Sociological Research Online Research Articles

Problem Solving in Dance/Movement Therapy Research: Developing an Intervention Protocol for Adults Living with Treatment Resistant Depression

Dance/movement therapy (DMT) research requires creative and innovative thinking; this paper includes two parts demonstrating this. Part one describes and delves into the creative problem solving process undertaken over 2.5 years. Four main steps were followed towards developing an intervention session plan for a first-of-its-kind DMT study in treatment resistant depression: (i) Examining pre-existing knowledge: Reviewing insights gained from clinical practice and formal literature. (ii) Assessing the need for preliminary studies: This step demonstrates how to determine and navigate the potential need for preliminary studies in novel research. (iii) Integrating existing and new research: I discuss Watson’s (Watson, Sociological Research Online 25:66–83, 2020) braiding technique and how it may help integrate insights from steps one and two. (iv) Reviewing outputs: This includes examining the developed session plan by conducting a fidelity and biases check. Each step presents reflective questions that ultimately contributed towards protocol development. The questions listed may also be a beneficial guide to novice DMT researchers embarking on novel research.

Decolonial dialogues: COVID-19 and migrant women's remembrance as resistance

ABSTRACT This contribution presents a text-journey documenting decolonial moments experienced during COVID-19 with other migrant women from Pakistan residing in the Netherlands. It explores women’s negotiations of epistemic disregard experienced during integration, by means of Urdu language proverbs that arose during our conversations. Through remembrance, the presence of relationalities and multiple temporalities [Vazquez (2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109–115] are expressed in knowledge practices we have brought from Pakistan. This raises crucial questions: How do relational and temporal dimensions (in)form migrant women’s practices and struggles? In what ways do migrant women defy modern knowledges and follow their ancestral ways of knowing, being, and doing? In addressing these questions, a decolonial approach is used to create (alternative) spaces, for those bodies that are relational and are sites of memory and temporality. Maria Lugones’ [(1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19] concept of world traveling and Rolando Vazquez’s [(2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109–115; Vazquez, R. (October 2015). Relational temporalities: From modernity to the decolonial. Unpublished manuscript] concepts of plural temporalities and relationality are used as a framework to understand remembrance as resistance to dominant world views.

“Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums

ABSTRACT Recent research has noted the persistence of a long continuum of “anti-welfare” discourses that are increasingly embedded in the UK news media, political communication, and popular culture (e.g. Golding and Middleton 1982. Images of Welfare: Press and Public Attitudes to Poverty. Oxford: Mark Robertson; Jensen 2014. “Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy.” Sociological Research Online 19 (3): 277–283; Morrison 2019. Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths. London: Zed Books). Historical distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving poor” have been sharpened by successive governments in the service of varying shades of neoliberal governance. While Margaret Thatcher castigated “shirkers” in fostering an ideology of economic self-reliance, both New Labour and the Coalition obsessed over “welfare reform”: promoting an ideology of “work” in symbolic opposition to supposed cultures of “worklessness”. But, while “scroungerphobia” (Deacon 1978. “The Scrounging Controversy: Public Attitudes Towards the Unemployed in Contemporary Britain.” Social Policy and Administration 12 (2): 120–135) is now a widely recognised sociological phenomenon, scholarly attention to the concept has largely been reserved for its manifestation in tabloid newspapers, political rhetoric and, latterly, “poverty porn” television. Even recent work considering the public’s contribution to scrounger discourse(s) on social media focuses on mainstream platforms, such as Twitter and newspaper comment threads (e.g. Van Der Bom et al. 2018. “‘It’s not the Fact They Claim Benefits but Their Useless, Lazy, Drug Taking Lifestyles we Despise’: Analysing Audience Responses to Benefits Street Using Live Tweets.” Discourse, Context & Media 21: 36–45; Morrison 2019. Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths. London: Zed Books; Paterson 2020). This paper begins to address this oversight, by examining how normative anti-welfare discourses infiltrate everyday communication in more disparate online communities – including niche consumer forums. It draws on previously unpublished findings from an analysis of welfare-related conversations in these and other spaces at the height of a recent moral panic over “scroungers”: the period from 2013-2016, when Conservative-led governments strove to legitimise sweeping benefit cuts and punitive “welfare reform”.

Between the perfect and the problematic: everyday femininities, popular feminism, and the negotiation of intersectionality

ABSTRACTIn recent years, celebrity and popular culture have figured as key sites in the mediated resurgence of feminism, producing competing and contested articulations of feminism as a ‘popular’ phenomenon [Banet-Weiser, S. and Portwood-Stacer, L., 2017. The traffic in feminism: an introduction to the commentary and criticism on popular feminism. Feminist media studies, 17, 884–888]. Drawing on interviews with self-identifying feminists who primarily learn about and engage with feminism through digital culture, this article aims to connect and extend debates over the aims, logics and limits of popular feminism by foregrounding the affective, lived negotiations of feminist identity at this moment. This pilot project research suggests that the very logics of individuality and authenticity underpinning celebrity shape personal understandings and negotiations of feminism. I discuss two significant dynamics in these negotiations. First, celebrity becomes an accessible means of both understanding and classifying ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feminism, organized under the poles of ‘white feminism’ and ‘intersectional feminism’ [Crenshaw, P. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago legal forum, 140, 139–167]. Second, in the context of the surveillance politics of social media, and broader neoliberal governmental injunctions to continually work on one’s ‘character’ [Bull, A. and Allen, K. 2018. Introduction: Sociological Interrogations of the Turn to Character. Sociological research online, 23(2), 392–398], authentic feminist identity becomes entangled with practices of perfecting and disciplining the self. The self is re-conceptualized as a ‘platform’ through which marginalized others are included. Via these celebrity logics, the pursuit of an intersectional feminist identity paradoxically obscures the reinvigoration of practices of middle-class whiteness centred on self-monitoring, self-actualization and the disavowal of complicity.

Corrigendum

Troubling Children’s Families: Who Is Troubled and Why? Approaches to Inter-Cultural Dialogue Jane Ribbens McCarthy and Val Gillies Sociological Research Online. Published OnlineFirst ahead of print. DOI: 10.1177/1360780417746871 First published December 22, 2017 In the above referenced article some of the citation dates were incorrect and so the article has been corrected to reflect this.

Corrigendum

Downing S (2017) They are not Mean Girls if They Are Adult Women: Reality Television’s Construction of Women’s Identity and Interpersonal Aggression. Sociological Research Online. Published online ahead of print. DOI: 10.1177/1360780417735781 This article was amended after publication to add the acknowledgement as follows: Jennifer Powers is acknowledged for her contribution to the research and writing presented in this manuscript.

Editors’ Note

In 2016 and 2017, Sociological Research Online published the following article and two subsequent responses: Gorard S (2016) Damaging Real Lives Through Obstinacy: Re-emphasising Why Significance Testing is Wrong. Sociological Research Online 21(1): 1–14. DOI: 10.5153/sro.3857 Nicholson J and McCusker S (2016) Damaging the Case for Improving Social Science Methodology Through Misrepresentation: Re-asserting Confidence in Hypothesis Testing as a Valid Scientific Process. Sociological Research Online 21(2): 1–12. DOI: 10.5153/sro.3985 Gorard (2017) Significance Testing is Still Wrong, and Damages Real Lives: A Brief Reply to Spreckelsen and Van Der Horst, and Nicholson and McCusker. Sociological Research Online 22(2): 1–7. DOI: 10.5153/sro.4281 An erratum has been published in the journal to clarify some corrections that had inadvertently been missed ahead of publication of the first article: Erratum to Gorard (2016) Damaging Real lives Through Obstinacy: Re-emphasising Why Significance Testing is Wrong. Sociological Research Online 21(1): 1–14. DOI: 10.1177/1360780417731066 Readers are advised to read the responses to the original article, particularly paragraph 4.7 in Nicholson and McCusker (2016) and paragraphs 3.1 and 3.2 in Gorard (2017) in light of the recently published Erratum. The journal apologises for any inconvenience or misunderstanding this may have caused.

Erratum

Gorard S (2016) Damaging Real Lives Through Obstinacy: Re-emphasising Why Significance Testing is Wrong. Sociological Research Online 21(1): 2. DOI: 10.5153/sro.3857 It has been brought to the attention of the Editors and the Publishers that some corrections requested by the author while reviewing the proofs had inadvertently been missed ahead of first publication of the above article on 28 February 2016. The author’s corrections were incorporated into subsequent versions of the online article, and there was an unintentional delay in uploading the corrected PDF version of the article online. For clarity of the scientific record, the corrections are outlined in this erratum: In paragraph 4.4 The sentence ‘On the first run, 1217 p-values were below 0.05 (this represents around 5.5% of the samples).’ was corrected as follows: ‘On the first run, 1217 p-values were below 0.05 (this represents around 12% of the samples)’. In paragraph 4.5 The sentence ‘Lack of normality may reduce the so-called “power” of the test slightly, but with 268 cases (deemed a very large N in most resources), this has been shown not to matter ( http://thestatsgeek.com/2013/09/28/the-t-test-and-robustness-to-non-normality/ )’ was corrected as follows: ‘Lack of normality may reduce the so-called “power” of the test slightly, but with 200 cases (deemed a very large N in most resources), this has been shown not to matter ( http://thestatsgeek.com/2013/09/28/the-t-test-and-robustness-to-non-normality/ )’ Sociological Research Online apologises to the author and the readers for any inconvenience this may have caused. The correct and citable version of the article is accessible at the following DOI: 10.5153/sro.3857

Corrigendum

‘We All Black Innit?’ Analysing Relations Between African and African-Caribbean Groups in Britain Louise Owusu-Kwarteng University of Greenwich, UK Sociological Research Online 22(2): 9 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/22/2/9.html DOI: 10.5153/sro.4265 Published: 29 May 2017 The author wishes to make clear that the work of Godfrey Mwakigale cited as 2009 in paragraph 1.3, 3.10, 5.4, 8.3 was actually published in 2007. The author apologises for this oversight.

Is Banning Significance Testing the Best Way to Improve Applied Social Science Research? – Questions on

Significance testing is widely used in social science research. It has long been criticised on statistical grounds and problems in the research practice. This paper is an applied researchers’ response to Gorard's (2016) ‘Damaging real lives through obstinacy: re-emphasising why significance testing is wrong’ in Sociological Research Online 21(1). He participates in this debate concluding from the issues raised that the use and teaching of significance testing should cease immediately. In that, he goes beyond a mere ban of significance testing, but claims that researchers still doing this are being unethical. We argue that his attack on applied scientists is unlikely to improve social science research and we believe he does not sufficiently prove his claims. In particular we are concerned that with a narrow focus on statistical significance, Gorard misses alternative, if not more important, explanations for the often-lamented problems in social science research. Instead, we argue that it is important to take into account the full research process, not just the step of data analysis, to get a better idea of the best evidence regarding a hypothesis.

Damaging the Case for Improving Social Science Methodology through Misrepresentation: Re-Asserting Confidence in Hypothesis Testing as a Valid Scientific Process

This paper is a response to Gorard's article, ‘Damaging real lives through obstinacy: re-emphasising why significance testing is wrong’ in Sociological Research Online 21(1). For many years Gorard has criticised the way hypothesis tests are used in social science, but recently he has gone much further and argued that the logical basis for hypothesis testing is flawed: that hypothesis testing does not work, even when used properly. We have sympathy with the view that hypothesis testing is often carried out in social science contexts when it should not be, and that outcomes are often described in inappropriate terms, but this does not mean the theory of hypothesis testing, or its use, is flawed per se. There needs to be evidence to support such a contention. Gorard claims that: ‘Anyone knowing the problems, as described over one hundred years, who continues to teach, use or publish significance tests is acting unethically, and knowingly risking the damage that ensues.’ This is a very strong statement which impugns the integrity, not just the competence, of a large number of highly respected academics. We argue that the evidence he puts forward in this paper does not stand up to scrutiny: that the paper misrepresents what hypothesis tests claim to do, and uses a sample size which is far too small to discriminate properly a 10% difference in means in a simulation he constructs. He then claims that this simulates emotive contexts in which a 10% difference would be important to detect, implicitly misrepresenting the simulation as a reasonable model of those contexts.

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

Imagining neoliberal feminisms? Thinking critically about the US diplomacy campaign, ‘Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports’

This paper builds upon the sport for development scholarship that critically explores how Western ideals of gender and sport are mobilized within sport development campaigns. This growing body of development scholarship (e.g. Hayhurst, 2013, “Girls as the ‘New’ Agents of Social Change? Exploring the ‘Girl Effect’ Through Sport, Gender and Development Programs in Uganda,” Sociological Research Online, 18 [2]; Chawansky, 2012, “Good Girls Play Sports: International Inspiration and the Construction of Girlhood,” Feminist Media Studies 3: 473–476) critically examines the taken-for-granted liberatory character that frequently accompanies accounts of sport's allegedly progressive role in supporting gender equity. Grounded in this scholarship and transnational feminist sensibilities, this paper critically examines the rhetoric to inspire and assist women in ‘developing’ nations, via the US State Department's global ‘Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports’ diplomacy campaign. Rather than focusing on those who participate in these programmes and the alleged positive results of such programmes, this analysis instead contextualizes this initiative. This analysis additionally exposes the underlying rhetorical assumptions of this campaign in order to interrogate the ways that national security, ‘developed’ nations, gendered equity, empowerment, and the alleged benevolent role of the US State Department and capital are imagined in these sporting discourses – discourses which also signal the rise of neoliberal feminism. The paper concludes by discussing the continuing need to embody ‘reflexive non-innocence’ (Hemmings, 2011, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham: Duke University) while interrogating popular narratives that constitute discourses of gender equity and feminism both within sport studies and more broadly.

Cookbooks, High-tech Kitchens, and Gender Culture: Addressing the Sugar and Spice in Contemporary Couple Relations

Cookbooks, High-tech Kitchens, and Gender Culture: Addressing the Sugar and Spice in Contemporary Couple Relations

If You're So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management

Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical—smaller state and bigger market—attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the

Introduction to Critical Concepts: Families, Intimacies and Personal Relationships

In this Special Section of Sociological Research Online we aim to take stock of the sociological imagination which is applied in making sense of contemporary ways of living, reflecting on the conceptual frameworks that are being used, asking whether existing analytical tools have kept apace with changes and with continuities in family life, intimacies and personal relationships today.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

Introduction to Food: Representations and Meanings

Original article can be found at : http://www.socresonline.org.uk/ Copyright Sociological Research Online

Sociology Still Lagging on Climate Change

This note responds to the discussion pieces by Elizabeth Shove and John Urry in the debates section of Sociological Research Online, 31 August 2010.

WITHDRAWN: Book Review: Transitions through Homelessness: Lives on the Edge

Alasdair B R Stewart. Book Review: Transitions through Homelessness: Lives on the Edge. Sociological Research Online. 2010; 15(3): 18-19 Article withdrawn by publisher. This article was accidentally published twice in the online version of Volume 15 Issue 3, with different DOIs and different page numbers. There was no duplication of the article in the printed version of Volume 15 Issue 3 The incorrect version of the article with DOI: 10.1177/136078041001500313 has been replaced with this correction notice. The correct and citable version of the article remains: Alasdair B R Stewart. Book Review: Transitions through Homelessness: Lives on the Edge. Sociological Research Online. 2010; 15(3): 1-2. 10.1177/136078041001500302