Perceiving and Feeling Personal Discrimination: Motivation or Inhibition for Collective action?

Relative deprivation and group consciousness theories differ in their predictions of how personal discrimination and personal discontent will be related to taking collective action. According to relative deprivation theory, assessments of personal status should be unrelated to taking collective action. In contrast, group consciousness theories suggest that while perceiving personal discrimination is necessary for collective action to occur, feelings of personal discontent may inhibit it. Female students completed questionnaires assessing their perceptions of, and affective responses to personal discrimination, as well as their participation in collective actions. A hierarchical regression analysis found that personal discrimination and discontent interacted such that among women who perceived personal discrimination, women took the most collective actions when they did not feel personally discontent with their status. Implications for the relationship between negative emotions and intergroup behavior were discussed

Perceiving and responding to the Personal/group discrimination discrepancy

To explain why minority group members recognize less personal than group discrimination, research has focused on cognitive processes. While within self-categorization theory it may be argued the discrepancy is a function of a salient social self that perceptually discounts the personal self, it can also be argued that depersonalization allows for the cognitive possibility of perceiving similar amounts of personal and group discrimination. The present study suggested that, consistent with group consciousness theories, the social self may serve to both discount as well as integrate the social self, depending on the way in which the social self is defined. Using structural equation modeling, the present study found that defining the social self along social experiences was associated with lower personal/group discrimination discrepancy scores which in turn were associated with greater participation in collective action. Implications for different definitions of the social self were discussed

Responding to Sexual Discrimination: The effects of societal versus self-blame

While self-blame has been considered to be a useful coping tool for victims, its benefits within the context of group discrimination are equivocal. The present research hypothesized that women encouraged to engage in self-blame for sex discrimination would be more likely to endorse accepting their situation or endorse the use of individual, normative actions. In contrast, women encouraged to engage in societal blame for sex discrimination would be more likely to participate in non-normative actions aimed at enhancing the status of the group as a whole. Female students in Canada were subjected to a situation of discrimination and were encouraged to blame either themselves or social discrimination. They were then given the opportunity to respond to the discrimination by endorsing various actions. A profile analysis of the endorsed actions indicated that women encouraged to blame themselves were most likely to endorse accepting their situation, while women encouraged to blame society endorsed non-normative individual confrontation

Double Relative Deprivation: Combining the Personal and Political

Double relative deprivation, which has been virtually ignored in research on relative deprivation, was expected to predict women\u27s collective action over and above egoistic and collective deprivation. The role of socio-political resources in perceiving deprivation and participation in action was also investigated. Female students (N=164) completed a questionnaire designed to assess their perceptions of egoistic, collective, double relative deprivation (defined as the interaction between egoistic and collective deprivation), resource availability and participation in collective action. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that double relative deprivation predicted collective action over and above egoistic and collective relative deprivation, and that resource availability also uniquely predicted action. Implications for expanding conceptual and operational definitions of these constructs are discussed

The Informal Housing Crisis in Cape Town and South Africa

This study concerns the housing conditions of Africans in urban South Africa. Informal housing, or shack dwelling, is common although there are variations across provinces. Shack dwellings are self-built, often out of discarded building materials and packing cases. They are not subject to building codes and generally lack basic services including electricity, sewerage and running water. To acquire these services residents often illegally and dangerously tap into municipal facilities. The proportion of urban Africans living in shacks is unusually high in the Western Cape province, including its largest city Cape Town. In the Western Cape in 1997 statistics show over half of all urban Africans lived in informal housing. This was a rate twice as high as for South Africa as a whole. Ten years later this disparity was reduced but the rate of shack dwelling in the Western Cape was still sixty percent higher than in the whole country. Since the fall of the apartheid regime, Cape Town has become an increasingly popular destination for Africans re-locating from the former homelands in the Eastern Cape. Statistics show that the high rate of shack dwelling has no relationship to the relative wealth of urban Africans between provinces, nor to the length of time a person has resided in a shack. The extremely high rates of urban growth in the Western Cape over the past twenty years would appear to be part of the explanation. There are still questions surrounding the formal housing supply in the Western Cape though, and why it has not responded to this urban growth. The study draws on survey materials compiled periodically by the national statistical organization, Statistics South Africa. These allow relative frequencies to be derived and incorporated into cross-tabulations. Simple effect statistics are used to evaluate the hypotheses advanced in the research.No embarg

Rival bishops, rival cathedrals : the election of Cormac, archdeacon of Sodor, as bishop in 1331

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

CO and CI maps of the starburst galaxy M82

The first map of an external galaxy in the 3P₁ - 3P0 fine-structure line of atomic carbon (CI) is presented towards the nucleus of the starbuster M82, and compared with the distinction of the CO J = 4 - 3 molecular emission. The CI traces features that are seen in lower transition CO maps, and shows that CI and the CO are well mixed and have similar spatial distributions. There are small differences between the CO J = 4 - 3 line and lower transition CO data towards the NE part of the molecular ring, where the emission is less prominent. The abundance ratio [CI]/[CO] across M82 is very high, with an average value ~ 0.5 across most of the nucleus, a factor at least 5 times that which is typical of dense molecular cloud cores seen in our own Galaxy. This means that on average, CI is overabundant towards M82. This result can be explained using models which provide enhancements to the CI abundance above normal Interstellar Medium values, a result of a greater cosmic ray flux in M82, or where there is substantial mixing of the gas

Molecular Exploration of the First-Century Tomb of the Shroud in Akeldama, Jerusalem

The Tomb of the Shroud is a first-century C. E. tomb discovered in Akeldama, Jerusalem, Israel that had been illegally entered and looted. The investigation of this tomb by an interdisciplinary team of researchers began in 2000. More than twenty stone ossuaries for collecting human bones were found, along with textiles from a burial shroud, hair and skeletal remains. The research presented here focuses on genetic analysis of the bioarchaeological remains from the tomb using mitochondrial DNA to examine familial relationships of the individuals within the tomb and molecular screening for the presence of disease. There are three mitochondrial haplotypes shared between a number of the remains analyzed suggesting a possible family tomb. There were two pathogens genetically detected within the collection of osteological samples, these were Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae. The Tomb of the Shroud is one of very few examples of a preserved shrouded human burial and the only example of a plaster sealed loculus with remains genetically confirmed to have belonged to a shrouded male individual that suffered from tuberculosis and leprosy dating to the first-century C.E. This is the earliest case of leprosy with a confirmed date in which M. leprae DNA was detected