JoAnn Miller

Social class sentiments in formation : Influence of class socialization, college socialization, and class aspirations

What explains social class sentiments among public university students? This empirical study uses a distributional model to define social class, which places students and their families with comparable resources over time into similar class locations. We survey a sample of students enrolled in four different schools at a large public midwestern university. The research finds that examining experiences with past, present, and anticipated or aspired future class locations is necessary for understanding the attitudes and beliefs associated with class that are held by young adults. We contend that future research designed to validly measure class consciousness or class sentiments must recognize that for some segments of the general population, class sentiments are not fixed, but are in a process of formation.

Family Abuse and Violence

At age 20 a thoughtful woman from a family with high social status began a lengthy period of enslavement to her father, a theologian. Claiming only that he loved his daughter, the father took possession of his daughter’s body, her sexuality, her emotional well-being, her social and family relationships, and nearly her life itself. Now an acclaimed young novelist, Kathryn Harrison quietly writes about the years of her own father—daughter incest experiences in The Kiss. Her memoirs tell about an ordinary case of family abuse. There were no repressed memories recovered, no failed social service agency, no murdered victim, and no falsely accused offender. There are, however, permanent and emotional scars resulting from an especially insidious form of family abuse and perplexing questions that can never be answered. The Kiss compels its readers to acknowledge a well-known social fact: A family member characterized by any socioeconomic group, any age, either gender, or any race or ethnicity can experience one or several forms of family abuse and violence. A highly educated mother can neglect her newborn infant, a university professor can kill his partner, an older sister can batter a young brother, a middle-aged husband can rape his wife, and a mother can exploit financially and physically abuse her own elderly mother.

Social control at the margins : toward a general understanding of deviance

Part One: The elusive reality of deviance. Experiencing and describing deviance. Deviance, society, and human experience. Explaining deviance: basic concepts, classical theories, and rates of deviance. Explaining deviance: contemporary theories and causes of deviance. Researching deviance. Part Two: Deviance: social organization, niches, and actions. Heterosexual deviance. Mental illness. Violence. White collar crime. Some final thoughts on social policy. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index.

Variation in Judgments of Criminal Sanctions: An Application of “Schema Theory”

Abstract “Schema theory” guides this study that was designed to explain judgments of criminal sanctions. We apply the perspective to predict a global level agreement in judgments, reflecting a shared legal ideology of justice and fairness. We use the perspective also to explain differences in how respondents use social knowledge structures to form judgments, based on their familiarity and experiences with the criminal justice process. We isolate crime wrongfulness and crime harmfulness, two dimensions of a crime seriousness sub-schema, to uncover variation in the judgment making process across distinct respondent samples. We find that those adjudicated by criminal courts are less concerned than others with crime wrongfulness when forming judgments of criminal sanctions; and younger respondents emphasize the harm resulting from property crime in their judgments of appropriate punishments. We conclude that schema theory is an integral tool for understanding the social actors judgments of complex social obj...

Advertising what lies behind the academic door: Occupational identity displays

Abstract We used an unobtrusive research design to observe and measure the materials that academics post on their office doors in a social science department. The purpose of the study was to uncover how social actors advertise dimensions of their occupational identities. The analysis examined variation in the amounts and types of door materials, focusing specifically on how indicators of social status influenced expressions given in displays of occupational identity. We found that door displays are related to professorial rank and other relevant status markers. We encourage researchers to replicate the study in different types of universities and academic departments.

Abused and Battered: Social and Legal Responses to Family Violence

Discursive Acts R.S. Perinbanayagam (Hunter College, CUNY) 1991. xii + 211 pp. 0-202-30366-7 Cloth

Felony Punishments: A Factorial Survey of Perceived Justice in Criminal Sentencing

36.95. 0-202-30367-5 Paper

An Arresting Experiment Domestic Violence Victim Experiences and Perceptions

18.95. Focusing on the significance of symbolic communication in human behavior, the author describes the interrelation of conversation and self-concept and the interpretive processes inherent in discourse, and explains the interaction between emotions and the rule structures of conversation.