychological literature on inequality by demonstrating that reconciling contradictions as a service provider often entails certain strategic characterizations of clientele, both positive and negative.