SOC 2143 - Donohue

This study explored the extent to which changes in socioeconomic status influenced the willingness or ability of extended family members to adhere to family scripts regarding interaction and resource sharing. Ethnographic methodology was utilized to examine the lived experience of the members of one large, extended African American family with its roots in a rural area of North Carolina. The results suggest that interaction is maintained despite changes in socioeconomic status among family members but that the interaction is transformed as one rises in socioeconomic status. The results also suggest that certain levels of ambiguous loss may occur as a result of the changing family relationships.

Although commonly perceived as a typical family type in western society, the nuclear family structure may not resonate with other cultures, including Indigenous populations. This study explored the conceptualization of Indigenous families in Canada. 15 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people participated in semistructured interviews. Findings revealed that the perception of Indigenous family may be framed through a personal or institutional perspective. At the personal level, the perception of an Indigenous family was influenced by culture, specifically social ties, language, childrearing practices, and residential location. At the institutional level, the perception of an Indigenous family was defined through demographic or legal terms, and influenced by temporal change, though generally through a non-Indigenous lens. These findings suggest that current (standard) western definitions of the family may not accurately represent Indigenous families; cultural influences need to be taken into consideration. However, institutional definitions of family may serve specific purposes.

Based on 11 diverse Asian American (AA) communities, this article discusses the similarities and differences across East, South, and Southeast Asians. Of two parts in this journal issue, Part 1 presents a review of literature and census data to understand the cultural and structural factors of different types of coethnic communities (strong, weak, or dispersed). Culturally, Asian families differ in culture, language, and religion. Structurally, class, education, and job skills also differ for diverse Asian families. Taken together, the article proposes a combined cultural-structural framework to understand unique characteristics in distinctive communities. The key findings from the literature and census data revealed differences in the types of communities and their resources. Lower achieving AA subgroups tend to have weaker communities with fewer resources and opportunities in general. Higher achieving AA subgroups have stronger coethnic networks with more resources and opportunities. This article challenges the monolithic view of AA students and finds more differences when comparing these communities. Educators and other practitioners need cultural and structural awareness to know how to best support AA students. Stakeholders and school officials can work together by building partnerships to support struggling AA families and communities.

Most research on the stability of adult relationships has focused on coresidential (cohabiting or married) unions and estimates rates of dissolution for the period of coresidence. Studies examining how the stability of coresidential unions differs by sex composition have typically found that same-sex female couples have higher rates of dissolution than same-sex male couples and different-sex couples. We argue that the more elevated rates of dissolution for same-sex female couples are a by-product of the focus on coresidential unions. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to compare rates of dissolution based on the total duration of romantic and sexual relationships for same-sex male couples, same-sex female couples, and different-sex couples. Results from hazard models that track the stability of young adult relationships from the time they are formed demonstrate that male couples have substantially higher dissolution rates than female couples and different-sex couples. Results based on models restricted to the period of coresidence corroborate the counterintuitive finding from earlier studies that female couples have the highest rates of dissolving coresidential unions. This study underlines the importance of comparisons between these couple types for a better understanding of the role that institutions and gender play in the stability of contemporary relationships.

Background: Despite effective and accessible treatments, many sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in high-income countries go untreated, causing poor sexual health for individuals and their partners. Research into STI care has tended to focus on biomedical aspects of infections using patient samples and prioritised attendance at healthcare services. This approach overlooks the broader social context of STIs and healthcare-seeking behaviours, which are important to better understand the issue of untreated infections.
Main Body: This paper is structured around three main arguments to improve understanding of help-seeking behaviour for STIs in order to help reduce the burden of untreated STIs for both individuals and public health. Firstly, biomedical perspectives must be combined with sociological approaches to align individual priorities with clinical insights. More research attention on understanding the subjective experiences of STI symptoms and links to healthcare-seeking behaviour is also needed. Secondly, a focus on non-attendance at healthcare services is required to address the patient-centric focus of STI research and to understand the reasons why individuals do not seek care. Finally, research using non-patient samples recruited from outside medical contexts is vital to accurately reflect the range of behaviours, beliefs and health issues within the population to ensure appropriate and effective service provision. We suggest piggy-backing other research on to existing studies as an effective way to recruit participants not defined by their patient status, and use a study recruiting a purposive non-patient sample from an existing dataset - Britain's third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) as an illustrative example.
Conclusion: STIs are common but treatable, however a range of social and cultural factors prevent access to healthcare services and contribute to the burden of untreated infection. Different conceptual and empirical approaches are needed to better understand care-seeking behaviour and reduce the gap between social and biomedical advancements in managing untreated infection.