Respite programs typically provide care for older adults with a wide range of physical and mental disabilities. Based on the small number of published reports that include data on client and family characteristics (Montgomery 1992), typical respite care users in the United States are around eighty years of age. Approximately 60 percent of the programs' participants are female who tend to be…
Family and work experiences are closely interwoven throughout adults' life course. Family relationships and obligations, both prior and current, shape the timing of retirement, retirement adjustment, and pensions; retirement can alter marital and kin interactions. …
F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that "The very rich are different from you and me." His friend Ernest Hemingway quipped "Yes, they have more money" (Hemingway 1936). Hemingway envied the rich and coveted their money, but Fitzgerald knew wealth was not an unmixed blessing. Money, as he had learned from his flamboyantly spoiled wife Zelda, is only the starting point for a di…
Writing in French in 1909, the European comparative sociologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) delineated in Les rites de passage (published in English in 1960) a structure for transformative ritual practices he considered universal and common to all cultures. Although they vary greatly in intensity, specific form, and social meaning, rites of passage are ceremonial devices used by societies…
Role theory is not one theory. Rather, it is a set of concepts and interrelated theories that are at the foundation of social science in general, and the study of the family in particular. The ideas and concepts formulated in the development of role theory continue to inform family theory and research more than half a century later. This is apparent in past and current research on the merging of f…
Throughout history, runaways have persisted as a formidable presence on the social landscape. Leaving behind families and friends for any number of reasons, these youths are quickly and almost invariably exposed to the brutal reality of a harsh life on the streets. Idealized images of adventure-loving adolescents seeking an escape from the monotony of suburban life are quickly replaced by the more…
The concept of rural families is, at best, a slippery one. This is because both aspects—family and rural—are today continuously being redefined. Further, in taking an international perspective, how family is defined varies regionally and from nation to nation. How family and rurality are defined differs depending on the theoretical context as well. For example, feminist thinkers have…
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been followed by years of economic, political, and cultural tumult with serious repercussions for individuals and families. As the country struggles to privatize industries and services, jobs have been lost, workers have gone unpaid, inflation has skyrocketed, crime rates have multiplied, and people have discovered that attitudes and skills that garnere…
In the United States, from 1900 to 2000, life expectancy increased from 47 to 76 years. Similar improvements in the human life span occurred in other developed countries, such as Japan and Sweden. One consequence of humans living longer is an expanded population of older adults. This remarkable growth in the aging population has resulted in concern about the availability of family caregivers. Rese…
The Scandinavian peninsula is made up of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Sometimes these countries are linked with the Nordic countries—traditionally including Finland and Iceland—and in the late twentieth century these countries were sometimes linked with the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as England and Scotland. This entry will examine marriage and fam…
Schizophrenia is a debilitating, often chronic, mental disorder characterized by disturbances in thinking, perception, emotion, and social relationships. The term schizophrenia, which literally means "split mind," was first applied by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911 to describe individuals whose thoughts were split from their emotions, leading to a disintegration of normal p…
Educational leaders and policy makers have called for revolutionary changes in schools. National and international school reform initiatives involve more challenging expectations for learning, high-stakes accountability, high performance standards, collaboration, and new roles for teachers and students (Adler and Gardner 1994). Agrowing number of children, youth, and families are being affected by…
The term school phobia reflects the terminological and conceptual confusion that has plagued the problem of excessive school absenteeism since it was first introduced as a phobia by Adelaide M. Johnson and her colleagues (1941). Most investigators currently working in the area, therefore, have come to view school phobia as a subset of school refusal behavior. As a consequence, the more comprehensi…
Disclosure as a phenomenon was first investigated by Sidney Jourard (1971). The process was originally defined as telling others about the self. Since then, an extensive amount of information about disclosure has been produced, leading to significant shifts in the way we think about this phenomenon (Derlega et al. 1993; Petronio in press). One change has been to consider disclosure as a process of…
Self-esteem refers to the evaluative and affective aspects of the self, to how "good" or "bad" we feel about ourselves. It is a consequence of the self's capacity for reflexivity, that is, the ability to look at oneself and to evaluate what one sees. Self-evaluations typically give rise to positive or negative self-feelings, such as pride or shame. These self-fee…
Marriage patterns in contemporary Senegal derive from Islamic, Western, and local traditions. This situation, which has prevailed for centuries, results from secular borrowings from the Arab world and European colonizers. Senegal embraced Islam more than a thousand years ago, mainly through early contacts with traders from Northern Africa. The trans-Saharan trade did not survive French colonizatio…
Separation anxiety is defined as feelings of negative emotions such as loss, loneliness, and sadness that are experienced by individuals when they are separated from an important person in their life. Separation anxiety is typically used to describe the reaction of an infant who is separated from a major caregiver such as the mother or father. Separation anxiety, however, has also been noted to oc…
Margaret Mahler (1897–1986) represents a group of ego psychologists whose interest focuses on the development of psychic structures, as outlined in Sigmund Freud's ([1923] 1990) structural theory, the id, ego, and superego. Mahler's interest in the developing ego centered on its development within the context of object relationships. Object relations refers to how experience w…
Early stages of relationships. Some scholars are interested in how sexual scripts (on the cultural level) guide interactions in newly forming or potentially sexual relationships (for a review see Metts and Spitzberg 1996). For example, studies of flirting and the negotiation of initial sexual involvement can be found under the general rubric of sexual communication. This area of research suggests …
Psychosexual disorders were listed for the first time in 1980 in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), a handbook used by almost all mental health professionals. This listing has led to an increasing medicalization of sexual problems that can allow individuals to avoid examining their own attitudes and ex…
Sexual behavior is behavior that produces sexual arousal and increases the chance of orgasm (Hyde and DeLamater 2003). Sexuality refers to sexual behavior, and the thoughts and feelings the person has in relation to that behavior. Every society controls the sexuality of its members, by embedding it in the institutions of family, religion, and law. The core social arrangement within the institution…
There is little debate that the words sex and sexuality produce immediate attention. Researchers and teachers in this area have also come to employ the terms family life education, human growth and development, and human sexuality to describe instruction in human reproduction and sexuality (Roth 1993). The Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) recommends the term sexu…
Research about adolescent sexuality has traditionally emphasized sexual intercourse. Most studies have focused on whether teenagers have had intercourse, how often, and with how many partners. Such simple measures of sexual behavior, narrowly defined as coitus, do not properly acknowledge the varied dimensions of adolescent sexual development. Sexuality, as opposed to sex, includes a wide range of…
Since the early part of the twentieth century, sex and sexuality have been crucial elements of both private and public discourse. From the bedroom to the living room to the classroom, from religious venues to the streets, and via television, movies, magazines, and other media, sex and sexuality are prevalent topics. Although there are many facets of sexuality in adulthood, the available research t…
Because children are naturally sexual human beings, gaining a better understanding of childhood sexuality is important for parents, educators, and developmentalists. However, research in this field has been limited because of a culture that is profoundly ambivalent about human sexuality in general and, more specifically, reluctant to recognize the existence of children's sexuality. In fact,…
The world continues to live with the ironic realization that the most intimate form of human relations, that of sexual interactions, carries the threat of serious disease. Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), once known as venereal diseases, have menaced humankind since the dawn of recorded history. There are references to STDs in Egyptian papyri dating to 1550 BCE, and according to biblical scho…