Family, Life Course, and Society Commons^™

Taking Care, Kelly A. Dorgan

Kelly A. Dorgan

Excerpt: It’s July 26, 2010, late. I’ve sunk onto the edge of the bed in my childhood home. The bedroom reminds me of one of those cozy, pretty Valentine’s Day shoeboxes I made back in elementary school: small, pink, white, flowery.

The Truth About The Surrender Of My Foster Child, Kelly A. Dorgan

Kelly A. Dorgan

Excerpt: My best efforts at parenting weren’t enough to make him stay. My son no longer wanted to call me “Mom.”

Mothered, Mothering & Motherizing In Illness Narratives: What Women Cancer Survivors In Southern Central Appalachia Reveal About Mothering-Disruption, Kelly A. Dorgan, Kathryn L. Duvall, Sadie P. Hutson, Amber E. Kinser

Kelly A. Dorgan

Informed by a mothering-disruption framework, our study examines the illness narratives of women cancer survivors living in Southern Central Appalachia. We collected the stories of twenty-nine women cancer survivors from northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia using a multi-phasic qualitative design. Phase I consisted of women cancer survivors participating in a day-long story circle (n=26). Phase II consisted of women cancer survivors who were unable to attend the story circle ; this sample sub-set participated in in-depth interviews (n=3) designed to capture their illness narratives. Participants' illness narratives revealed the presence of: (1) mothering-disruption whereby cancer adversely impacted the mothering role …

Big Mama And The Uncertain Leap, Kelly A. Dorgan

Kelly A. Dorgan

Excerpt:I live in a place that evokes fear, a place deformed by layers and layers of pulse-racing images, of intoxicating whiskey-dark stories.

Holding On By Letting Go: Personal Agency As Maternal Activism, Amber E. Kinser

Amber E. Kinser

Despite the efforts of maternal advocates and feminists through 150 years or more, a great many mothers today feel dissatisfied, shortchanged, and/or inadequate in their own lives. Even those who have reckoned with the fact that standards for mothering are absurdly out of synch with the real lives that families are living in contemporary times, or have carved out comfortable personal and familial space for themselves just beyond, or far beyond, the margins of mainstream motherhood ideologies, often struggle nevertheless with a needling sense of unrest and lack of personal agency. Further, women who agree that maternal empowerment is an …

Mothered, Mothering & Motherizing In Illness Narratives: What Women Cancer Survivors In Southern Central Appalachia Reveal About Mothering-Disruption, Kelly A. Dorgan, Kathryn L. Duvall, Sadie P. Hutson, Amber E. Kinser

Amber E. Kinser

Informed by a mothering-disruption framework, our study examines the illness narratives of women cancer survivors living in Southern Central Appalachia. We collected the stories of twenty-nine women cancer survivors from northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia using a multi-phasic qualitative design. Phase I consisted of women cancer survivors participating in a day-long story circle (n=26). Phase II consisted of women cancer survivors who were unable to attend the story circle ; this sample sub-set participated in in-depth interviews (n=3) designed to capture their illness narratives. Participants' illness narratives revealed the presence of: (1) mothering-disruption whereby cancer adversely impacted the mothering role …

Book Review Of Mothers And Daughters: Complicated Connections Across Cultures, Amber E. Kinser

Amber E. Kinser

Excerpt: As both a daughter to a mother and a mother to a daughter, I have lived, and pushed against, and been formed by, the profound truth about mother-daughter relationships suggested by this book's title: it's complicated.

Digital Australia 2016 (Da16), Jeffrey Brand, Stewart Todhunter

Jeffrey Brand

Digital Australia 2016 is the sixth iteration of empirical studies about demographics, self-report behaviours and attitudes around digital games. The current research is based on 1,274 households and 3,398 individuals of all ages living in those households. Adult participants responded to 80 questions about themselves and on behalf of all members of their households. The result reveals that 68% of the Australian population plays, although the proportion varies by age group. Predictably, 91% of children aged 5-14 play. However, the proportion of older adults aged 65 and over who play is as great as young children between ages of one …

Cumulating Evidence About The Social Animal: Meta-Analysis In Social-Personality Psychology, Blair T. Johnson Dr., Marcella H. Boynton Dr.

Blair T. Johnson

Like most scientific fields, social-personality psychology has experienced an explosion of research related to such central topics as aggression, attraction, gender, group processes, motivation, personality, and persuasion, to name a few. The proliferation of research can be a monster unless it is tamed with the scientific review strategy of meta-analysis, literally analyses of past analyses that produce a quantitative and empirical history of research on a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic process and statistics of meta-analysis, as they pertain to social-personality psychology. Meta-analysis involves: (i) defining the problem under review; (ii) gathering qualified …

Grieving Together And Apart: Bereaved Parents’ Contradictions Of Marital Interaction, Paige W. Toller, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Dawn O. Braithwaite

The researchers adopted relational dialectics theory (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996) to examine the discourse of 37 bereaved parents. Research questions guiding the study were what dialectical contradictions do bereaved parents experience when communicating with their marital partner after their child’s death and how do bereaved parents and their marital partners communicatively negotiate the dialectical contradictions they experience? Our analysis revealed that bereaved parents experienced a dialectical contradiction between trying to grieve their child’s death together as a couple and apart as individuals. Likewise, parents experienced a contradiction between being both open and closed when talking with one another about their …

Centered But Not Caught In The Middle: Stepchildren's Perceptions Of Dialectical Contradictions In The Communication Of Co-Parents, Dawn Braithwaite, Paige Toller, Karen Daas, Wesley Durham, Adam Jones

Dawn O. Braithwaite

The researchers adopted a dialectical perspective to study how stepchildren experience and communicatively manage the perception of feeling caught in the middle between their parents who are living in different households. The metaphor of being caught in the middle is powerful for stepchildren and this metaphor animated their discourse. A central contribution of the present study was to understand the alternative to being caught in the middle and what this alternative means to stepchildren. Reflected in the discourse of stepchildren is that to feel not caught in the middle is to feel centered in the family. Stepchildren's desire to be …

Life Is Precious, Donna L. Landry, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes