The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest and research on close relationships and social cognition. In both areas, numerous handbooks, textbooks, and journal articles have been published. However, it is the editors' impression that although cognitive theories and concepts have filtered through to research dealing with close relationships, much of this research reflects a relatively untutored understanding of the theoretical and empirical work in social cognition. Conversely, the research literature that provides a more sophisticated perspective on the role of cognition in close relationships typically reveals a relatively limited knowledge of the literature on close relationships. As researchers who have worked in both social cognitive processes and close relationships, Fletcher and Fincham are convinced that each field has much to offer the other. In fact, their book is based on two important postulates: first, that a social cognitive framework offers a valuable resource for developing our understanding of close relationships; and, second, that studying cognition within close relationships has the potential to inform our understanding of basic social cognitive processes.

Marriage and Family Therapy: A Sociocognitive Approach is a comprehensive and clearly written introduction to sociocognitive therapy. It is rich with transcripts and case examples, culled from the authors'more than thirty-five years of practice, providing you with valuable background information on helping difficult-to-reach and hard-to-help populations. In practical language, this volume takes you step-by-step through methods of assessment and change that are useful in traditional and nontraditional families and couples. With clear language and taxonomy for family troubles and their resolution, Marriage and Family Therapy provides conceptual handles to guide you in learning intervention strategies, enabling you to work effectively with, most notably, lower working-class and poor inner-city, African-American families. A highlight of the book is the detailed look at terminal and instrumental interaction hypotheses and how they can be applied in actual therapy situations. With Marriage and Family Therapy as a guide, you will develop multiple skills and methods that equip you to better handle the challenging task of helping troubled families and couples.The first two chapters present the theoretical framework of the sociocognitive approach. In the third chapter, the assessment and change concepts central to Dr. Hurvitz's approach are introduced. The last four chapters show how these humanist principles are applied through the phases of opening, change-producing, and termination in therapy, creating an invaluable book for marriage and family therapists, social workers, psychologists, and educators.

This book explores the role played by families in the Russian revolutionary movement and the first decades of the Soviet regime. While revolutionaries were expected to sever all family ties or at the very least put political concerns before personal ones, in practice this was rarely achieved. In the underground, revolutionaries of all stripes, from populists to social-democrats, relied on siblings, spouses, children and parents to help them conduct party tasks, with the appearance of domesticity regularly thwarting police interference. Family networks were also vital when the worst happened and revolutionaries were imprisoned or exiled. After the revolution, these family networks continued to function in the building of the new Soviet regime and amongst the socialist opponents who tried to resist the Bolsheviks. As the Party persecuted its socialist enemies and eventually turned on threats perceived within its ranks, it deliberately included the spouses and relatives of its opponents in an attempt to destroy family networks for good.

This is one of the first volumes to examine the interface between research undertaken in sexuality and that in close relationships from a social psychological perspective. Experts from several different disciplines offer chapters that contain theory, extant literature, and their own original research on such topics as jealousy, extradyadic sexuality, communication, love, and sexual coercion. Aimed at a fairly wide audience, this book will be of interest to students, faculty, and other professionals in social psychology, sociology, communication, and family and women's studies. It is also a valuable source of information for teachers, researchers, and clinicians working in the areas of human sexuality and/or close relationships.

Kinship foster care involves placing children who cannot live at home in foster care with other members of their family or close network. This book sheds light on different aspects of kinship care development and practice. Using a 20-year longitudinal research study from Norway, this book shows the historical development of kinship care in Norway, research on kinship care, and how family life and relations are negotiated and lived in the span between private and public sphere. It includes the perspectives of the children, their parents and their relatives who have functioned as foster parents. Recognising that kinship care is complex, and needs to be understood and studied from different perspectives, the book describes, analyses and discusses a number of subjects: kinship care in a child welfare historical context, families who are part of kinship care and their perspectives, the formal frameworks around kinship care, and research approaches which have dominated research into kinship care. This book will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in social work and child welfare more broadly, both in the Nordic countries and in a wider international context.

This volume is concerned with elucidating similarities and differences in enculturation processes that help to account for the ways in which individuals in different cultures develop. Each chapter reviews a substantive parenting topic, describes the relevant cultures (in psychological ethnography, rather than from an anthropological stance), reports on the parenting-in-culture results, and discusses the significance of cross-cultural investigation for understanding the parenting issue of interest. Specific areas of study include environment and interactive style, responsiveness, activity patterns, distributions of social involvement with children, structural patterns of interaction, and development of the social self. Through exposure to a wide range of diverse research methods, readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the problems, procedures, possibilities, and profits associated with a truly comparative approach to understanding human growth and development.

This life-course analysis of family development focuses on the social dynamics among family members. It features parent-child relationships in a larger context, by examining the help exchange between kin and nonkin and the intergenerational transmission of family characteristics.

This book examines the American system of dating, mate choice, and marriage. It analyzes a wide range of established ideas about how dating and mate choice are changing, and identifies changes and continuities in premarital experiences in twentieth century America. A variety of ideas about what sorts of dating and premarital experiences will make for a successful marriage are tested and for the most part disproven, raising serious doubts about our fundamental assumption that dating experience helps individuals make a "wise" choice for a future mate. Marital success turns out to depend not so much on premarital experiences or on the social background characteristics of couples (such as race, religion, and social class) as on the way in which couples structure their day-to-day marital life together. Through its detailed examination of a wide range of ideas and predictions about dating, mating, and marriage, and through its dramatic findings, "Dating, Mating, and Marriage" challenges many previous assumptions and conclusions about the fate of American marriage and elevates our knowledge of the American system of mate choice to a higher level. "Martin King Whyte" is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His primary research interests are the sociology of the family and social change in the People's Republic of China and the former Soviet Union. He is the author or editor of several books, and author of several journal articles. He is also a member of several professional Associations including the American Sociological Association, National Committee for U.S. China Relations, and Population Association of America

Developing the new framework of 'life-mix', which considers the mixed patterns of caring and working in different periods of life, this book systematically explores the interplay of productivism, women, care and work in East Asia and Europe. The book ranges across four key aspects of welfare - childcare, parental leave, employment support and pensions - to illustrate how policies affect women in various periods of their lives. Policy case studies from France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, South Korea, Sweden and the UK, show how welfare could support people's caring and working lives. This book forms a prescient examination of how productivist thinking underpins regimes and impacts women's welfare, care and work in both the East and West.

Finally, here is an enlightening and empowering book that defines motherhood from a feminist perspective and then explores the implications of that definition. Feminist authors examine some of women's full, rich, and varied thoughts and experiences about motherhood. In contrast to the too often accepted male notions of what constitutes a "good'mother or a "normal" family, this important book presents a comprehensive and balanced view of motherhood--as women have observed and experienced it. The major issues surrounding motherhood today are closely examined--the pervasive problem of mother-blaming and mother-hating and solutions to overcome it; ageism, sexism, and motherhood; relationships between mothers and daughters; relationships between stepmothers and stepchildren; motherhood and sex roles within the family; adoption; infertility; and childlessness. Special insight is also provided into the concerns of women who are mothers--lesbians, women of color, mothers of biracial children, and adoptive mothers of children from different cultures. Woman-Defined Motherhood is must reading for women, including both mothers and daughters, for therapists and other professionals supporting women, and for anyone interested in mothering.

This book examines how gender and heterosexuality structure the lived experiences of people in living apart together (LAT) relationships in contemporary Chinese society. Using in-depth interview data with Chinese LAT people of different ages, the author explores why they live apart; how they construct and make sense of their everyday family lives and negotiate their gender roles; and how they experience intimacy while being physically apart. This text sheds new insights on non-cohabitating intimate partnerships by bringing together themes of gender, family, intimacy, and relationality. Through looking at people's lived experiences in LAT relationships, it argues that practices of family and intimacy are closely implicated with doing gender, and consequently, that gendered family lives and heterosexuality are reconstructed, rather than deconstructed, in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in Chinese social, historical and cultural contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars across Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Family Studies, in addition to scholars of contemporary Chinese culture and society.

This book presents, for the first time, a full range of perspectives on emotions and the family from the radical behaviorist to the intrapsychic. B.F. Skinner begins the volume by examining the role of feelings in applied behavior analysis, thus laying the groundwork for the reactions of many distinguished contributors. Offering both opposing and favorable comments, contributors also present their own original empirical, theoretical, and clinical perspectives. Finally, the editor integrates the contributors' positions into an expanded behavioral perspective on the study of emotions and suggest a model for effective family communication.

This book considers the impact of digital media and technology on lived experience for young people in foster care. While the extent and intricacies of foster care-known as out-of-home care (OOHC) in Australia, where this study takes place-are not widely understood by the general public, youth in care might struggle to construct a personal identity that goes beyond reflecting the stereotypes and stigma by which they are often recognised. In today's digital environment, media can play a significant role in any individual's developing sense of self, identity, and belonging. Deitz and Sheridan Burns examine OOHC through the lens of networked media environments and investigate the conditions that encourage belonging and resilience in order to establish the role that digital technology can play in supporting those conditions for individuals, family networks, and the care sector.

A guide to rediscovering niceness as one of the highest of all human achievements. Many books seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer and less prickly. Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless, and one that we neglect at our peril. On Being Nice gently leads us around the key themes of the often-forgotten quality of being nice. It discusses how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure, as well as the importance of navigating interpersonal relationships with compassion and kindness. Ultimately, the book encourages us to understand that niceness is compatible with strength and is not an indicator of naivety. Praise for On Being Nice 'If every human could read this book perhaps the world would be a little better and kinder.' 'An exceptional book that offers a guide to everyone on the lost art of being nice... littered with wisdom, backed up with recognisable real-world examples of how to be warmer, kinder, more patient and more available to the other people we share the world with.'

This book assists parents, teachers, and counselors in training children so that home and school will be happy and efficient, organized but pleasant -- with adults satisfied with their children and children growing up to be respectful, responsible, and resourceful. It provides solutions and emphasizes practicality.

In her latest paperback, the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of Damaged tells the story of the Dawn, a sweet and seemingly well-balanced girl whose outward appearance masks a traumatic childhood of suffering at the hands of the very people who should have cared for her.

Dawn was the first girl Cathy Glass ever fostered. Sweet and seemingly well balanced girl, Dawn s outward appearance masked a traumatic childhood so awful, that even she could not remember it.

During the first night, Cathy awoke to see Dawn looming above Cathy s baby s cot, her eyes staring and blank. She sleepwalks which Cathy learns is often a manifestation in disturbed children. It becomes a regular and frightening occurrence, and Cathy is horrified to find Dawn lighting a match whilst mumbling it s not my fault in her sleep one night.

Cathy discovers Dawn is playing truant from school, and struggling to make friends. More worryingly she finds her room empty one night, and her pillow covered in blood. Dawn has been self-harming in order to release the pain of her past.

When Dawn attempts suicide, Cathy realises that she needs more help than she can give. Dawn s mother eventually confides in her that Dawn was sent away to live with relatives in Ireland between the ages of 5 and 9, and Cathy soon realises that the horrors Dawn was exposed to during this time have left her a very disturbed little girl."

These companion volumes provide a "behind the scenes" look into the personal experiences of researchers in an effort to eliminate the lack of communication surrounding family research methodology. They show how the researchers achieved their results and why they chose particular methodologies over others. These volumes present more than just findings -- they present the real experiences of the authors in their own styles and personalities, exposing the problems, mistakes, and concerns they experienced during their research projects. Volume I presents the experiences of researchers into typical normative populations. Volume II describes work with clinical, atypical populations.

This leading, comprehensive text for courses on the sociology of work covers many vital new topics since the last edition (2015), just as it continues to offer foundational writings and discusses different types of jobs, inequality and intersectionality, work and family, and more. New to this edition: * The gig economy and new digital platforms and their effects on how work is organized. * Precarious work and precarious workers, changes that reflect fundamental changes in employment relationships, increased job insecurity, and how people think about their jobs. * The new retail, from customer interactions to a world where consumption is driven by data science. * The latest research on call centers as the archetypal 21st-century workplace, illustrating many important issues about interactive work, transnational workplaces, gender, etc. * The post-pandemic workplace, including essential workers and frontline workers, healthcare work and care workers; job flexibility, and implications for gender, work, and family.

This edited collection brings together two strands of current discussions in gender research through the concept of creativity. First, it addresses creativity in the context of the family, by exploring changing and newly emergent family forms and ways of creating and maintaining intimate relationships. Creativity here is understood not as just "newness or originality," but as that which, in the words of Eisler and Montouri (2007), "supports, nurtures, and actualizes life by increasing the number of choices open to individuals and communities." One aim of this book, therefore, is to investigate the social, collaborative, and creative interactions in contemporary family and kin formations in Europe. Second, the volume examines how new media and technologies are entering and shaping everyday family lives. Technological transformations and adaptions have not only enabled the creation of new forms of families and ways of family living, but also challenged the established constellations of gender and family arrangements. The present volume addresses these issues from multiple perspectives and in different contexts, and explores the involvement of different actors. By problematizing the creativity of becoming and "doing" family and kinship, the authors acknowledge the increasing fluidity of gender identities, the evolving diversity of relationships, and the permeation of technology into daily life.

The first book to gather studies on siblings from diverse areas of research, Sibling Relationships across the Life Span examines the course of the sibling relationship from childhood to the end of life. Author Victor Cicirelli outlines the factors that influence the sibling relationship, considering the sibling dyad alone, as well as in relation to a larger kinship. He provides information gleaned from studies of stepsiblings wherever possible. Chapter highlights include a broad framework for viewing sibling research, including the kin rather than the family network, the total life span rather than segments of it, and the development and aging of relationships; new insights into sibling interactions through the study of a family with nine adult siblings, their spouses, and their elderly parents and an integration of research on siblings in the first part of the life span (childhood and adolescence) with that on the latter part (adulthood and old age). This comprehensive volume also encompasses a discussion of methodological problems confronting the sibling researcher; cross-cultural evidence for the universality of the sibling relationship; sibling-helping relationships; and special aspects of sibling relationships, including chronic illness and disabilities, conflict, violence and abuse, incest and sexual abuse, death, and sibling therapy.

This edited collection uses the concept of 'displaying families' as a new way to understand contemporary family and personal life, addressing how, in a world of fluid relationships, family life must not only be 'done' but also be 'seen to be done'.

Disturbing the Nest assesses the future of the family as an institution through an historical and comparative analysis of the nature, causes, and social implications of family change in advanced western societies such as the United States, New Zealand, and Switzerland by focusing on the one society in which family decline is found to be the greatest, Sweden.

The founding of the modern Swedish welfare state was based in large part on the belief that it was necessary for the state to intervene in society in order to improve the situation of the family. Of great concern was the low birthrate, which was seen as a threat to the very survival of Swedes as a national population group. The Social Democrats pioneered welfare measures that aimed to strengthen the family, to alleviate its worst trials and tribulations, and to make possible harmonious living. With the Social Democrats remaining in power continuously until 1976, a period of almost forty-five years, Sweden went on to implement governmental "family policies" that are among the most comprehensive (and expensive) in the world.

In view of this major policy goal of family improvement, the actual situation of the Swedish family today presents a genuine irony; some have claimed that Swedish welfare state policies have had consequences that are the opposite of those originally intended. Comparing contemporary Swedish family patterns with those of other advanced nations, one finds a very high family dissolution rate, probably the highest in the Western world, and a high percentage of single-parent, female headed families. Even marriage seems to have fallen increasingly out of favor, with Sweden having the lowest marriage rate and latest age of first marriage, and the highest rate of children born out-of-wedlock. The early pronatalist aspirations of the Swedish government have been spectacularly unsuccessful, as Sweden continues to have one of the world's lowest birthrates and smallest average family sizes.