Conceptualizing Transition: The Role of Metaphor in Describing the Experience of Change at Midlife

Five new or returning midlife university students were asked to provide metaphors describing their experience of midlife change, change indicated by their attending university at this point in their lives. Five resulting portraits (S. Lawrence-Lightfoot & J. H. Davis, 1997) were created, based on participant-invoked metaphors: personal rebellion against colonization, stage productions, collection and accumulation, journey home, and alchemy and metamorphosis. The portraits indicate that even from within widely divergent metaphoric conceptualizations, the respondents all find midlife to be an active, positive, and hopeful period of life. For them midlife is decidedly neither crisis nor dull plateau. Further, given the richness of the metaphor use, the study demonstrates the desirability of listening carefully to and moreover expressly soliciting metaphoric usage, in order to more fully understand people's inner realities. Finally, the portraits reveal that the participants' metaphoric conceptions are deeply imbedded in their lives, past and current, and as such identify life themes.     

Small acts,kind words and “not too much fuss”: Implicit activisms

In this paper, we suggest that social scientists' accounts of ‘activism’ have too often tended to foreground and romanticise the grandiose, the iconic, and the unquestionably meaning-ful, to the exclusion of different kinds of ‘activism’. Thus, while there is a rich social-scientific literature chronicling a social history of insurrectionary protests and key figures/thinkers, we suggest that there is more to ‘activism’ (and there are more kinds of ‘activism’) than this. In short, we argue that much can be learnt from what we term implicit activisms which – being small-scale, personal, quotidian and proceeding with little fanfare – have typically gone uncharted in social-scientific understanding of ‘activism’. This paper will reflect upon one example of this kind of ‘implicit’ activism, by re-presenting findings from interviews undertaken with 150 parents/carers, during an evaluation of a ‘Sure Start’ Centre in the East Midlands, UK. From these interviews emerged a sense of how the Centre (and the parents/carers, staff and material facilities therein) had come to matter profoundly to these parents/carers. We suggest that these interviews extend and unsettle many social-scientific accounts of ‘activism’ in three key senses. First: in evoking the specific kinds of everyday, personal, affective bonds which lead people to care. Second: in evoking the kinds of small acts, words and gestures which can instigate and reciprocate/reproduce such care. And third: in suggesting how such everyday, affective bonds and acts can ultimately constitute political activism and commitment, albeit of a kind which seeks to proceed with ‘not too much fuss’.     

Phonemic and semantic generation norms

Independent groups of subjects generated restricted free associations that either rhymed with the cue or were members of the semantic category designated by the cue. The data include both a listing of the responses to each cue and a cross-index of all words appearing as responses to more than one cue. These data will permit researchers to take into account the a priori associative strength between cues and targets at these two levels of processing.     

Scale development to measure attitudes toward unauthorized migration into a foreign country

This study reports on the development and cross-national utility of a Likert type scale measuring attitudes toward unauthorized migration into a foreign country in two samples from "migrant-sending" nations. In the first phase a pool of 86 attitude statements were administered to a sample of 505 undergraduate students in Bulgaria (22.5% male; M age = 23, SD = 4.8). Exploratory factor analysis resulted in six factors, and a reduction to 34 items. The results yielded an overall alpha of (0.92) and alpha for subscales ranging from 0.70 to 0.89. In the second phase the 34-item scale was administered in a survey of 180 undergraduates from Sofia University in Bulgaria (16.7% male, M age = 23, SD = 4.8), plus 150 undergraduates from Hanoi State University in Vietnam (14.7% male, M age = 19, SD = 1.8). Results yielded a 19-item scale with no gender differences, and satisfactory alpha coefficients for a Vietnamese and Bulgarian sample of 0.87 and 0.89 respectively. This scale, equally applicable in both samples, includes items that reflect salient topics of concept of attitudes towards unauthorized migration. An exploratory principal component analysis of the Bulgarian and Vietnamese version of the 19-item scale yielded three factors accounting for 54% and 47% of the variance respectively. A procrustes analysis indicates high conceptual equivalence in the two samples for factor 1 and 2, and moderate for factor 3. This study lends support to the idea that despite different cultural meanings there is a common meaning space in culturally diverse societies.     

Some Social and Psychological Factors Related to Suicide in Primitive Societies: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study

ABSTRACT: Using a sample of primitive and peasant societies from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper examines some of the social and psychological factors related to suicide prevalence. Although the sample is small, the results are quite striking, and a multivariate analysis accounts for about 70 percent of the variance in suicide prevalence. In these data, suicide prevalence is quite consistently high where (a) the society involved is of the stable agricultural type (vs. hunting-gathering type), (b) the society customarily expects either very restrained or very open expression of the emotions (vs. more moderate expression of the emotions), and (c) the society customarily places a great deal of importance on individual pride and shame (vs. little or no emphasis on such matters).