Using a sample of 7,881 African American (915 males and 1,073 females) and White (2,864 males and 3,029 females) adolescents from Waves 1 and 3 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examined the psychosocial consequences that obese adolescents encounter as they reach young adulthood. Results indicate that obesity…

Social aggression, or victimization using social exclusion, rumors, and body language, has been overlooked in state anti-bullying policies since the policy surge following the 1999 Columbine Massacres. Social aggression has been associated with social anxiety disorder, depression and suicide, and lowered academic achievement and involvement. An…

Contemporary social transformations of the body are essentially mediated by medical discourse. With the body conceived of as "soft and modifiable," we are witnessing an unprecedented rise in recourse to medicine in order to validate primarily social conditions. In this context, plastic surgery functions as a modality of social control and…

University instructors are increasingly drawing on active learning exercises to engender critical thinking skills among students. In this article, we introduce the design and implementation of an active learning exercise about mobility and transportation that we assigned in an introductory human geography class at the University of Georgia. The…

This article analyses the central themes running through the collection of papers in this special issue of Childhood, which were all given as papers at the XVI Durban World Congress of Sociology, 23-29 July 2006. These themes encompass the ways in which global processes of social change combining modernity with tradition have become important for…

Increases in the aging population and use of computer-related technology have spawned research regarding older adults' use of the Internet. This study examined characteristics differentiating rural Midwestern senior citizens (N = 298) who use e-mail from those who do not. Compared to those who did not use e-mail, e-mail-using seniors were younger…

We explore the capacity of positive sentiments, those enduring affective states one achieves when one likes another, to impact status structures. Do positive sentiments combine with existing aspects of interaction to create status hierarchies and potentially change the social order, or do they moderate the effects of extant structure by dampening…

Gottfredson proposed that most people share an understanding of the world of work based upon the sex type, social status and type of occupations. Individuals use these three dimensions to organise their view of the world of work. There is as a consequence, she argued, a common cognitive map of occupations. She depicted this map graphically. This…

Experience of significant bereavement is reported by the majority of young people in contemporary western societies, but it receives little attention from mainstream services or academics, and this marginality is paralleled in young people's everyday bereavement experiences. Existing academic and professional work concerned with children and young…

This study tested a person-group dissimilarity model for the relation between peer preference on the one hand, and bullying and victimization on the other. This model accounts for both individual and group (i.e., classroom) factors and postulates that children will be rejected by their peers when they display behaviors that deviate from the group…

With the rise of network society, consumerism, individualization, globalization and contemporary change forces, students are pressured to both perform well in standardized academic assessments while at the same time constructing a non-standard, unique project of the self. I argue that this generates a particular set of place-based tensions for…

Transfer articulation is an important policy issue in Virginia. With increasing economic strains on federal and state budgets, pressure on key actors in higher education, and critical teacher shortages, an opportunity presented itself to investigate state transfer policy and articulation agreements designed to facilitate student transfer.…

This study explores what motivates a student to enter medical school by first measuring students' strength of motivation and then by looking for relationships between motivation and career-related values and approaches to learning. Validated and reliable questionnaires were used to obtain data. This study found no differences in strength of…

This study explores developing conceptions of feminism among Latina adolescents, their prevalence of feminist endorsement, and whether home environment and well-being are related to feminist identity. One hundred and forty Latina girls (Grades 9 to 12, M age = 15) wrote personal narratives of their understanding of feminism and whether they…

Peer rejection is a common experience for youth with emotional and behavioral disabilities and it is associated with increased risk of negative short- and long-term outcomes. There is a high premium on interventions that can improve the social status and functioning of these youth. Positive Peer Reporting (PPR) is a behavior analytic intervention…