Representations of Mental Health Among Middle‐Aged Urban Chinese Men

Little is understood by the ideas that urban Chinese population holds about mental health. Insufficient research and recognition of mental illnesses, and a dearth of social resources for mental health support and promotion limit understandings of how daily life stresses restrict the quality of life of China's urban population. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 15 middle‐age urban men, we map out men's accounts of how they battle to cope with the demands of everyday social, political, and familial pressures. The study reveals that the representations of mental health are shaped by notions of control over emotions, adherence to Confucian philosophy, familial obligations, and the need to demonstrate social obedience and conformity. Data also suggest that the participants represent stable family support along with healthy social interactions as important enabling factors of positive mental health, whereas pressures of modernity are regarded as significant disruptive factors in mental health. The theory of social representations guides the process as well as analytic interpretations of this research. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding social suffering: a phenomenological investigation of the experience of inequality

As global market conditions erode traditional forms of solidarity, there is evidence of psychological disturbance among a number of social groups as a direct result. This paper investigates this issue among a disadvantaged working‐class group in South Yorkshire (England) and argues that understanding emerging forms of social suffering requires both a social and a person‐centred approach that transcends normal clinical/psycho‐analytic accounts. The attempt here is to create well‐founded terms of reference that will support investigators who seek to embed agents' case histories in a social‐psychological framework as they set about illuminating social pathologies. The paper attempts to trace the contours of pathology holistically by following its traces as they are manifest in everyday experience and articulated in conversation; thus putting agents' everyday perceptions of the data at the heart of this account. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When work came home: Formation of feeling rules in the context of a pandemic

The shift of middle-class jobs to home settings, which occurred as a result of COVID-19 health measures that also closed schools and daycares, introduced dynamic changes to everyday life. We investigate these changes drawing on data from our study in which participants in Nova Scotia, Canada, who were working at home due to the pandemic, wrote journal entries in response to weekly prompts. Participants not only documented changes to their routines and challenges of managing work and parenting simultaneously and in the same physical space, but also reflected on their conflicted emotions about life during the pandemic and their vision for life as things return to “normal.” Their narratives prompt us to consider these experiences and emotions in relation to Arlie Hochschild's scholarship on feeling rules, emotion work, and gender and work more broadly. We find that from our participants’ struggle to meet existing expectations on activities and emotion while simultaneously managing new sets of protocols and feeling rules what emerges is a resistance to norms of busyness, productivity, and exhaustion.     

Sex in the City: The ambiguity of female mating strategies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the limitations of evolutionary explanations of female mating strategies, and to present an alternative theory that accounts for the ambiguity of mating strategies throughout a woman's life. While mating strategies are considered to be discrete entities, it is clear that women's decision making in everyday life is based on mutually fused, ambiguous courses of actions. The current perspective addresses the commonality of female mating experiences while highlighting the uniqueness of each woman's mating strategy and outlines a multi-level perspective on strategies of women's reproductive decision making.     

‘Left to your own devices’ – the missed potential of adult career guidance in Denmark

In 2008, the European Council agreed on a Resolution on better integrating lifelong guidance into lifelong learning strategies. The Resolution promoted lifelong guidance as a policy to support people during the multiple transitions provoked by a more volatile labour market. However, when looking into the guidance policy of Denmark, the Resolution does not seem to have taken effect. Whereas, the career guidance system is relatively developed in terms of transitions from basic schooling into youth education and from youth education to higher education, when it comes to transitions during a working life, adult career guidance structures are patchy and scattered across different policy areas and institutions. The objective of this article is to investigate the potential of adult career guidance as a support structure for Lifelong Learning, career transition and labour market mobility. To this end, we draw on Holzkamp's concept of ‘disruption of the cyclicity in everyday life’ to analyse working life narratives. We focus on the potential contact points between the individual and public structures supporting working life transitions. This article hereby contributes to ongoing discussions concerning access to career guidance as part of a social contract underlying flexible labour markets.     

Ethnography, Institutions, and the Problematic of the Everyday World

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith's wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith's conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society's ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests.     

Central Role of Relatedness in Alaska Native Youth Resilience: Preliminary Themes from One Site of the Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood (CIPA) Study

This qualitative study of youth resilience takes place in an Alaska Native community, which has undergone rapid, imposed social change over the last three generations. Elders, and successive generations have grown up in strikingly different social, economic and political contexts. Youth narratives of relationships in the context of adolescent growth and development offer insights to better understand culturally-patterned experience, continuity and change. Local youth and adults shaped the design, implementation and analysis phases of this participatory study. Multiple interviews, totaling 20 older (ages 15–18) and younger (11–14) boys and girls provide accounts of everyday lives and life histories. Although losing close relationships was the most common stressor, many of the participants’ resilience strategies centered on their connections to others. Participants cultivated ‘relatedness’, nurturing relationships that took on kinship qualities. Within these relationships, youth participants acted more responsibly and/or developed a sense of competency and self-worth because of others’ reliance on them.     

The experience of ‘healing stories’ in the life narrative: A grounded theory

‘healing stories' are part of an emergent narrative literature in psychology and counselling. This research explored the subjective experience of ‘healing stories’ within the context of individual's life narratives. A grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) method of analysis was used to generate and analyse six participant's life narratives. Analysis of these accounts revealed three categories. The first is the context of struggle that preceded the healing process. participants told of struggle in their relationships with others as well as turmoil in their experience of themselves. The second category, the healing process reflected the participants' growing awareness of life's existential givens (Yalom, 1980). This represented a personal exploration that opened lparticipants to a ‘healing story’ that offered them an insight into choices and possibilities for liberation. The third category illustrated that in the ongoing struggle the ‘healing story’ has continued to provide inspiration in the participants' lived experience as an ‘evoked companion’ (Stern, 1985). This research posited a core dynamic whereby participants' experience of their ‘healing story’ provided not only an initial inspiration that was healing but also, in their ongoing struggle, the ‘healing story’ continued to inspire their lived experience.     

What Chance‐Credence Norms Should Not Be

A chance‐credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non‐modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance‐credence norms: the first is Hall's and Thau's New Principle (NP); the second is Ismael's General Recipe (IP). Thus, the question arises: Should we adopt NP or IP or both? In this paper, I argue that IP has unacceptable consequences when coupled with reductionism, so we must accept NP alone.     

The silent music sheet,the replica tin and the unsewn button: Materialising nostalgia in the Marks and Spencer's archive

This paper explores how nostalgia and collective memory are materialised, imagined, curated and orchestrated through the archive. Drawing upon the example of the Marks and Spencer's (M&S) archive, we argue that archives, particularly those containing objects, command nostalgia. They re-appropriate objects, memories and their histories into contemporary narratives. This paper adds to a body of work within and beyond geography and sociology exploring the potency and creativity of everyday materials and their ability to produce, imagine and memorialise affinities between people, places and past times. This raises questions about the politics of memory, the authenticity of objects and the nostalgic imaginaries they enliven, what we discuss as ‘faux nostalgia’. We illustrate how M&S is part of collective British memory, promoting middle-class ideals of British family life. The archive and objects on display materialise such imaginaries, creating a yearning for the spirit, values and opportunities of times gone by; interweaving them into contemporary narratives of family life to create unattainable ideals. We reflect upon the biographies of three objects from the archive: a music sheet, an unsewn button and a replica tin. By making these objects central to our account, we illustrate how they materialise and recollect nostalgia through the archive.     

Young and Older Adults' Expression of Emotional Experience: Do Autobiographical Narratives Tell a Different Story?

Though autobiographical remembering is a common means of emotional expression in everyday life, rarely have autobiographical narratives been used to assess emotion. Studies rely instead on retrospective scalar measures. In this study, 87 young (M = 20) and older (M = 62) adults' scalar reports and narratives of the salience, frequency, and intensity of emotional reactions to the OJ Simpson verdict announcement were compared. Scalar measures and autobiographical narratives sometimes tell different stories about certain aspects of emotion. Supporting theory, scalars measures, and narratives both indicate greater salience of emotion in late life. In contrast to expectation, older adults more frequently expressed negative affect in their narratives, but not in scalars measures. Both types of measures did, however, show a higher intensity of sadness in older adults. Theories of emotion and aging may benefit from incorporating the role of memory, and reactions to specific negative life events.     

Biography, Narrative, and Lives: An Introduction

ABSTRACT The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Personality is to spotlight some of the more fruitful ways in which contemporary personality psychologists are collecting, analyzing, and discerning stories about persons' lives The issue focuses both on current approaches to psychobiography and on new uses of life narratives in social research     

Individual Breaches of Environmental Laws in Cases from Public Administration Files

The characteristics of environmental transgressions and transgressors involved in 1,505 files handled by 4 public administrations were assessed. These administrations were in charge of environmental law enforcement in a highly protected setting, across federal, state, island, and municipality jurisdictions. Special attention was given to the transgressors' written responses to administrative sanctions included in the files. These were analyzed integrating the approaches of neutralization techniques and of accounts as strategies of conflict management. Results suggest that most environmental transgressions under study were carried out by private individuals in the personal domain of everyday life, and that transgressors' accounts of environmental transgressions were short, straightforward, and questioned the legitimacy of the environmental law being broken.     

Community psychology,digital technology,and loss: Remembrance activities of young adults who have experienced the death of a close friend

We argue for community psychology to include digital communications technology in research on ways that the social environment shapes fundamental human experiences. We present a qualitative study that examined the narrative accounts of 20 young adults who experienced the death of a close friend to describe both traditional and digital forms of remembrance in coping with loss. Findings suggest that young adults' activities both online and offline were intended to acknowledge the loss, exchange social support, create and sustain memories of their deceased friend, and facilitate continued communication with the deceased. Participants described both costs and benefits to their real and virtual remembrance activities. Findings illustrate ways that the study of digital technology adds to our understanding of grief and bereavement and contributes to dominant cultural narratives about coping with death. Implications of findings for research in community psychology are discussed.     

“Leave Your Comment Below”: Can Biased Online Comments Influence Our Own Prejudicial Attitudes and Behaviors?

Increased use of online communication in everyday life presents a growing need to understand how people are influenced by others in such settings. In this study, online comments established social norms that directly influenced readers' expressions of prejudice both consciously and unconsciously. Participants read an online article and were then exposed to antiprejudiced or prejudiced comments allegedly posted by other users. Results revealed that exposure to prejudiced (relative to antiprejudiced) comments influenced respondents to post more prejudiced comments themselves. In addition, these effects generalized to participants' unconscious and conscious attitudes toward the target group once offline. These findings suggest that simple exposure to social information can impact our attitudes and behavior, suggesting potential avenues for social change in online environments.     

Emotions and cognitions in consumer health behaviors: insights from chronically ill patients into the effects of hope and control perceptions

The lack of compliance to medical advice is a widely recognized healthcare concern with important implications to consumer well‐being. Through an in‐depth examination of the narratives provided by chronically ill patients, this study contributes to transformative consumer research by offering a better understanding of patients' compliance or lack of compliance with medical advice. The narratives are examined with a focus on two potential antecedents: hope and perceptions of control over health outcomes. Findings suggest that although control perceptions play a crucial role in compliance, chronically ill patients often feel that they have no control over their health outcomes. The narratives reveal that the positive emotion of hope is a motivator for positive health behaviors. Additionally, the lived experiences accounts suggest a possible relationship between hope and control perceptions: patients' belief in their ability to manage their chronic illness facilitates hope but might not be essential to it. The importance of healthcare providers' role in cultivating hope and customizing their interactions with patients is discussed. The implications also indicate that health initiatives aimed at increasing treatment compliance should consider alternatives to messages calling for patients to take control of their health. Instead, future research on health behavior should look beyond social cognition models of health behavior and focus on the role of positive emotions such as hope. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Being marked as different: The emotional politics of experiences of depression and migrant belongings

This article asks the question: “What does it mean to think about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ when migratory experience is enmeshed with the story of depression?”. The article focuses on the personal story of a woman who migrated from the United States (US) to Australia, and whose sense of disconnection and displacement in relation to everyday life is embedded within a narrative of depression. Our discussion of her twin narratives of emotional distress and migration is located within theoretical debates about depression, migration and the constitution of subjectivity. In particular, we draw on psychoanalytical approaches to subjectivity to argue that her emotional distress and the medical diagnosis of depression together represent a form of ‘experienc[ing] oneself as a subject’ (Butler, 2005), and function as a precondition to her narrative of migration. Ultimately, we conclude, the woman's intertwined narratives of depression and migration operate simultaneously to provide retroactive order to her subjectivity.     

Particularism and the Point of Moral Principles

According to radical moral particularists such as Jonathan Dancy, there are no substantive moral principles. And yet, few particularists wish to deny that something very like moral principles do indeed play a significant role in our everyday moral practice. Loathe at dismissing this as mere error on the part of everyday moral agents, particularists have proposed a number of alternative accounts of the practice. The aim of all of these accounts is to make sense of our appeal to general moral truths in both reaching and justifying our particular moral judgments without thereby violating the particularists' stricture against substantive moral principles. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent non-substantive accounts of moral generalities appealed to by radical particularists – the heuristic account and default reasons accounts – fail in this aim.     

Understanding the Role of Everyday Practices of Privilege in the Perpetuation of Inequalities

To explain the interrelated effects of material and psychosocial inequalities, we suggest a move beyond research focused on deprived communities to include their broader social situation. Bourdieu's theory of practice explains how social and material disadvantages are interconnected, and struggles for power are enacted in everyday practice. In this paper, we draw on data from a qualitative study of two neighbourhoods to provide examples of everyday practice as people work to perpetuate or overcome inequalities in one field: education of their children. These examples show that those with more resources are actively working to retain and improve their children's social advantage, which rests on the disadvantage of others. In conclusion, we suggest that many current interventions to improve material and social conditions within disadvantaged communities ignore the damaging effects of social inequalities between social groups. Work towards understanding the nature of power struggles in daily life and the everyday actions of the privileged will help us understand and address the damaging effects of inequalities. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.