Context Of Relationships Research Articles

Close to others - closer to happiness?: An empirical investigation of the social determinants of subjective wellbeing

Extensive research on the determinants of people‘s subjective wellbeing has shed light on factors that influence quality of life and that traditional welfare measures tend to neglect. Particularly important among these appear to be the relational, interpersonal aspects of human existence, and both intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of participating in different types of social networks and associative activities. This field of analysis, however, is not devoid of challenges. These include: the wide variety of social proxies adopted in the literature, which has often led to mixed results; and the almost exclusive use of cross-sectional data, which makes it impossible to control for individual unobserved characteristics that could significantly affect both wellbeing levels, and the quality of one’s social and relational context. In this study, we address both of these issues by examining the association between subjective wellbeing, and a rich set of 17 social capital indicators reflecting the following dimensions: personal relationships, social network support, civic engagement, and trust and cooperative norms. Moreover, we use longitudinal data, and control for time-constant sources of heterogeneity among respondents, such as personality traits and predispositions. Our results suggest a consistent relationship between wellbeing and all four dimensions of social capital examined. Furthermore, we find evidence of important gender differences in the way social and relational factors affect overall life satisfaction.

Rise and fall of the (social) group.

This article maps the rise and fall of the idea of a (social) group across medicine in the context of contemporary analyses in psychology and sociology. This history shows the early 20th century emergence and growth of group medicine, group therapy and group comparisons. In recent decades, however, the idea that groups constituted the basic units of society has been replaced with the emergence of populations and systems that offer a more virtual and abstract context for individual relationships. This has implications for explanation itself as the demise of groups has changed the epistemological ground-rules for understanding identity formation and social change.

Fairer Sex: The Role of Relationship Equity in Female Sexual Desire

ABSTRACT Previous investigations into Female Sexual Desire (FSD) have been focused on women’s biological, cognitive, and emotional processes, despite evidence that FSD is also responsive to relational contexts. Past research consistently demonstrates a general association between relationship satisfaction and FSD. There remains, however, a need to expound this connection. In response, this study explored the role of relationship equity in relationship satisfaction and FSD. For this cross-sectional study, 299 Australian women aged 18 to 39 years responded to an online questionnaire measuring relationship factors and dimensions of sexual desire. Two mediation models were tested to examine how relationship equity was associated with solitary and dyadic sexual desire, via a connection with relationship satisfaction. As expected, equality in relationships predicted relationship satisfaction, which, subsequently, was related to higher levels of dyadic sexual desire. No significant mediation was found for solitary desire, indicating that relationship factors may not play a critical role in this domain. This result also demonstrates a distinct divergence between the two domains of desire that requires further examination. These results solidify the notion of FSD as a multifaceted construct and present meaningful implications for theory, research, and clinical practice.

Care experienced LGBTQA + young people in out-of-home care in Australia: A case study

This paper presents a case study that discusses the lived experiences of two LGBTQA + young people who have been in out-of-home care in Australia, focusing particularly on the influence of relationships on their developing sexual identity. Utilising a secure base theoretical perspective, we argue that how young people experience support, care and safety may depend on the relational context in which it is received, and that warm, loving relationships may be just as significant for the development of positive gender and sexual identities as explicit support for identity formation. The findings from the two narratives provide an argument in favour of the secure base model to support young LGBTQA + people in out-of-home care.

Revisiting rural healthcare access through Held’s ethics of care

Access to healthcare and health seeking behaviours of rural people often hinge on the existing relationships between healthcare providers and (prospective) healthcare users. However, rich micro-level health professional-healthcare user relationships and the unique relational context of rural settings are largely missing from dominant rural healthcare access conceptual frameworks. We argue rural healthcare access conceptualisations require revisiting from a relational perspective to ensure future healthcare access policy accounts for the relational nature of healthcare in rural contexts. Ethics of care is a moral theory informed by feminism which rejects liberal individualist notions and emphasises interdependence. We used Held’s ethics of care characteristics to examine Russell and colleagues’ healthcare access framework and dimensions for rural and remote populations. This process revealed Held’s ethics of care characteristics are only somewhat evident across Russell et al.’s dimensions: most evident in the acceptability and accommodation dimensions, and most absent in the availability and affordability dimensions. Future rural healthcare access frameworks need to pay further attention to the relational aspects of rural healthcare, particularly around the availability and affordability of healthcare, to bolster future efforts to improve healthcare access for rural people.

Using AI and ML to optimize information discovery in under-utilized, Holocaust-related records

Digital cultural assets are often thought to exist in separate spheres based on their two principal points of origin: digitized and born digital. Increasingly, advances in digital curation are blurring this dichotomy, by introducing so-called “collections as data,” which regardless of their origination make cultural assets more amenable to the application of new computational tools and methodologies. This paper brings together archivists, scholars, and technologists to demonstrate computational treatments of digital cultural assets using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques that can help unlock hard-to-reach archival content. It describes an extended, iterative study applied to digitized and datafied WWII-era records housed at the FDR Presidential Library, rich content that is regrettably under-utilized by scholars examining American responses to the Holocaust. Authors detail the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration for evaluating user needs, identifying and applying tools and methodologies (including ML through object detection and AI through Named Entity Recognition or NER), and reaching the real-world outcome of public access to augmented data. They also discuss issues of digital representation, relational context, and interface design to enable new modes of public and scholarly access. While based on a case study, we believe that this work is a substantial contribution to revealing the strengths and weaknesses of using AI/ML systems in cultural organizations. We give particular care to lessons learned, and generalize the approach taken across broad classes of collections with a focus on responsive iterations, reproducibility, and the relevance of data and its structures to users.

Parenting Behavior and Attitudes of a Group of South African Foster Parents Caring for Adolescents Presenting with Risk Behavior

This article reports on one of the objectives of a larger study aiming at the development of an adolescent risk-behavior management program for foster parents. The objective relevant to this article entailed the exploration of parenting behaviors and attitudes of parents fostering adolescents presenting with risk behavior. The respondents were recruited from the clientele of designated welfare organizations in the North West Province of South Africa. A quantitative survey using the multi-dimensional Parental Style Dimension Questionnaire (PSDQ) was administered to a purposive sample of 150 respondents. A response rate of 64.5% was achieved, with only foster mothers participating in the study. Data analysis was done by the Statistical Consultation Services of the North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus) using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 25, Release 25.0 SPSS. In addition, T-Tests and ANOVAs were used to test the hypothesis at a 0.05 level of significance and Spearman’s correlations examine correlations between sub-scale scores and biographical data. Sub-scales of the PSDQ were tested for internal consistency reliability and reasonable coefficients were rendered, except for the permissive parenting style scale that was excluded from analysis. The results showed a significant, positive correlation between authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles amongst the respondents. Parental attitudes and responses to risk behavior significantly affected their actual behavior towards fostered adolescents presenting with risk behavior. The researchers concluded that consideration of parenting styles in the foster care relationship context will greatly determine the nature of further interventions.

WeChat users’ debunking strategies in response to COVID-19 conspiracy theories: A mixed-methods study

The current study adopted a mixed-methods approach to examine both qualitative and quantitative data of Chinese WeChat users’ strategies in response to COVID-19 conspiracy theories disseminated in WeChat. Thematic analysis based on 30 interviewees suggested interesting patterns about how such conspiracy theories were disseminated based on relationship types within WeChat groups and how different types of debunking strategies were used to counter conspiracy theories based on the relational outcomes and contexts. Quantitative data based on 588 participants suggested COVID-19 information exposures from different sources, conspiracy beliefs, exposures of conspiracy beliefs and face concerns influence WeChat users’ responses to address COVID-19-related information in WeChat platform.

Early Adversity and Changes in Cortisol and Negative Affect in Response to Interpersonal Threats in the Laboratory.

Adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse and neglect, are associated with poor health outcomes. This association may be partially explained by differences in stress physiology. Though most early adverse experiences occur within the context of interpersonal relationships, stress exposures manipulated in the laboratory rarely involve interpersonal interactions beyond the mere presence of others. This study examines whether adverse childhood experiences are associated with differences in affective and cortisol reactivity to two stressors which may more closely resemble the powerlessness and the lack of control characteristic of many adverse childhood experiences: a dominant (vs. submissive) interaction partner and lower (vs. higher) social status. We also manipulate social-evaluative threat as a test of whether these interpersonal stressors are more germane to stress reactivity associated with early adversity than the performance anxiety evoked by more traditional laboratory stressors, such as the Trier Social Stress Test. The results partially support the hypothesis that participants with greater early adversity may be more reactive to interpersonal stressors reminiscent of early adverse experience. Given the interpersonal nature of most adverse childhood experiences, conceptualizing and measuring associations with stress physiology in an interpersonal context may more closely capture the psychological and biological embedding of these early experiences.

SISTEM INFORMASI PENJUALAN DAN PEMBELIAN UNTUK MENYUSUN DAN MENGUKUR RASIO PROFITABILITAS

ABSTRACT
 The development of technology today has become something that is universal and can be used in various human lives. One of them is in business. In today's era, it is undeniable that a computer is a component that must be owned by a company in running its business, in order to assist in processing data and help improve the quality of work and quality in service. In this case, Toko Maju Jaya is used as a place of research, because in this place the system that is carried out is still manual and has not been managed properly, so errors often occur in making reports and in processing stock items. The purpose of this study is to provide convenience during the processing of sales, purchase transactions, goods data, supplier data and customer data, minimizing errors in recording.
 The research method used in this research is using the R&D (Research and Development) method. This method is used to produce a certain product that is analytical and can be tested for effectiveness so that it can be used in the wider community. In designing the system the tools used are Flowcharts, Entity Relationship Diagrams and Context Diagrams, while for data collection using observations, interviews, and literature studies. The database application development tool uses MySQL and the programming language uses Visual Basic 6.0. With this information system transaction data processing can be done computerized so as to reduce errors in reporting.

Mindfulness and Implementation Planning: Promoting Self-Reported and Behavioral Forgiveness.

The current research examined mindfulness and implementation planning as practices that promote interpersonal forgiveness. A unique contribution of this work includes the investigation of motives and techniques that might promote both self-reported and behavioral forgiveness. Young adults (N = 80; M = 19.2years) completed a task in which a standardized, interpersonal transgression occurred without the participants' knowledge. Results indicate that individuals who received training in either a mindfulness practice (i.e., mindful breathing) or implementation planning practice (i.e., developing "if-then" plan statements) reported better overall mood following the standardized transgression. Interestingly, mindful breathing appeared to be the most beneficial practice to enhance positive attitudes toward the forgiveness process and promote self-reported and behavioral forgiveness. Findings are consistent with prior research investigating the effectiveness of mindful breathing and implementation planning following an actual interpersonal transgression. Implications as well as future research directions within the context of forgiveness and relationships are discussed.

“Immigration Knocks on the Door . . . We Are Stuck . . .”: A Multilevel Analysis of Undocumented Youth’s Experiences of Racism, System Failure, and Resistance in Policy and School Contexts

Background/Context: Undocumented youth navigate unwelcoming federal, state, and local contexts in the United States. Although previous research shows the significant impact of immigration policy and enforcement on educational outcomes and social-emotional well-being, this study sheds light on the multiple, intersecting policy, and school contexts that hinder social and educational mobility. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to elicit Latinx undocumented immigrant youth experiences in a southern state to contribute to evolving research on their experiences in K-12 schools. In addition, the purpose was to understand how undocumented youth (a) talk about the policies that impact their daily lives, (b) perceive the organizational-level structures that exist to support them in school and community contexts, and (c) articulate a sense of belonging through their community and school interactions in relation to processes of racialization and its impact on immigration status. Conceptually, the paper uses a multilevel, interactional framework to show the impact of racialization of Latinx undocumented immigrants in policy, school, and community, and relational contexts. Research Design: The study is a 3-year critical ethnography of two Title I high schools in the U.S. South that maintains particularly restrictive policies toward immigrants. Fieldwork from two school sites and interviews with 63 undocumented youth, and relevant personnel deepen our understanding of their status of illegality—specifically how their material lives are impacted by policy and institutional-level dynamics and constraints. Conclusions/Recommendations: The author shows how youth voice through ethnographic evidence counteracts anti-immigrant policies and criminalization of Latinx immigrants; youth critique social policy and institutions that seek to limit their progress in society. The implications for policymakers, educators, and school-based personnel is significant Although legal status may impose certain limitations on undocumented students’ educational opportunities, their educational trajectories are still highly determined by school structures. Knowing this, educators can respond effectively to ensure educational rights and equitable educational practice.

Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960 by Stephanie Vander Wel

Reviewed by: Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960 by Stephanie Vander Wel Leigh H. Edwards Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960. By Stephanie Vander Wel. Music in American Life. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 250. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08495-9; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04308-6.) This study of early women's country music provides an illuminating contribution to scholarship on gender and class in popular music, establishing specifically how white working-class women in country music during the three decades from 1930 to 1960 negotiated classed ideals of femininity through their musical voices and theatrical displays. Stephanie Vander Wel argues that performers such as Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells reveal the contradictions of female performance in the country music industry during this period because while the industry emphasized notions of middle-class respectability, the female artists themselves often performed in ways that exceeded that pressured framing of domestic propriety and instead registered working-class ambivalence about middle-class norms. Using a nuanced model of both identification and disavowal, Vander Wel skillfully establishes how performers could engage with gender and class formations in this period of industrial modernity, and fans from a range of socioeconomic and regional backgrounds could take pleasure in performances that pushed back against or exceeded white middle-class respectability. [End Page 420] Building on important work by scholars such as Kristine M. McCusker, Vander Wel makes a key contribution to studies of women in early country music. Her study is particularly notable for its extensive discussions of vocality and gender. She unpacks how vocal style itself can be interpreted in different sociohistorical contexts in relation to ideas of class, gender, and place. Finding larger cultural tensions around gender and class in performance tropes of the period, Vander Wel examines tropes such as the singing cowgirl, the female hillbilly comedian with burlesque humor, and the honky-tonk angel for how each in different ways embodies ambivalent resistance to middle-class domesticity. Organized chronologically, the book attends to place. Part 1 tackles early country radio in the 1930s and Chicago's WLS National Barn Dance, with case studies of Lulu Belle and Patsy Montana. Part 2 addresses 1940s California and dance hall culture, with studies of Carolina Cotton's performances with western swing bands and in Hollywood films, and of Rose Maddox's use of burlesque humor. In Part 3, the book moves to 1950s Nashville and the evolution of the country music industry, focusing on Kitty Wells and honky-tonk, with studies of Jean Shepherd and Goldie Hill. In her conclusion, Vander Wel traces the ongoing impacts of these earlier dynamics of female performers in the performers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, as well as recent artists such as the Chicks and Miranda Lambert. Drawing on intersectional approaches to country music studies, Vander Wel discusses recent scholarship on Dolly Parton in particular. As it engages with these larger theoretical questions of gender and class, the book illuminates how musical performances register sociohistorical ideas around these categories, and it thoroughly contextualizes these performances and their cultural reception. Vander Wel analyzes specific vocal performances such as Patsy Montana's and Carolina Cotton's yodeling or Rose Maddox's open-throat singing style. The chapter on Kitty Wells provides an especially convincing argument that Wells combined more traditional southern vernacular elements like a nasal twang with more modern vocal approaches that included more vibrato, and that her singing style conveys the tensions of the honky-tonk angels who express their own sexual desires as well as their own conflicted relationship to notions of middle-class security. That chapter encapsulates the book's strength in combining vocal analysis with larger gendered class themes, as well as thorough historicization of styles like honky-tonk. The book also helpfully brings more attention to less well known performers, such as Carolina Cotton. Throughout, Vander Wel's study demonstrates how these larger theoretical concerns can be seen in the grounded history of musical performance itself. Leigh H. Edwards Florida State University Copyright © 2022...

Clinical Communication Skills Training in Third‐ and Fourth‐Year Medical Students: A Qualitative Study

Healthcare professionals require strong clinical communication skills (CCS), yet many healthcare workers demonstrate discrepancies between their self‐rated competency in communication skills and patient satisfaction. These communication skill deficiencies may cause increased stress and anxiety in healthcare professionals, which in turn adversely affects patient compliance and long‐term health outcomes. According to the Transaction Model of Communication, communication can be shaped by social, relational, and cultural contexts. This study sought to identify the factors that influence how medical students gained CCS and how those factors evolved over the course of the medical school experience. Semi‐structured interviews of third‐ and fourth‐year medical students were conducted at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Qualitative responses underwent deductive thematic analysis using the Transaction Model of Communication with iterative open coding to identity and name themes. Results indicated that students felt there were profound differences in CCS training between the preclinical versus clinical years. They suggested preclinical CCS training, while valuable, often falls short in preparing them for the challenges of navigating real patient care. Medical students also recognized the value of CCS for safe and effective healthcare practice, but strongly advocated for changes to the current CCS curriculum, including earlier exposure to real patients, increased cultural awareness training, explicit telehealth training, and increased opportunities to practice “delivering bad news”, even in simulated settings. The findings of this study have provided new insights into the individual medical student experience, which speak to the experiences of medical students and practitioners throughout the global healthcare field. This study’s findings may be used to inform curricular changes such as increased training on select topics and earlier access to real patient experiences, which may improve students’ confidence and competency in their clinical communication abilities, thereby improving patient care.

Doubt and Desire

Doubt and Desire

Interactive Contribution of Observed Mother-Youth Emotional Climate and Youth Physiology: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Understanding Youth Coping With Peer Stress

We examined the prospective associations between two indicators of mother-youth emotional climate (i.e., maternal affect, dyadic cohesiveness) during a peer problem discussion and youth coping with peer stress following entry into middle school. We also investigated youth baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as a moderator of these associations given its role in physiological stress regulation. Participants were 100 mother-youth dyads (53% boys; Mage = 11.05 years; 43% ethnic minorities). More positive maternal affect at Time 1 (spring of 5th grade) was associated with more primary and secondary control engagement coping and advice-seeking at Time 2 (fall of 6th grade); greater dyadic cohesiveness was prospectively linked with more advice-seeking only. Further, the positive association between maternal affect and primary control coping was only evident for youth who showed lower (not higher) baseline RSA. We discuss implications for jointly considering the mother-youth relational context and youth physiological regulatory capacity towards understanding coping socialization.

Asking the right questions: towards a person-centered conception of shared decision-making regarding treatment of advanced chronic kidney disease in older patients

An increasing number of older patients have to decide on a treatment plan for advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD), involving dialysis or conservative care. Shared decision-making (SDM) is recommended as the model for decision-making in such preference-sensitive decisions. The aim of SDM is to come to decisions that are consistent with the patient’s values and preferences and made by the patient and healthcare professional working together. In clinical practice, however, SDM appears to be not yet routine and needs further implementation. A shift from a biomedical to a person-centered conception might help to make the process more shared. Shared should, therefore, be interpreted as two persons bringing two perspectives to the table, that both need to be explored during the decision-making process. Starting from the patient’s perspective will enable to determine the mutual goals of care first and, subsequently, determine the best way for achieving those goals. To perform such SDM, the healthcare professional needs to become a skilled companion, being part of the patient’s relational context, and start asking the right questions about what matters to the patient as person. In this article, we describe the need for a person-centered conception of SDM for the setting of older patients with advanced CKD.

The Health Impacts and Life Challenges Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic on Hong Kong Chinese Women.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive global crisis. The adverse impacts on Asian women, including Hong Kong Chinese women, have been considerable. The pressure on Hong Kong women is immense due to cultural, social, familial, and personal responsibilities. This study aims to illustrate the health impacts and life challenges for Hong Kong Chinese Women during the pandemic. An interpretive phenomenological approach with purposive sampling was adopted. Semi-structured, face-to-face, in-depth interviews were conducted from August 2020 to January 2021. Twenty-five women participated in the interviews, lasting an average of 48 min. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The core theme identified was “Perceived family caregiving as paramount self-obligation in times of the pandemic”, in the context of the role of daughter, wife, or mother (or a combination). Three interconnected themes have been identified in individual, relational, and external contexts: deterioration of personal health, unfavorable to family relationships, and adaptation to social challenges. Eight subthemes have emerged related to health impacts and life challenges. The pandemic has increased women’s perception of their caregiver roles in the family, but it has diminished their quality of life. The promotion of strategies and activities that could enhance women’s physical, psychological, emotional and social quality of life is recommended.

Pleasure privilege in mediated and relational contexts: sexuality and gender

ABSTRACT This article responds to encouragement to remember the wonder in gender and sexualities education. Specifically, it addresses gender and sexuality in a variety of contexts, from mediated forms to how gendered sexual expectations are socially constructed and conveyed through cultural scripts, particularly in heterosexual contexts. According to traditional sexual scripts, men are encouraged to be sexually active and privilege personal sexual pleasure (e.g., arousal, orgasm), whereas women are often conditioned to be sexually passive, reactive, dismissive and reputationally protective. Exploring gender, conditioning and education as they relate to sexuality and pleasure, this article combines scholarly research with play in its approach. Findings acknowledge both the continuation of traditional sexual expectations and practices as related to sex and gender as well as the value of more contemporary, sexual nuance such as those found in PlayLabs, educational workshops addressing sex and mentoring as related to sex and pleasure.

The Perception of Lying of Indonesians Living Abroad

There are four common requirements of the definition of ‘lie’; they are (1) falsehood of a statement, (2) speaker’s belief regarding the falsehood, (3) intention to deceive the hearer, and (4) belief that the hearer will be deceived by the statement (Mahon, 2015). Speaker’s belief or subjective falsity is the most important element as argued by philosophers and linguists. This argument is true for speakers of English (Coleman & Kay, 1981), Arabic (Cole, 1996), and Spanish (Hardin, 2010; Eichelberger, 2012), but not for Indonesians (Adha, 2020) or Chinese people (Adha & Li, 2021). Indonesians and Chinese people consider objective falsity as the most important element in the definition of ‘lie’, but the latter group also emphasizes on intention, speaker-hearer relationship, and situational context. Since cultures have a role in shaping the choice and moral judgements about truth and deception (Fu, Xu, Cameron, Heyman & Lee, 2007), would Indonesians living and experiencing foreign cultures have a different perception about a lie? Specifically, would Indonesians living in China have a perception that is similar to Chinese people? A questionnaire consisting stories in Chinese Mandarin was distributed to 45 Indonesian respondents. All respondents have lived at least one year in China as foreign students in a Chinese university and have at least lower intermediate levels in Mandarin language. The result shows that the Indonesian respondents living abroad exhibit more uncertainty in their responses compared to Indonesian respondents in Adha’s (2020) study. Thus, it is feasible to argue that a new environment with a different culture may affect one’s perception.