Recycling Identities: A Narrative Inquiry on Consumer Decision Making Among Urban Poor Families in the Philippines

The purpose of this article is to explore consumption-related decisions of urban poor families. Using a combination of in-depth interviews and visual narrative exercise, stories of six urban poor families living in Payatas, Quezon City, were analyzed. Key findings show that consumption-related decisions of participants follow a double cyclic narrative of just right spending. Community shared practices enable participants to survive by managing tensions between making ends meet and sustaining a public ideal of living a simple life. The researchers provide reflections on the socio-economic reproduction of a public ideal and rethinking the role of psychology in poverty reduction policies.     

Innovative Practice,Clinical Research,and the Ethical Advancement of Medicine

Innovative practice occurs when a clinician provides something new, untested, or nonstandard to a patient in the course of clinical care, rather than as part of a research study. Commentators have noted that patients engaged in innovative practice are at significant risk of suffering harm, exploitation, or autonomy violations. By creating a pathway for harmful or nonbeneficial interventions to spread within medical practice without being subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation, innovative practice poses similar risks to the wider community of patients and society as a whole. Given these concerns, how should we control and oversee innovative practice, and in particular, how should we coordinate innovative practice and clinical research? In this article, I argue that an ethical approach overseeing innovative practice must encourage the early transition to rigorous clinical research without delaying or deferring the development of beneficial innovations or violating the autonomy rights of clinicians and their patients.     

Is Smoking Queer? Implications of California Tobacco Denormalization Strategies for Queer Current and Former Smokers

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with normative conceptions of health structuring tobacco control strategies designed to “denormalize” tobacco use. Analysis of 201 interviews with non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgender adults in California revealed that participants implicated tobacco use in exacerbating health inequities and perpetuating harmful narratives of queer suffering, but also regarded smoking as a critical tool for self-care and symbol of resistance. Participant narratives suggest that using stigma in health promotion efforts which reinforce normative conceptions of health may be harmful to queer people whose social identities exist within ongoing legacies of pathology, health stigma, and deviance from hegemonic structural norms.     

Integrating Terror Management Theory into Fear Appeal Research

Fear appeal communications have sustained the interest of researchers for over a half century. The dominant paradigm guiding fear appeal research asserts that differences in level of fear lead to differences in the persuasiveness of a message. Research grounded in the level of fear perspective has produced equivocal results, failed to explain why fear appeals sometimes backfire, and has not provided an a priori explanation for who may reject fear appeal messages. By emphasizing differences between individuals’ responses to the fear of death versus the fear of physically or socially undesirable consequences, terror management theory (TMT) offers a complementary theoretical perspective that may overcome the shortcomings of extant fear appeal research. This article reviews extant theoretical approaches to fear appeal research and summarizes the central tenets of TMT. A comparison of extant theories to TMT suggests that incorporating TMT into future fear appeal research may improve both the explanatory and predictive power of fear appeal theories.     

Early pathways to bullying: A prospective longitudinal study examining the influences of theory of mind and social preference on bullying behaviour during the first 3 years of school

Research has focused on the role of theory of mind (ToM) for positive social behaviour, while the association between ToM and negative social behaviours is less well understood. This longitudinal study compares two mediation models examining the role of ToM and peer-rated social preference at ages 5 and 6 for bullying at age 7. Participants were 114 children (58 boys, M_age = 67 months) at entry to primary school (T1). At Time 2 (T2), 106 children and, at Time 3 (T3), 96 children remained. Teacher-rated externalizing problems and children’s language ability were controlled at T1. Poor ToM was found to indirectly predict later bullying via poor social preference, while for boys only, greater earlier ToM directly predicted greater bullying 2 years later. These results suggest that there are different pathways to bullying via ToM and social preference , which has implications for interventions to prevent the development of bullying behaviour.