Social Identity and Cooperation

This study seeks to examine the effects of cooperation on social identity in group work. I posit that members of groups which are cooperative and therefore successful will be more likely to identify with the group, than members of those groups which are not cooperative. To test the prediction, I conduct an experimental test in which groups of four work on a public goods task. While groups? cooperative behavior is not related to social identity, individuals? perceptions of others? cooperation is significantly related to social identity

An Expectation States Approach to Examining Medical Team Information Exchange

This project is the first step in a long line of research that will examine the impact of status on information exchange in small groups of medical professionals. Specifically, we employ the expectation states theory and observable power and prestige methodology to develop a coding scheme and live coding methodology that is attuned to the unique status organizing process in interprofessional medical teams. This paper begins with an explanation of the shortcomings in current research that examines medical teams. We then discuss the conceptual development of the coding scheme and methodology. Next, we establish reliability between live coders and between the transcript coders. We conclude by employing our coding scheme to examine how occupational status (physician vs. nurse) operates in medical teams, and find that our scheme possesses both criterion and face validity. Future steps include increasing our sample size to have more statistical power in detecting status differences and dropping some items from the coding scheme to increase reliability

Quantitative Approaches to Studying the Effect of Mental Illness Labels on Stigma

In this project, we examine the literature to see if there is consensus about the effect of mental illness labels on stigma. In so doing, we also examine the ways that researchers have been measuring this phenomenon, e.g., examining thei

Discourse in Action: Parents Use of Medical and Social Models to Resist Disability Stigma

For parents of children with disabilities, stigmatization is part of everyday life. To resist the negative social and emotional consequences of stigma, parents both challenge and deflect social devaluations. Challenges work to upend the stigmatizing structure, while deflections maintain the interaction order. We examine how parents of children with disabilities deploy deflections and challenges, and how their stigma resistance strategies combine with available models of disability discourse. Disability discourse falls into two broad categories: medical and social. The medical model emphasizes diagnostic labels and treats impairment as an individual deficit, while the social model centralizes unaccommodating social structures. The social model's activist underpinnings make it a logical frame for parents to use as they challenge disability stigma. In turn, the medical model's focus on individual “improvement” seems to most closely align with stigma deflections. However, the relationship between stigma resistance strategies and models of disability is an empirical question not yet addressed in the literature. In this study, we examine 117 instances of stigmatization from 40 interviews with 43 parents, and document how parents respond. We find that challenges and deflections do not map cleanly onto the social or medical models. Rather, parents invoke medical and social meanings in ways that serve diverse ends, sometimes centralizing a medical label to challenge stigma, and sometimes recognizing disabling social structures, but deflecting stigma nonetheless

Discursive Entwinement: How White Transracially Adoptive Parents Navigate Race

Through 47 interviews with 56 White parents who attend culture camps, the authors analyze race discourse and practices in transracially adoptive families. The authors document parents’ use of two discursive frames, colorblindness and race consciousness, and find that small subsamples of parents use either race consciousness or colorblindness exclusively, while the majority (66 percent) entwine the two discursive frames together. Because the sample is drawn from culture camps, which emphasize race and ethnicity, this sample begins with some degree of racial attunement. As such, the continued presence of colorblindness among the sample indicates the deep rootedness of White hegemonic logic. However, the emergence of race consciousness indicates the potential for White transracially adoptive families to engage race critically. Moreover, the analyses draw a clear line between how parents articulate racial understandings in their interviews and the ways parents report talking about race and racism with their children. These findings are directly relevant to ongoing debates about the ethics of transracial adoption and racial identity development among transracial adoptees. More generally, these findings speak to the ways Whites’ racial understandings are constrained, but not determined, by a history and biography of privilege

The Stigma Discourse-Value Framework

https://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/node/17920/87868-thumbnail.jpgAlthough stigma was first theorized as a basic social process, its contemporary developments have been highly compartmentalized. Understanding the nature of stigmahow it operates across subjects and circumstances-requires a return to general theory. The authors take this general turn, focusing on stigma\u27s discursive element. Through combined case studies of race, disability, and fat stigma (134 interviews with 146 parents), they develop the stigma discourse-value framework (DVF) as a theoretical scaffold for stigma discourse studies. The DVF includes three value-oriented categories: stigma as deficit, value-neutral diversity, and value-added pride. Tracing commonalities and divergences within and between cases vis-a-vis the DVF, the authors show stigma discourse to be a multifaceted interpersonal process that variously reflects, reinforces, and challenges stigmatizing social structures.</p

mize_online_supplement_ – Supplemental material for Precarious Sexuality: How Men and Women Are Differentially Categorized for Similar Sexual Behavior

<p>Supplemental material, mize_online_supplement_ for Precarious Sexuality: How Men and Women Are Differentially Categorized for Similar Sexual Behavior by Trenton D. Mize and Bianca Manago in American Sociological Review</p

Distribution and disavowal: Managing the parental stigma of Children's weight and weight loss

Parents who seek weight loss treatment for their children find themselves pulled between double moral burdens. Blamed and shamed for the weight itself while culpable for the psychological effects of encouraging weight loss, parental stigma comes from multiple directions. Through interviews with parents who send their children to weight loss camps (N = 47), we ask: how do parents maintain a moral sense of self? We show that parents distribute moral blame for their children's weight and disavow moral blame for encouraging weight loss. We further interrogate how parents' own weight status informs moral management strategies. We find parents' bodies and biographies affect the ways distribution and disavowal take form. Parents with self-identified weight problems internalize significant self-blame for children's weight gain, while parents without personal weight problems more freely allocate blame to outside actors and factors. However, when disavowing the effects of encouraging weight loss, parents with current or past weight issues rely on a shared experience that is unavailable to their slender counterparts. Our findings elucidate the moral tensions of parents who embark on weight loss intervention for their children while highlighting the interplay between primary and associative moral stigma in a family context.Funds for this project were drawn from a Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (FAD) seed grant, administered through the American Sociological Association and the National Science Foundation