Frontiers in Sociology最新文献

Introduction: Preterm birth profoundly impacts both the infant's health and the family's psychosocial well-being. In NICUs, communication between professionals and parents unfolds in contexts of high emotional stress, technical complexity and structural power asymmetries. Whilst effective dialogue supports family well-being, some structural and contextual factors in the studied NICUs often prevent it. This study, part of the e-ParWelB project, examines healthcare staff's perspectives on structural barriers, the role of digital technologies, and authority dynamics, especially strategies for managing high-uncertainty communication with preterm parents.

Materials and methods: We conducted 76 semi-structured expert interviews with a maximum variation sample of NICU staff across four Italian hospitals. Focused ethnographic observations complemented interviews. Data were analysed using a concept-driven coding strategy in NVivo 15.

Results: Barriers extend beyond language and ethnicity, including vertical (educational) and horizontal (disciplinary) gaps. Digital technologies increase parental assertiveness but also fuel misunderstandings, anxiety and mistrust. Parents' peer group chats offer support but can amplify stress and conflict. Clinicians respond with varied, individualised strategies, especially pedagogical explanations and emotional support. In a landscape where their authority requires continual negotiation, they struggle to preserve their professional legitimacy whilst providing the best possible care for newborns and cultivating relationships with parents.

Discussion: NICU communication is shaped by structural inequality, shifting authority and digital mediation. Healthcare staff broadly agree on an increased emphasis on relationships with parents compared to the past. Nonetheless, implicit and explicit challenges to professional authority often manifest in expectations that parents legitimise their involvement by demonstrating commitment through constant presence in the NICU and compliance with staff directives. Enhancing relational competence, embedding cultural mediation and institutionalising collaboration with parent associations could help reframe these dynamics into trust-based and inclusive forms of care, to the benefit of both families and healthcare workers.

This study investigates the influence of social norms on male caregiving in Uganda and considers the implications for tailoring and scaling the REAL Fathers mentoring program across six regions. By identifying key norms and reference groups, the findings inform strategies to enhance father engagement in early childhood development within culturally and socially relevant frameworks. This study employed an exploratory Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) approach, integrating in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and community validation workshops to identify and prioritize social and gender norms across the study regions. We found that norms influence male engagement in care giving directly, by setting expectations for how men should behave with their wives and children. Norms also have a strong indirect influence through social expectations about what is appropriate for men and women related to power, decision-making and gender roles. Data shows that the norms and the reference groups that sustain them are consistent across cultural regions and the social sanctions that enforce the norms are largely intangible. We also found some exceptions to the norms. For norm shifting interventions to be effective, practitioners should be intentional in engaging reference groups and take advantage of exceptions to norms as leverage points for behavior change. Also, the different norm shifting strategies adopted should be able to address the complexity and interconnectedness of the norms.

This study re-examines the experiences of children of divorced parents within Indonesia's collectivist and religious context through the lens of the Communication Theory of Resilience and Negotiated Identity Theory. It introduces the Transformative Communication of Resilience Model, which conceptualizes resilience as a communicative, relational, and meaning-making process rather than a static psychological trait. The model identifies five interrelated dimensions-Strategic Construction of Normalcy, Identity Transformation Process, Relational Communication Architecture, Cultural and Religious Meaning-Making, Emotional Negotiation, and the Paradox of Resilience-to explain how children reconstruct identity, reframe trauma, and develop agency through dialog and social interaction. Findings reveal that children are not passive victims but active communicative subjects who negotiate stigma, gendered expectations, and moral judgment while transforming pain into adaptive narratives of growth. Communication functions as both a healing mechanism and a performative act of social resilience, enabling children to redefine their belonging within supportive relational and cultural networks. The practical implications extend to education, counseling, and policy, emphasizing communicative spaces that empower children's voices and promote emotional literacy, narrative reflection, and cultural inclusivity. Ultimately, resilience is reframed as a transformative communicative act linking trauma to self-redefinition and fostering an inclusive understanding of family and identity in post-divorce contexts.

Introduction: Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA) is a growing public health and safeguarding concern in the UK, compounded by long-standing data quality issues in police records. Incomplete or inaccurate recording of key variables undermines the ability of police, health services, and partner agencies to assess risk, allocate resources, and design effective interventions.

Methods: We evaluated two machine learning models (Random Forest and DistilBERT) for classifying the type of victim/offender relationship (ex-partner, current partner, and family) from approximately 19,000 DVA incidents recorded by a UK police force. Models were benchmarked against a static rule-based classifier and assessed using precision, recall, and F1-score. To reduce false positives in the most challenging relationship categories, we implemented a selective classification strategy that abstained from low-confidence predictions.

Results: Both machine learning models outperformed the baseline across all metrics, with average absolute gains of 11% in precision and 16% in recall. Ex-partner cases were classified most accurately, while current partner cases were classified with the least accuracy. Selective classification substantially improved precision for underperforming categories, albeit at the expense of reduced coverage.

Discussion: These findings demonstrate that computational tools can enhance the completeness and reliability of police DVA data, provided their use balances predictive accuracy, interpretability, and safeguarding risks.

Objective: This study aims to explore the mechanisms through which the multidimensional reconstruction of childbearing values in the post-pandemic era influences fertility intentions among Chinese individuals of reproductive age, while elucidating the interplay between economic rationality and cultural norms in fertility decision-making, thereby providing theoretical foundations for targeted fertility policy formulation.

Methods: Utilizing data from the 2022 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we analyzed a sample of 1,758 individuals of reproductive age. Factor analysis was employed to extract three dimensions of childbearing values-psychological affection, economic utility, and familial responsibility. A logistic regression model incorporating control variables (gender, household registration, education, etc.) was constructed, followed by heterogeneity analyses across demographic subgroups.

Results: All three dimensions of childbearing values exhibited significant positive effects on fertility intentions, with familial responsibility demonstrating the strongest impact (coefficient = 0.249, p < 0.01). Heterogeneity analysis revealed that psychological affection predominantly influenced females (coefficient = 0.316, p < 0.05) and rural populations, while economic utility exerted a pronounced effect on high-income groups (coefficient = 0.306, p < 0.05). Educational attainment consistently enhanced fertility intentions (coefficient = 0.206, p < 0.01).

Conclusion: Fertility decisions emerge as a dynamic interplay between cultural values and resource endowments. Sustainable enhancement of fertility intentions necessitates differentiated policy interventions that reinforce familial responsibility, alleviate economic constraints, and address emotional needs.

Introduction: Humanitarian actors have been slow to address child marriage, despite evidence that it is particularly common in conflict-affected contexts. This article explores the child marriage decision-making process among refuges living in Jordan, using a gender and generational lens.

Methods: Data used in this paper was collected between 2018 and 2022 and focuses on refugee girls (and young women) who live in Jordan and who married prior to age 18. Survey data was collected from 152 young Syrian brides. In-depth interviews were conducted with 45 Syrian and Palestinian brides-as well as their parents, in-laws, and husbands.

Results: Our research finds that girls' parents, grooms' parents, grooms, and girls themselves operate under deeply constrained conditions resulting from the legal and economic precarity experienced by refugee communities, and that these disadvantages reinforce gender norms and commitments to clan and culture. Girls' fathers are often beholden to their brothers to provide brides for their nephews; mothers prefer child marriage because of expectations that they will vouchsafe their children's behavior and the family's honor; grooms view marriage to girls as way of achieving adult masculinity and girls who married as children report that they felt like active agents in the process-albeit because they have so few other options.

Implications: Given the importance of economic precarity, ending child marriage in contexts of forced displacement will require expanding girls' access to education and improving refugees' access to work, which will provide a route through which fathers and young men can demonstrate their adult masculinity, and to allow girls and women some measure of financial independence. Given that displacement now often lasts for decades, the humanitarian sector also needs to focus on addressing the gender norms that leave girls at risk of child marriage.

In this article, I consider whether and to what extent the concept of social pathology can serve to better understand relatively long-term disruptions of the social order. I compare the findings present in practically oriented studies on types of social pathology and attempts to explain it grounded in the body of sociological/social theory and social philosophy, serving the critique of society. I understand social pathology as a structured process. I try to indicate its conditionalities and to what extent the dynamics of this process affect the quality of social existence of individuals and collectivities. I show the emergence of relatively durable assemblages that "preserve" negatives in the form of pathological behaviors and their (often ideological) justifications. Seeking the possibility of theoretical synthesis in the thick approach formula, I indicate two positions that can be a starting point for further analyses: the concept of Vytautas Kavolis (set in the tradition of studies on social problems) and the concept of forms of life by Rahel Jaeggi (fitted in the formula of critical theory). I begin by recalling and criticizing the "classical" approaches to social pathology. Then, I reveal the connections between normativity and normality, and attempts to theoretically explain out-of-order phenomena. In the next part, I refer to the concepts of Kavolis and Jaeggi, portraying their relationships with critical theory. The final part is a tentative balance and an indication of issues worth taking up in the name of theoretical codification of knowledge about social pathology.

Gender inequality in contemporary organizations persists despite decades of policy initiatives, partly because many barriers have shifted from overt exclusion to subtle, often invisible, mechanisms embedded in everyday practices. Existing models-whether grounded in economics, sociology, or social psychology-tend to focus on either the "supply" of candidates or the "demand" of organizations, reify gender categories, and overlook the active role of dominant groups in defining competence standards. This article introduces the Gender Projection Model (GPM), an identity-structural framework that explains how dominant-group members project their own attributes, life patterns, and interactional styles onto the prototypes of valued organizational roles such as leaders, experts, or the "ideal worker." These prototypes, presented as neutral, are in fact historically situated and power-sensitive, shaping both evaluation criteria and the aspirations of those perceived as non-prototypical. The GPM predicts that projection is strongest when the gender hierarchy is perceived as legitimate, stable, and impermeable, and that it operates as a feedback loop: prototypes influence evaluations and opportunities, which in turn reinforce status beliefs and prototype stability. By reframing "supply" as a product of organizational demand, the model unifies phenomena often treated separately-glass ceiling, sticky floor, glass cliff, backlash, tokenism-within a single identity-driven mechanism. Beyond its theoretical integration, the model generates testable predictions about when projection strengthens or weakens and offers an empirical and diagnostic framework for organizational analysis. This article thus outlines testable implications, proposes a cumulative research agenda, and discusses practical and organizational interventions aimed at redefining prototypes to foster equitable access to valued roles.

Introduction: Breastfeeding is one of the core pillars of the so-called "First Thousand Days" (FTD) discourse. By mobilising neuroscience, the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), and epigenetics, this contemporary narrative establishes a causal link between various pre-natal and early-life lifestyle factors and health across the lifespan. By framing parental choices as social determinants of children's health, it aligns with broader contemporary parenting trends, such as scientific motherhood and intensive parenting, the expectation that parents, particularly mothers, devote significant time and energy to raising their children according to the latest scientific advice.

Methods: A qualitative analysis of health information guides and policy papers circulating in Italy over the last 6 years was conducted following the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The aim was to explore how the promotion of breastfeeding within the FTD framework normalises biomedical imaginaries of childrearing and increases social pressure on mothers.

Results: The analysed texts emphasise individual behavioral prescriptions for mothers, focusing on nutrition, bodily techniques, and information gathering, while largely overlooking structural barriers such as inadequate parental leave or poor work-life balance. Biomedical and epigenetic narratives portray the mother as a vector for the child's gene expression, development, and health. She is positioned as dependent on expert guidance, while embodied maternal knowledge is marginalised.

Discussion: This discourse blends social and biological determinism, reinforcing intensive mothering ideals rooted in healthism, and underestimating the structural constraints that hinder full adherence to these expectations. In the Italian context, characterized by weak parental support policies and limited implementation of breastfeeding promotion, this narrative may contribute to a perception of motherhood as anomic, where the ideal of raising healthy children is promoted without providing the necessary means to achieve it.