Accounting for Racism Against Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand: A Discourse Analytic Study of the Views of Maori Adults

Previous discursive studies on the construction, reproduction and justification of racism have focussed on the accounts of perpetrators to the exclusion of the targets of racist talk. The current study redresses this imbalance by exploring the talk of targets of racism in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with 24 participants, 19 Māori and five Pākehā partners. Our social constructionist discourse analysis identifies four primary discourses that participants drew on to account for racism, two of which resonated strongly with the literature and two which spotlighted new areas of interest. A discourse of ignorance functioned to allow participants to account for racism by highlighting Pākehā ignorance of Māori people and culture, and of racism itself. The second discourse implicated the media for emphasising negative Māori news, avoiding positive Māori achievements and promoting negative stereotypes. A third discourse constructed Pākehā as possessing an innate sense of superiority which contributed to racism, and fourthly, institutionalised racism was used by participants to construct a colonial society which continued to marginalise Māori. Finally we consider the implications of these findings with respect to existing literature, some implications around the intersectionality and relationship between these discourses, and the importance of potential gains in understanding made possible through the study of targets' perspectives. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Couples Work in Cultural Context: Te Ao Māori and Poststucturalist Practices Informing Counselor Training in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article outlines key themes that appear in the teaching of poststructuralist ideas and practices for couples counseling within the Postgraduate Diploma in Counseling Program at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, and it explores the congruence of this pedagogical approach with Māori (indigenous) understandings of relationality, collaboration, and partnership. The diploma program's curriculum includes narrative therapy and relational language‐making. Themes explored in this article include: understanding (heterosexual) couple relationships as contextualized entities, deconstructing dominant discourses of coupledom, and the positioning of counselors/teachers as nonexpert. Taking each theme in turn, the authors, one of them Māori and two Pākehā (European), articulate points of alignment with Māori cultural concepts and practices.     

Beyond the Couple: A Qualitative Analysis of Successful In‐law Relationships in Iran

In‐laws can play a significant role in the success or failure of marriages around the world. In the Middle East, recent quantitative research indicates that having trouble with in‐laws is a major predictor of divorce in Iran. To explore this further, we undertook a qualitative (grounded theory) analysis of in‐depth interviews with 17 Iranian daughters‐in‐law, five sons‐in‐law, three mothers‐in‐law, three fathers‐in‐law, and three expert family clinicians. Emergent concepts, themes, and coding categories were consistent with a Family Triad Model (FTM) of successful marital and in‐law relationships, wherein each spouse must (a) form we‐ness with their partner, (b) establish flexible boundaries between themselves and their families of origin, and (c) join their in‐laws. A higher‐order core category suggested that optimal couple and family functioning depends on the coherence or balance of these functions across the triadic role components of spouse, child‐in‐law, and family‐in‐law (or family‐of‐origin). In the changing cultural context of Iran, where blood relations have traditionally held primacy over marital relations, such triadic coherence appears crucial to marital success, at least from the perspective of many women. Our FTM results also highlight the importance of taking in‐laws into account when planning educational, preventative, or clinical interventions.     

Tradition,Authority, and Immanent Critique in Comparative Ethics

Drawing on resources from pragmatist thought allows religious ethicists to take account of the central role traditions play in the formation and development of moral concepts without thereby espousing moral relativism or becoming traditionalists. After giving an account of this understanding of the concept of tradition, I examine the ways in which understandings of tradition play out in two contemporary examples of tradition‐based ethics: works in comparative ethics of war by James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay. I argue that a pragmatist approach to tradition‐based ethics allows for a nuanced and flexible understanding of moral traditions, and one that holds great promise for international consensus‐building around shared ethical norms for the use of armed force.     

Workaholism and Family Functioning: A Profile of Familial Relationships, Psychological Outcomes, and Research Considerations

This paper examines the relationship between workaholism and family functioning and the psychological outcomes of family members. A profile of the workaholic family is presented, along with an argument for family scientists and practitioners to pay more attention to this neglected area of family life. Considerations for how to address the need in family research and practice also are presented.     

Beyond Consent: Building Trusting Relationships With Diverse Populations in Precision Medicine Research

With the growth of precision medicine research on health data and biospecimens, research institutions will need to build and maintain long-term, trusting relationships with patient-participants. While trust is important for all research relationships, the longitudinal nature of precision medicine research raises particular challenges for facilitating trust when the specifics of future studies are unknown. Based on focus groups with racially and ethnically diverse patients, we describe several factors that influence patient trust and potential institutional approaches to building trustworthiness. Drawing on these findings, we suggest several considerations for research institutions seeking to cultivate long-term, trusting relationships with patients: (1) Address the role of history and experience on trust, (2) engage concerns about potential group harm, (3) address cultural values and communication barriers, and (4) integrate patient values and expectations into oversight and governance structures.     

Getting Beyond Form Filling: The Role of Institutional Governance in Human Research Ethics

It has become almost a truism to describe the interaction between research ethics committees and researchers as being marred by distrust and conflict. The ethical conduct of researchers is increasingly a matter of institutional concern because of the degree to which non-compliance with national standards can expose the entire institution to risk. This has transformed research ethics into what some have described as a research ethics industry. In an operational sense, there is considerable focus on modifying research behaviour through a combination of education and sanctions. The assessment of whether a researcher is ‘ethical’ is too often based on whether they submit their work for review by an ethics committee. However, is such an approach making a useful contribution to the actual ethical conduct of research and the protection of the interests of participants? Does a focus on ethical review minimise institutional risk? Instead it has been suggested that ethics committees may be distorting or frustrating useful research and are promoting a culture of either mindless rule following or frustrated resistance. An alternative governance approach is required. There is a need for a strong institutional focus on promoting and supporting the reflective practice of researchers through every stage of their work. By situating research ethics within the broader framework of institutional governance, this paper suggests it is possible to establish arrangements that actually facilitate excellent and ethical research.     

Recoupling in Mid‐Life and Beyond: From Love at Last to Not So Fast

Divorce rates have dropped in the United States, except for couples over 50 where they are rising steeply, along with rates of late‐life recoupling. Both stepcouples and their young adult and adult children in new older stepfamilies are often surprised to find themselves facing many of the same challenges that younger stepfamilies do. Some challenges are even intensified by the decades‐long relationships and additional layers of extended family that come with recoupling after mid‐life. Stepfamilies formed in later life must also negotiate decisions about estate planning and elder care among stakeholders who often have sharply divergent agendas before there is time to establish trusting relationships. This article describes the “normal” challenges facing stepcouples who come together over age 50. It provides evidence‐informed guidance for therapists in meeting these challenges on three levels of clinical work: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational. As in younger stepfamilies, “family therapy” must usually begin in subsystems—often the adult stepcouple and parent–adult child. The article then describes a particularly fraught subgroup of recouplers: over‐50 fathers and their new partners, where the dad's young adult or adult daughter is very unhappy with his new relationship. In these latter stepfamilies, father–daughter repair must precede stepfamily bonding. Stepfamilies that are preceded by a partner's death and those that begin with affairs are also discussed. Finally, some “easy wrong turns” for therapists are described.     

Affection and Abuse: Technology Use in Adolescent Romantic Relationships

Communication technologies benefit romantic relationships in terms of connection, but can also bring potential harm. Positive relational outcomes of adolescent technology use (i.e., increased emotional connection) have been examined separately from negative outcomes (i.e., unwanted monitoring of whereabouts) in previous research. However, the current study utilized hierarchical multiple regression to explore whether variance in both positive and negative relational outcomes could be explained by time spent online. Results suggest that time spent online predicts both positive relationship quality and cyber dating abuse after controlling age and gender. Implications include a greater understanding of the intersection between technology and adolescent relationships.     

Beyond Acculturation: An Investigation of the Relationship of Familism and Parenting to Behavior Problems in Hispanic Youth

In the adolescent research literature, acculturation processes have been linked to the development of serious behavior problems in Hispanic adolescents, but not enough is known about how that process takes place. This article reports an investigation that sought to shed light on empirically plausible mechanisms by which family processes (i.e., familism and parenting practices) may operate as mediators of acculturation‐related factors on adolescent problem behaviors among 167 Hispanic sixth‐ or seventh‐grade early adolescents. SEM analyses identified an empirically plausible mediated pathway through which parenting practices may operate as a mediator of the effects of acculturation‐related variables on adolescent problem behaviors. Second, although the role of familism as a mediator was not supported, the results did provide support for familism having indirect effects on behavior problems also through parenting practices. The findings are discussed in the context of existing research and clinical developments in the treatment of Hispanic adolescents and families.     

Psychoanalysis as Prevention: Using PATHS to Enhance Ego Development, Object Relationships, & Cortical Integration in Children

For over a century, psychoanalysis has improved the lives of many individuals, as well as humanity in general. However, the great potential for psychoanalysis to vastly enhance cultural evolution has not yet been actualized. Employing psychoanalysis in the service of prevention could assist with this goal if it could be made exportable, user-friendly, and available to a large segment of the population. PATHS (Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies) is one specific application of psychoanalytic prevention that was developed with these objectives in mind. PATHS is a comprehensive, developmentally-based curriculum for teachers to use in their classrooms with latency-aged children throughout the elementary school years. Some of the major goals of PATHS include teaching emotional literacy, improving social competence, alleviating and preventing emotional distress and behavior problems, reducing risk factors, improving classroom atmosphere, enhancing student–teacher relationships, and promoting optimal development. The present paper provides an overview of the content and process of PATHS, discusses PATHS as psychoanalytic prevention, and summarizes research conducted with PATHS over the past 15 years. It is suggested that emotional literacy is now critical for our basic knowledge repertoire and that children not taught this information will likely be at a distinct disadvantage as adults.     

Sexual Passion in Committed Relationships: Measurement and Conceptual Issues

The purpose of this study is to discuss the need for a new triadic model of sexual passion in relationships and to present the preliminary psychometric properties of a scale designed to measure these three approaches to passion (harmonious, obsessive, and inhibited) for use in clinical and scholarly work. Existing theory and measures of general passion are based on a dualistic model of passion that includes the harmonious and obsessive approaches to passion. We added the inhibited approach to passion from the sexuality research and develop measures for assessing sexual passion in relationships. We utilized an Amazon Mechanical Turk sample of 1,421 individuals in committed relationships to test this measure. Reliability analyses and confirmatory factory analyses evinced that these three approaches to sexual passion were unique constructs and distinct from sexual satisfaction. Sexual passion showed predictive validity above and beyond relationship length, sexual desire toward a partner, and a broader variable of sexual drive. Harmonious sexual passion robustly predicted higher sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction, and inhibited sexual passion moderately predicted lower sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction. Obsessive sexual passion had minimal associations with either outcome. These new constructs, especially harmonious and inhibited sexual passion, may help scholars and practitioners improve their understanding of sexual satisfaction and overall relationship satisfaction.     

Sexual Assault in Intimate Relationships: Introduction to Special Issue

ABSTRACT

The 13 articles in this special issue draw from the experience of women and men in Australia, Canada, Denmark, India, Micronesia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Vietnam, and the US to shed light on the complex problem of accounting for Intimate Partner Sexual Violence (IPSV) in a globalizing world. As a collection, the articles draw from qualitative methodologies in social science and humanities privileging local narratives drawn through interviews, focus groups, participant observation and historical surveys. This special issue presents articles from multiple disciplinary vantage points that seek to bring to the fore insight drawn from the close reading of sexual violence in varied global cultural contexts. The collection of articles challenges the idea that there is a universal way to understand and measure IPSV. Together the articles demonstrate key elements of the disconnect between local understandings and the assumed universality of concepts that undergird most sexual violence research. Congruent with our previous work, the challenge of the work in the cross-cultural perspective taken by this special issue lies in the acknowledgement that the ways we account for and define sexual violence in intimate (dating, cohabiting and marital) relationships is culturally-situated and must be contextualized as such. This cross-cultural perspective values the conceptual insight that can be drawn from cultural difference and pushes against a homogenization of notions of sexual violence in studies within global societies as well as those that work to compare them.     

Cardiovascular Reactivity During Marital Conflict in Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings: Differential Associations with Relationship and Individual Functioning Across Contexts

Cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict is considered to be one of the main pathways for relationship distress to impact physical, mental, and relationship health. However, the magnitude of association between cardiovascular reactivity during laboratory marital conflict and relationship functioning is small and inconsistent given the scope of its importance in theoretical models of intimate relationships. This study tests the possibility that cardiovascular data collected in laboratory settings downwardly bias the magnitude of these associations when compared to measures obtained in naturalistic settings. Ambulatory cardiovascular reactivity data were collected from 20 couples during two relationship conflicts in a research laboratory, two planned relationship conflicts at couples’ homes, and two spontaneous relationship conflicts during couples’ daily lives. Associations between self‐report measures of relationship functioning, individual functioning, and cardiovascular reactivity across settings are tested using multilevel models. Cardiovascular reactivity was significantly larger during planned and spontaneous relationship conflicts in naturalistic settings than during planned relationship conflicts in the laboratory. Similarly, associations with relationship and individual functioning variables were statistically significantly larger for cardiovascular data collected in naturalistic settings than the same data collected in the laboratory. Our findings suggest that cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict in naturalistic settings is statistically significantly different from that elicited in laboratory settings both in magnitude and in the pattern of associations with a wide range of inter‐ and intrapersonal variables. These differences in findings across laboratory and naturalistic physiological responses highlight the value of testing physiological phenomena across interaction contexts in romantic relationships.     

孝悌为上:曾国藩家庭伦理思想的根本取向

曾国藩的家庭伦理思想以孝为核心,表现为把"孝道"作为立家之本,认为孝悌廉耻胜于功名,表现了与以往家庭伦理的不同。曾国藩非常重视并终身实践传统家庭伦理文化意义上的孝观念,而且将传统意义上的孝观念予以扬弃,形成了既承接传统又体现时代特色的"孝思"。为此,在忠与孝的关系上,曾国藩提出了先孝后忠的思想,反映了他在家庭伦理方面对传统道德的改造。     

Research in Applied Ethics: Problems and Perspectives

The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in concern with matters of ethics in all areas of public life. This ‘applied turn’ in ethics raises important issues not only of focus, but also of methodology. Sometimes a moral end or moral feature is designed into an institution or technology; sometimes a morally desirable outcome is the fortuitous, but unintended, consequence of an institutional arrangement or technological invention. If designing-in ethics is the new methodological orientation for applied ethics, globalisation is providing many of the practical ethical problems upon which to deploy this methodology. This is a revised version of an article that was presented at the 2007 Applied Ethics Conference in Sapporo, Japan, hosted by the University of Hokkaido. Thanks to Jeroen van den Hoven for the key idea of ‘designing-in-ethics’.     

The Relationship of the Family Social Environment,Peer Influences,and Peer Relationships to Altruistic Orientation in Chinese Children

This study investigated the correlation between the family social environment, peer influences, and peer relationships to altruistic orientation in Chinese children. Results in the present study showed that (a) altruistic orientation measured by the Child Altruism Inventory (H. K. Ma & M. C. Leung, 1991) was directly associated with a positive family social environment, (b) altruistic orientation was directly associated with positive peer influences and was inversely associated with negative peer influences, and (c) altruistic orientation was directly associated with perceived prosocial behavior of one's best friend and inversely associated with perceived antisocial behavior of one's best friend. The findings suggested that a good family social environment, positive peer influences, and good peer relationships tended to increase altruistic orientation.     

Parental Alcoholism and Co-Occurring Antisocial Behavior: Prospective Relationships to Externalizing Behavior Problems in their Young Sons

The hypothesis that parental alcoholism and co-occurring antisocial behavior would be indirectly linked to child externalizing behavior problems through child lack of control, current levels of parent depression, family conflict, and parent–child conflict was tested using manifest variable regression analysis. Participants were a community sample of 125 families with an alcoholic father and 83 ecologically matched but nonsubstance abusing families involved in the first 2 waves of an ongoing longitudinal study (with 3 years between each wave). All families had a biological son who was 3–5 years old at study onset. Results revealed that child lack of control mediated the relation between paternal alcoholism and the son's subsequent externalizing behavior problems. Family conflict was a significant mediator of maternal and paternal lifetime antisocial behavior effects and father–son conflict mediated paternal lifetime antisocial behavior effects. Study implications are discussed within the context of parental socialization of antisocial behavior.     

Relationships,Environment, and the Brain: How Emerging Research is Changing What We Know about the Impact of Families on Human Development

Recent research is providing family therapists with new information about the complex interaction between an individual's biological makeup and his/her social and physical environment. Family and social relationships, particularly during sensitive periods early in life, can affect a child's biological foundation. Additionally, stress during the early years can have a lasting effect on an individual's physical and mental health and contribute to the onset of severe mental illness. Community programs have been developed to intervene early with families who have an at‐risk child to prevent or minimize the onset of mental illness including providing partnerships with at‐risk mothers of infants to shape attachment relationships. Programs are also developing individual and family interventions to prevent the onset of psychosis. Practicing family therapists can incorporate emerging neuroscience and early intervention research and leverage the growing base of community programs to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of mental health outcomes for clients. Additionally, family therapy education programs should broaden student training to incorporate the growing body of information about how family relationships affect individual mental health development.