Contentious Relationships Research Articles

How to Suppress Women's Remix

Vidding is a thirty-year-old remix practice in which predominantly female media fans reedit television or film into music videos. Vidding is important not only as an art form in its own right but also as a subcultural — and often feminist — reinterpretation of and confrontation with mainstream media culture. The feminist manifestations of vidding range from the creation of deeply felt emotional odes to television and film, to the analytical teasing out and foregrounding of subtextual or secondary meanings, to bitingly critical engagements with the mainstream media's political failings. In all these cases, vids serve both to magnify and to aestheticize the audience's readings of the mass media. The three essays address different aspects of this practice and its surrounding culture. Francesca Coppa explores the historical and sociopolitical implications of a female-dominated art form that heavily utilizes technological tools and skills; Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet discuss the legal implications of vidding as a particularly gendered form of remix art and debate the ways in which its underground aesthetics have and have not mainstreamed alongside the rest of remix culture; and Kristina Busse and Alexis Lothian demonstrate the contentious relationships that can develop when fanvids enter the realm of academic discourse.All four authors are themselves fans and academics, practitioners and theorists who continually negotiate the artistic, political, legal, academic, and communitarian constraints we discuss in our essays. Rather than seeing those complex negotiations as a drawback, we suggest that these very tensions have created this culturally rich form. It is this complexity that makes vidding an enticing object for academic analysis, but even more so an important aesthetic and political contribution to feminist art and scholarship.

Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: The Uses of Remix Video

Vidding is a thirty-year-old remix practice in which predominantly female media fans reedit television or film into music videos. Vidding is important not only as an art form in its own right but also as a subcultural — and often feminist — reinterpretation of and confrontation with mainstream media culture. The feminist manifestations of vidding range from the creation of deeply felt emotional odes to television and film, to the analytical teasing out and foregrounding of subtextual or secondary meanings, to bitingly critical engagements with the mainstream media's political failings. In all these cases, vids serve both to magnify and to aestheticize the audience's readings of the mass media. The three essays address different aspects of this practice and its surrounding culture. Francesca Coppa explores the historical and sociopolitical implications of a female-dominated art form that heavily utilizes technological tools and skills; Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet discuss the legal implications of vidding as a particularly gendered form of remix art and debate the ways in which its underground aesthetics have and have not mainstreamed alongside the rest of remix culture; and Kristina Busse and Alexis Lothian demonstrate the contentious relationships that can develop when fanvids enter the realm of academic discourse.All four authors are themselves fans and academics, practitioners and theorists who continually negotiate the artistic, political, legal, academic, and communitarian constraints we discuss in our essays. Rather than seeing those complex negotiations as a drawback, we suggest that these very tensions have created this culturally rich form. It is this complexity that makes vidding an enticing object for academic analysis, but even more so an important aesthetic and political contribution to feminist art and scholarship.

A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage (review)

Reviewed by: A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage Meredith Conti A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage. By Barbara Wallace Grossman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009; pp. 344. $37.50 paper. A mere four pages into the introduction of A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage, in which Barbara Wallace Grossman offers her readers a brief précis on the triumphs and catastrophes that typified her subject's turbulent life and career, you may begin to wonder, as I did, how Clara Morris evaded a full-length biographical treatment for so long. Beyond Morris's status as one of the most famous American actresses of the nineteenth century, her life serves up a veritable banquet of scandals and [End Page 698] misfortunes rarely occurring within a single individual's history: an isolated childhood, chronic illness, morphine addiction, artistic failures, contentious relationships, financial distress, and an extramarital affair, just to list the feast's main courses. However, upon finishing A Spectacle of Suffering, you may also find yourself unreservedly delighted, as I was, that Grossman got there first. In the hands of a less intuitive and assiduous scholar, a biography of Morris could easily slip into the realms of tawdry sensationalism or mythologizing hagiography; instead, it is a rigorously researched and readable history of an actress who should neither be apotheosized nor demonized, but whose life, the author posits, "is as much a tribute to the power of the human spirit as it is an effective means of exploring American theater and society in the Gilded Age" (6). With the exception of the first chapter, which introduces readers to Morris at the height of her popularity, dramatic potency, and youthful ambition, the book progresses through the actress's life chronologically. Morris's childhood and adolescence, as well as the beginnings of her professional acting career in Ohio, are discussed over the course of three chapters. Raised by a single mother (whose devotion to Clara seems uncharacteristic when considering her repeated abandonment of several other children), Morris lived a nomadic lifestyle until settling in Cleveland. Her first theatrical engagement was at Cleveland's Academy of Music, where at age 15 she was hired by John Ellsler, a married actor-manager who eventually became her lover. It was in Cleveland, and later in Cincinnati, that Morris cultivated the "hallmarks of her art": "graphic realism . . . emotional intensity . . . and the powerful impact she had on her audiences—particularly women" (68). The middle chapters of the book track Morris's meteoric rise to fame in New York, where she first moved with her mother in 1870 to work at Augustin Daly's Fifth Avenue Theatre. Daly and Morris's working relationship was frequently antagonistic: Morris viewed his management style as authoritarian and condescending, while Daly "resented her defiant, even subversive independence" (85). Yet both enjoyed immense successes with the actress's turns in plays like Article 47 and Madelein Morel that capitalized on her effective portrayals of "erotic, hysterical wom[en]" (97). After three years under contract with Daly, fierce salary negotiations and enmity prompted Morris to defect to Albert Palmer's Union Square Theatre, where her maturing powers as an emotional actress were showcased in Camille (a theatrical chestnut into which Morris breathed new life) and a variety of other dramas. It was during Morris's tenure with Palmer that ill health began to plague the actress, and in 1876 she was prescribed morphine to alleviate chronic pain, initiating a decades-long addiction that lasted until her death in 1925. The book's final chapters follow Morris's artistic, financial, and physical decline and the development of her second career as a writer and lecturer. Attempts to reignite her stage career were hobbled by her escalating drug use, stale repertoire, and exhausting touring schedule. Grossman's coverage of this period, deliciously titled "Queen of Spasms," is perhaps the only letdown of the biography, as the author becomes a little too fastidious in recording Morris's every move on tour—a tactic that briefly drags down the book's normally effective pacing. A Spectacle of Suffering profits from Grossman's judicious analysis and deployment of...

Participatory Action Research

There are many threads of participatory research and action research, and a variety of ethical and philosophical stances that fall under the heading of participatory action research. in this special issue we test the grounds of Par traditions, put them in conversations with a variety of disciplines and invent new forms and protocols for their implementation. as we shared our developing work, we offered up a bounty of exciting ideas, visualized each others research landscapes, and ventured out onto our own with tools and perspectives. specifically, we have nourished each others’ ideas regarding the insider-outsider positionality of researchers; issues of participation, process and power relations; the concept of scale and human geography; what it means to negotiate conceptions of damage in communities and in research; knowledge production, the right to knowledge, and the right to research; negotiating our deep beliefs in and contentious relationships with Par. as a group we brainstormed the ideas and works that have been important as we have each formulated a Participatory action research methodology and we set out in this brief introduction to clarify our place in that research tradition. We thought about our work in the categories that appear below as subheadings in this text: critical Par and critiquing Participation; critical consciousness in Par; action; and responsibility to the subject/subject object relations in Par. While conducting the literature search for all the readings mentioned, orlando Fals Borda’s chapter in reason and Bradbury’s 2001 Handbook of Action Research came to our attention. in this chapter, Fals Borda describes the emergence of Par within the subheadings on science, Knowledge and reason; on Theory and Practice; and on subject and object. These categories closely mirror the concerns that our group described as central to our thinking about Par, and we acknowledge the lineage of scholarship that shapes our priorities, ethical concerns and philosophical stances about epistemology and the relationship between knowledge and power. We have been influenced by the work of activist scholars from the late 1960s and 1970s — an era when activists challenged oppressive and exclusive structures that maintained social inequalities and academics sought ways to make their research relevant to the social issues demanding attention and social change.

SCLD: a stem cell lineage database for the annotation of cell types and developmental lineages

Stem cell biology has experienced explosive growth over the past decade as researchers attempt to generate therapeutically relevant cell types in the laboratory. Recapitulation of endogenous developmental trajectories is a dominant paradigm in the design of directed differentiation protocols, and attempts to guide stem cell differentiation are often based explicitly on knowledge of in vivo development. Therefore, when designing protocols, stem cell biologists rely heavily upon information including (i) cell type-specific gene expression profiles, (ii) anatomical and developmental relationships between cells and tissues and (iii) signals important for progression from progenitors to target cell types. Here, we present the Stem Cell Lineage Database (SCLD) (http://scld.mcb.uconn.edu) that aims to unify this information into a single resource where users can easily store and access information about cell type gene expression, cell lineage maps and stem cell differentiation protocols for both human and mouse stem cells and endogenous developmental lineages. By establishing the SCLD, we provide scientists with a centralized location to organize access and share data, dispute and resolve contentious relationships between cell types and within lineages, uncover discriminating cell type marker panels and design directed differentiation protocols.

Arthropod molecular divergence times and the Cambrian origin of pentastomids

Pentastomida are parasites of tetrapods (especially reptiles) and have had long contentious relationships. Traditionally seen as a separate phylum with arthropod affinities, recent ultrastructural and molecular evidence unites them to branchiuran crustaceans (fish lice). However, the discovery of Cambrian pentastomids has been interpreted to refute the view that pentastomids are closely related to advanced crustaceans (of presumably recent origins). Bayesian phylogenetic and relaxed-clock analyses of molecular data (18S and 28S ribosomal RNA, elongation factor 1α and 2, RNA polymerase II subunit) help reconcile these apparently contradictory views: a pentastomid-branchiuran grouping is recovered, but this clade is the sister group to other Tetraconata, whereas all other crustaceans form a monophyletic group that is sister to hexapods. Crustacean monophyly is widely supported by morphology, but has rarely been retrieved in other molecular studies. Estimated molecular dates for pentastomid origins range from ∼490 to ∼520 million years ago, consistent with Cambrian fossils. The basal position of branchiurans within tetraconatans means pentastomids can be simultaneously related to branchiurans, and also have a deep fossil record. All Cambrian pentastomids are tiny, resembling the larvae of living pentastomids that infect intermediate hosts including fish; as definitive hosts (tetrapods) of modern pentastomids were absent in the Cambrian, it is possible that the small Cambrian forms were adults rather than larvae, and their entire life cycle was confined to small fish-like vertebrates that were then present.

How Managers Handle Conflict in Supply Chain Collaborative Relationships in Ghana

To contribute to a broader understanding of how conflict impacts the emergence of collaborative relationships in the supply chain, the authors conduct a series of simulation games among supply chain collaborative teams in Ghana, West Africa. Results lend support to a theoretic proposition that managers' responses to conflict differ on the basis of their evaluative judgments about the favorability of processes and fairness of outcomes as predicted by the process and outcome discrepancy model (Kumar & Nti, 1998). Further, results show that most collaborative relationships are prone to only a moderate level of conflict (contentious) as opposed to being highly conflict-prone (hostile) or conflict-free (harmonious), but the incidence of contentious and hostile relationships has a greater negative impact on collaboration decisions than the incidence of harmonious relationships. These findings demonstrate the importance of the process and outcome discrepancy model and the loss aversion tenet in prospect theory to supply chain collaboration research and strategy formulation.

A comprehensive phylogeny of extant horses, rhinos and tapirs (Perissodactyla) through data combination

We present the first phylogenies to include all extant species of Perissodactyla (oddtoed hoofed mammals) and the recently extinct quagga (Equus quagga). Two independent data sets were examined; one based on multiple genes and analyzed using both supertree and supermatrix approaches, and a second being a supertree constructed from trees collected from the scientific literature. All methods broadly confirmed the traditional view of perissodactyl interfamily relationships, with Equidae (¼ Hippomorpha) forming the sister-group to the clade Rhinocerotidae þ Tapiridae (¼ Ceratomorpha). The contentious affinity of the Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) is resolved in favour of it forming a clade with the two Asian rhinos (genus Rhinoceros). However, no data set or tree-building method managed to satisfactorily resolve the historically contentious relationships among extant equids; little agreement appears among the different trees for this group. In general, both the supertree and supermatrix approaches performed equally well, but both were hindered by the current paucity of data (e.g. no single gene has been sequenced to date for all 17 species) and its patchy distribution within Equidae. More data, both molecular and morphological, are required for all species to resolve the poorly supported nodes.

Psychiatrist–consumer relationships in US public mental health care: consumers’ views of a disability system

The US public mental health system is a disability system. By this is meant that public programs for people with mental illness serve consumers who are seriously and chronically ill, functionally disabled and eligible for benefits by virtue of their disability. This study explores, through focus groups and qualitative data analysis, the perceptions of these consumers of their relationships with public sector psychiatrists. Thematic analysis finds relationships of three types – compliance, collaboration and contention – and constituent sub‐themes that specify these further. Issues of poverty and powerlessness arise in every category, but especially in contentious relationships. Although the converse is widely believed to be true, this paper argues that the economic and political empowerment of people with psychiatric disabilities is vital to the success of their clinical care

Bargaining for Brooklyn: community organizations in the entrepreneurial city

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and '70s, government services and investment capital left, too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today, there are tens of thousands of these CBOs - private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid. Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.

The FEPC and the legacy of the labor-based Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s

The Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement are often seen as two distinct movements for social justice. During the Second World War, however, this was not the case, as many activists and leaders argued that civil rights advances would enhance the egalitarian premise of the Labor Movement and as increased opportunities in employment seemed the best way to advance civil rights. These two movements came together to fight for the perpetuation of the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), which had been initially spurred on by the great labor leader A. Philip Randolph. During and after the war, when Northern business interests and Southern segregationists threatened the existence of the FEPC, the cause for civil rights and economic justice led to the formation of a dynamic coalition of civil rights liberals, including advocates from religious, labor, civic and civil rights organizations. This article explores the contentious relationships within the coalition and how the fight for a permanent federal FEPC led to the creation of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which became a crucial voice during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and which is today the largest umbrella organization fighting for the cause of civil rights.

Book Review:A Good Life in a World Made Good: Albert Eustace Haydon, 1880-1975by W. Creighton Peden

Reviewed by: A Good Life in a World Made Good: Albert Eustace Haydon, 1880-1975 Tadd Ruetenik W. Creighton Peden A Good Life in a World Made Good: Albert Eustace Haydon, 1880-1975. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2006. xvi + 312 pp. According to pragmatists, facts are not compelling on their own. In context, we select which facts are important to us, constructing from them an interesting reality. This is why it is disappointing to read Peden's work in intellectual biography and not become especially interested in the life and work of its subject. It is not that Haydon is uninteresting, and the author of his biography does an admirably diligent job in presenting him. It is just that the author, despite his diligent research, does little to try to sell the reader on Haydon's significance. Peden presents a thorough summary of Haydon's life and work, but does so without critical engagement, and without a compelling argument for why this particular good life is worthy of our extended appreciation. There are things to appreciate in Haydon. He was a noteworthy advocate of humanistic religion, a man who worked to free us from the restrictions of dead, traditional theology. For Haydon, religion was at heart an expression of social hope, not an elaboration of an abstract scheme of the universe. His fascination with world religions led to the development of a thesis that religion is the integration of values into workable group ideals, and that "each religion has been utterly optimistic by reading the quest for perfect happiness as the goal of history" (111). As he puts it, religion is "the shared quest for the good life" (xii), a "heroic quest . . . to accept nothing less than the perfect life" (124). And it appears that Haydon lived close to the perfect life, one of health, happiness, manageable fame, resolvable conflict, and home-life stability. This is part of the problem, though. Philosophical heroes are often those who negotiate lives of significant adversity—or at least that is the way we choose to interpret their lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson lost a son and yet lived life with a nearly obnoxious passion; Charles Sanders Peirce was a cantankerous man prone to addictions and contentious relationships; Henry James Senior was a tender-minded soul trying to posture his way through a tough-minded, anti-establishment philosophy. William [End Page 225] James dealt with anxiety and depression throughout his life, which seemed often to be on the point of shipwreck and emotional death. Margaret Fuller's challenging life was ended by literal shipwreck—and we are engaged in the story. On the other hand, A. Eustace Haydon was just a really nice guy who worked hard, lived cleanly, and believed the universe was basically friendly to us. So should he have no biography? No, it is just that any biography needs to be presented compellingly and selectively, even if the subject is not particularly dramatic. Those already interested in Haydon, or who work specifically in the field of pragmatic religious thought, might find this work to be a useful compendium. Those for whom Haydon is obscure, however, will not, based on this work, necessarily be drawn to him. Jerome A. Stone's foreword tells us that Peden chose to write this biography in the "historical present," a technique which allows readers to avoid the "'fallacy of hindsight'" by inviting the reader to place herself as a participant in Haydon's emergence from a conservative Baptist setting to become a Humanist Pioneer" (xiii). This technique works well in biographies involving Nazi Germany or the American Civil War, where decisions are momentous and need to be appreciated in their full moral context. And it could work here, in the biography of a radical humanist working within an environment of theological conservatism, where desires for human flourishing clash with traditional concerns about human arrogance and amorality. But other than just noticing the courses that Haydon took in graduate school—the author lists many of these on page 34—readers are not able to see how it is that Haydon was converted. A man's conversion is perhaps the most interesting thing about him, and yet...

Analysis of complete mitochondrial genome sequences increases phylogenetic resolution of bears (Ursidae), a mammalian family that experienced rapid speciation

BackgroundDespite the small number of ursid species, bear phylogeny has long been a focus of study due to their conservation value, as all bear genera have been classified as endangered at either the species or subspecies level. The Ursidae family represents a typical example of rapid evolutionary radiation. Previous analyses with a single mitochondrial (mt) gene or a small number of mt genes either provide weak support or a large unresolved polytomy for ursids. We revisit the contentious relationships within Ursidae by analyzing complete mt genome sequences and evaluating the performance of both entire mt genomes and constituent mtDNA genes in recovering a phylogeny of extremely recent speciation events.ResultsThis mitochondrial genome-based phylogeny provides strong evidence that the spectacled bear diverged first, while within the genus Ursus, the sloth bear is the sister taxon of all the other five ursines. The latter group is divided into the brown bear/polar bear and the two black bears/sun bear assemblages. These findings resolve the previous conflicts between trees using partial mt genes. The ability of different categories of mt protein coding genes to recover the correct phylogeny is concordant with previous analyses for taxa with deep divergence times. This study provides a robust Ursidae phylogenetic framework for future validation by additional independent evidence, and also has significant implications for assisting in the resolution of other similarly difficult phylogenetic investigations.ConclusionIdentification of base composition bias and utilization of the combined data of whole mitochondrial genome sequences has allowed recovery of a strongly supported phylogeny that is upheld when using multiple alternative outgroups for the Ursidae, a mammalian family that underwent a rapid radiation since the mid- to late Pliocene. It remains to be seen if the reliability of mt genome analysis will hold up in studies of other difficult phylogenetic issues. Although the whole mitochondrial DNA sequence based phylogeny is robust, it remains in conflict with phylogenetic relationships suggested by analysis of limited nuclear-encoded data, a situation that will require gathering more nuclear DNA sequence information.

A phylogeny of the Caniformia (order Carnivora) based on 12 complete protein-coding mitochondrial genes

Evolutionary relationships of the order Carnivora have been extensively studied. However, phylogenetic studies based on different types of data, species samples, and methods of analysis provide contradictory results. Consequently, phylogenetic relationships of Carnivora remain contentious. Here, the sequence of 12 mitochondrial genes (10,842 nucleotides) from a total of 38 carnivore species was used to investigate the phylogeny of the caniform (dog-like) carnivores. An analysis using maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian approaches provided a unique and well-supported solution to most contentious relationships within Caniformia. The clade Arctoidea was shown to consist of three major monophyletic groups: Pinnipedia, Ursidae, and Musteloidea. Within Pinnipedia, the families Otariidae and Odobenidae formed a clade, sister to Phocidae. Within Musteloidea, there was a sister relationship between true mustelids (i.e., excluding the skunks) and procyonids, and between ailurids and mephitids (skunks). Despite a high level of confidence obtained at most nodes, uncertainty remained about the relative position of the three major arctoid clades.

Law & psychiatry: slowing the revolving door: community reentry of offenders with mental illness.

Law & psychiatry: slowing the revolving door: community reentry of offenders with mental illness.

Landscapes of power, landscapes of conflict: state formation in the south Scandinavian Iron Age

Preface. Forward. Table Of Contents. List of Figures. Part I. 1. The Secondary State In South Scandinavia. 2. A Multidisciplinary Study Of The State. 3. Prestate Denmark: The Earlier Iron Ages. Part II. 4. The Viking Age in Denmark. 5. Social Classes In The Viking Age: Contentious Relationships. 6. Landscapes Of Power And Landscapes Of Conflict. Part III. 7. Reconstructing Cultural Landscapes In Southeast Scania. 8. Place, Space, And Experience In Iron Age Communities. 9. Conclusions. Bibliography. Appendix A.Preface. Forward. Table Of Contents. List of Figures. Part I. 1. The Secondary State In South Scandinavia. 2. A Multidisciplinary Study Of The State. 3. Prestate Denmark: The Earlier Iron Ages. Part II. 4. The Viking Age in Denmark. 5. Social Classes In The Viking Age: Contentious Relationships. 6. Landscapes Of Power And Landscapes Of Conflict. Part III. 7. Reconstructing Cultural Landscapes In Southeast Scania. 8. Place, Space, And Experience In Iron Age Communities. 9. Conclusions. Bibliography. Appendix A.

Family Business Succession in Portugal: An Examination of Case Studies in the Furniture Industry

This paper explores the transferability of theoretical constructs developed in an Anglo-American culture to Portugal. Cultural effects on succession are examined within three Portuguese family firms, which were selected for their ability to generate theory. Much of the extant literature appears to be valid in this context. Notable exceptions include difficulties in applying stages models of the succession process with more than one predecessor and successors at varying stages. Harmonious rather than contentious relationships were commonplace. Daughters were more highly educated than sons and less likely to enter the family firm. Sons joined the family firm with little or no outside work experience and low levels of education. These facts are highlighted as concerns regarding the ability of Portuguese family firms to compete in the new economy. A conceptual framework is presented as a basis for further research.

Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow

On November 16, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov signed an agreement establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two days later Roosevelt named the first of five ambassadors he would place in Moscow between 1933 and 1945. Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin tells the dramatic and important story of these ambassadors and their often contentious relationships with the two most powerful men in the world. More than fifty years after his death, Roosevelt's foreign policy, especially regarding the Soviet Union, remains a subject of intense debate. Dennis Dunn offers an ambitious new appraisal of the apparent confusion and contradiction in Roosevelt's policy - one moment publicizing the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter and the next moment giving tacit approval to Stalin's control of parts of Eastern Europe and northeast Asia. Dunn argues that Rooseveltism, the president's belief that the Soviet Union and the United States were both developing into modern social democracies, blinded Roosevelt to the true nature of Stalin's brutal dictatorship despite repeated warnings from his ambassadors in Moscow.

Variations in Adolescent Conflict and Social Interaction Associated with Maternal Employment and Family Structure

Adolescents' relationships with parents, siblings, and friends were examined as a function of family structure and maternal employment. High school subjects responded to questionnaires indicating, for each relationship, rate and affective intensity of conflicts from the previous day, as well as amount of social interaction. There were no differences between adolescents with full-time, part-time, and nonemployed mothers in reports of conflict or social interaction. Conflict affective intensity was unrelated to household structure, as were levels of social interaction. Subjects in single mother households indicated more conflict with mothers than those in two-parent families, although levels of conflict with single mothers were equivalent to the total number of disagreements that adolescents in two-parent families experienced with both parents. Adolescents in single mother households also reported higher rates of conflict with siblings, but not friends. The results do not support views that adolescents with single or employed mothers have more contentious or distant relationships than their peers.