“It kind of fosters a culture of interdependence”: A participatory appraisal study exploring participants' experiences of the democratic processes of a peer‐led organisation

Peer‐led mental health organisations operate through participatory democracy, enabling participants to take an active role in decision making about the running of these organisations. U.K. national policy recommends increased involvement of people accessing statutory mental health services in service development, for example, through co‐production. This study employed a participatory research method to explore participants' perspectives of the democratic processes of a U.K.‐based peer‐led mental health organisation, The Bridge Collective, and the influence of these processes on participant wellbeing. A range of data collection methods were used to gather the perspectives of 16 participants. Participatory thematic analysis identified how the organisations' democratic processes both nurtured and challenged participants' wellbeing. Three main themes captured the influences of the democratic processes on participant wellbeing: (a) negotiating relationships, (b) feeling the responsibility of involvement, and (c) sharing power. The findings identify the value of democratic processes in enabling meaningful social support and empowerment, and also identify the challenges of inclusion and workload management in participatory democracy. These insights may inform the development of co‐production methods and enable The Bridge Collective and other peer‐led organisations to further develop their processes.     

Marital Expectations in Strong African American Marriages

The current exploratory study utilized a family strengths framework to identify marital expectations in 39 strong African American heterosexual marriages. Couples reflected on their marital expectations over their 10 or more years of marriage. Three themes emerged through qualitative analysis and the participants' own words were used in the presentation of the themes. African Americans indicated that there was growth in marital expectations over time, with marital expectations often beginning with unrealistic expectations that grew into more realistic expectations as their marriages progressed. Participants also indicated that core expectations in strong African American marriages included open communication, congruent values, and positive treatment of spouse. Finally, participants explained there is an “I” in marriage as they discussed the importance of autonomy within their marital relationships. Results are discussed in association with existing research and theory.     

Mixed up about mixed worlds? Understanding Blackburn’s supervenience argument

Simon Blackburn’s supervenience argument—focusing on the mysterious “ban on mixed worlds”—is still subject to a variety of conflicting interpretations. In this paper, I hope to provide a defense of the argument that clarifies both the argument and the objections it must overcome. Many of the extant objections, I will argue, fail to engage the argument in its true form. And to counter the more compelling objections, it will be necessary to bring in additional argumentation that Blackburn himself does not clearly provide. One important upshot of this discussion is that moral realism is not the only target of the argument: it raises trouble for a variety of metaethical views wed to realist-friendly construals of moral evaluation. Rightly understood, this argument not only survives the prominent responses, but turns out to be more powerful than his critics and Blackburn himself have recognized.     

Faith and belief in The Anti-Christ: A re-evaluation of Nietzsche’s relation to Jesus

This paper re-evaluates the significance of Jesus for Nietzsche by looking at The Anti-Christ. Specifically we will ask whether a re-evaluation of this relation can shed new light on Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. And we will do this first by surveying the standard interpretations of this issue, as well as the existing literature on The Anti-Christ. Arguing that the latter picks out nothing new regarding a critique of Christianity, we nonetheless suggest that a new criticism can be developed via the discussion of Jesus there. Further, this can be done by looking at the account given of faith and belief in that text. That is, we will explore the status of Jesus for Nietzsche by looking at the origins and development of “faith” as a mode of belief. In particular, we trace the former’s development as a type from a basic mode of faith. As such, we begin by looking at the psychological origins of this kind of belief in “decadence”, and why Nietzsche is critical of this. However, we will then discuss the emergence of a more positive faith in the form of Buddhism, and see how this represents an analogue for Jesus’s faith. Continuing, we will see how Jesus signifies a similar problematic development, but also “overcoming”, of initial decadence faith. And we will argue, also, that this overcoming is rooted in his emphasis on the immediacy of lived experience. Finally though, we will look at how Christianity returns Jesus’s more productive relation to the world again to a primitive mode of faith. In other words, we will see how Christianity converts the fluid, lived, “faith” of Jesus into something again based on transcendent belief. And lastly, we will ask what new light this point sheds on Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, and his affinity with Jesus the man.     

A LABORATORY ANALOGUE FOR THE STUDY OF PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT

The purpose of this study was to develop a laboratory analogue for the study of peer sexual harassment, and to examine person and situational factors associated with male on female peer sexual harassment. One hundred twenty-two male participants were given the opportunity to tell jokes to a female confederate from a joke list that included sexually offensive jokes, as well as other types of jokes. Participants were exposed to either a sexist laboratory environment or a neutral laboratory environment during the study. Eighty percent of participants told at least one sexually offensive joke to a female confederate. Higher scores on a measure of adversarial sexual beliefs were associated with telling a greater number of sexually offensive jokes. The results suggest that the joke-telling analogue may be a useful means for laboratory explorations of person and situational factors associated with peer sexual harassment.