Women’s spiritually mediated stories about recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder: A brief report

This study explored women’s lived recovery experiences from alcohol use disorder (AUD) facilitated by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The women (n?=?10; age range 30–62 years; married?=?6) completed life story interviews regarding their recovery from AUD with AA participation. Discourse analysis of the interview data yielded themes to suggest the women characterise their recovery as spiritual growth, a healing process with reliance of a higher authority, renewed purpose of life, and actively engaging rehabilitation. Spirituality appears a key resource in women’s AUD recovery.     

Collective Identities of Class and Gender: Working-Class Women in the Pittston Coal Strike

This article investigates the intersections and tensions between two collective identities, those of class and gender, for working-class women involved in supporting the 1989–1990 strike against Pittston Coal Group in southwestern Virginia. In the case of this year-long (and ultimately successful) strike, women were organized by United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) staff in strike support activities, but they also sought to organize themselves as women. The tensions between their identity as members of the working class and their identity as women are revealed by examining their forms of activism, their relationship with the UMWA, the divisions between groups of activist women, and the articulation of women's involvement in the strike. The experiences of these women are briefly compared with women's activism in the 1984–1985 British Coal strike. The article concludes by arguing that collective identity is best understood as it emerges in response to specific contexts.     

The (HI)Stories We Live by: Power/Knowledge and Family Therapy in Africa

There is a need to Africanise family therapy so as to serve the interest of local communities. Western approaches to family therapy have been accused of being irrelevant to African contexts. They are seen as forming part of a dominant scientific knowledge which invalidates local folk and cultural psychologies and thereby continuing a historical tradition of oppressive colonial power relations. This paper aims at archaeologising and evaluating such criticism by situating family therapy within different fields of knowledge that have emerged historically and are currently co-existing in Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of dominant family therapy approaches in African contexts are explored by focussing on power relations between different knowledges in Africa. It is argued that many global narratives of family therapy offer congenial companionship to many local African narratives, but that family therapists should pay more attention to local spiritual and political narratives so as to attain more legitimacy and validation by local communities.     

A multistage ranking model

In this paper, we propose a (n–1)² parameter, multistage ranking model, which represents a generalization of Luce's model. We propose then×n item-rank relative frequency matrix (p-matrix) as a device for summarizing a set of rankings. As an alternative to the traditional maximum likelihood estimation, for the proposed model we suggest a method which estimates the parameters from thep-matrix. An illustrative numerical example is given. The proposed model and its differences from Luce's model are briefly discussed. We also show some specialp-matrix patterns possessed by the Thurstonian models and distance-based models.     

三重自我建构的神经机制

三重自我建构理论（the tripartite model of self-construal）认为,自我包含三个方面：个体自我,关系自我和集体自我;三种自我同时存在。研究发现：相比其他信息,三种自我均诱发了更强的N2（熟悉度指标）、P300（高级认知加工指标）成分以及与自我加工有关的MPFC脑区;个体自我存在右脑优势,而集体自我则存在左脑优势。但其具体表征脑区,其在中国文化背景下的文化特异性,以及不同关系类型、群体范畴是否能进一步划分关系和集体自我等问题均有待探讨。