Paula Wilcox

‘It was nothing to do with the university, it was just the people’: the role of social support in the first‐year experience of higher education

This article argues that to understand higher education student retention, equal emphasis needs to be placed on successful integration into the social world of the university as into the academic world. To date, sociological research reflecting first‐year students’ perceptions of the processes involved in developing social lives at university is scarce. Here the concept of ‘social support’ is used to analyse interviews with 34 first‐year students, investigating the processes through which social integration (or lack of it) influenced their decision as to whether or not to leave university. Our data support the claim that making compatible friends is essential to retention, and that students’ living arrangements are central to this process. Such friends provide direct emotional support, equivalent to family relationships, as well as buffering support in stressful situations. Course friendships and relationships with personal tutors are important but less significant, providing primarily instrumental, informational and appraisive support.

Using texting to support students’ transition to university

This article argues that judicious use of mobile phone text messaging by university staff has the potential to enhance the support provided to students by an academic department during the transition to university. It reports on an evaluation of a desktop computer application, Student Messenger, which enables staff to send text messages from their computers to the mobile phones of groups of students. Analysis of qualitative interviews with 30 students reveals that text messaging is the dominant mode of electronic communication amongst students and plays a central role in maintaining their social networks. The text message dialogue amongst students provides emotional and social peer support and facilitates an informal system of interdependent learning in relation to navigating unfamiliar academic and administrative systems. Text messages from university staff, inserted into this dialogue, can enhance the existing peer support and aid students’ social integration into university life.

Lone Motherhood: the Impact on Living Standards of Leaving a Violent Relationship

This paper presents findings from doctoral research which looked at the social support of women leaving domestic violence. In this paper the focus is on one aspect of that study: the living standards of women who have left a violent relationship. An exploratory, area-based study using in-depth interviews and participant observation with twenty white working-class women examinedthis issue. This exploratory study makes visible the links between violence and living standards. Debts incurred during the violent relationship when women had little if any control over finances, rent arrears incurred as a result of leaving, when women were temporarily housed in a refuge or hostel, and increased housing, travel and communication costs all contributed to the womensexperience of poverty. If findings of previous research are correct, that between 20 and 40 per cent of lone parents (overwhelmingly mothers) experienced domestic violence in their previous relation-ship, then more extensive research in this area is indicated.

Is parent abuse a form of domestic violence

There is a lack of research on parent abuse in the UK and a lack of research on the overlap between domestic violence and parent abuse internationally. This article explores why this is the case. Findings suggest that conceptual conflicts in defining both concepts, in framing children’s safety as subsumed under mothers’ safety and the desire to challenge deterministic ‘cycle of violence’ models, may unwittingly have contributed to the failure to address parent abuse in the domestic violence field. The author argues that only by integrating parent abuse into the domestic violence framework will this issue be appropriately addressed.

Transformation or Trauma: The Transition to Higher Education of Non-Traditional Students

We focus in this chapter on the transition between school or college and higher education (HE) in England. While interested in the experience for all students, we have particular concerns for those who can be defined as non-traditional, as representing diversity, although we do not include specific consideration of disability issues. In recent years, completing this transition effectively in a ‘good enough’ fashion has been identified as important for a successful university career. Recognising the significance of transition also has consequences for the policy, practice and organisation of universities (Yorke and Longden, 2008).

Work and Money

The potential negative impact of domestic violence on women’s financial and employment prospects seem to have been more readily recognised as a serious problem in developing countries. Uganda is one such example where women participating in poverty alleviation programmes identified gender-based violence as one of the major contributing factors to their poverty. Projects such as the Mifumi1 Domestic Violence Intervention Project was set up with two aims: to empower women economically and to protect women from male violence. There is much we can learn in the west by looking at the links between domestic violence and women’s poverty and these links are now starting to be researched (see for example Kirkwood, 1993; Tolman and Raphael, 2000; Wilcox, 2000b; Humphreys and Thiara, 2002; Lyon, 2002; Meisel et al., 2003).2 Studies that have investigated the prevalence of domestic violence have found that over half of the women receiving welfare had suffered physical abuse. Derr and Taylor’s (2004) recent study of 280 women who were long-term welfare recipients found that 81 per cent lived in a physically violent relationship as an adult.3 Historically, however, there has been relatively little research on the relationship between lone motherhood, domestic violence and poverty or the relationship between women’s employment and domestic violence.

Mothers and Children

Women’s experiences as mothers of children are focal to this study as children feature strongly when looking at agency (and its enhancement) for women experiencing domestic violence. The roles and attitudes of women in society are changing but gendered patterns of domestic work and caring in the family remain relatively static with children primarily cared for by mothers, and fathers primarily seen as economic providers. A new emphasis on fathering in state discourse has not (at least so far) been enthusiastically adopted by men.

Home and Security

This chapter provides a further window into women’s agency in the face of constraints in contexts of domestic violence focusing on home and security. In order to escape her violent relationship Catherine found shelter in two refuges and several months later was re-housed in a community 70 miles from her own hometown. A severe constraint faced by Catherine was the local authority ‘rule’ whereby homeless people are made one offer of a house only and in her case the house was in so many ways inappropriate for someone fleeing domestic violence. I pursue this point in more detail later in the chapter.

Coercion and ‘Consensus’

The practices of men in their efforts to control their wives/partners, and women’s agency in the face of such practices, are the focal points of this chapter. As Sally reveals above, the enactment of male power and control in violent heterosexual relationships does not rely on violent acts alone. Women often experience this behaviour as bewildering, which makes it difficult for them to know how to react (and I take up this point later in the chapter). As seen in the introduction to this book not only do women find it difficult to speak about domestic violence they tend to deny or minimise the violence they experience from men, indeed are often encouraged so to do (see Kelly and Radford, 1996). Nevertheless, when women are encouraged to speak about their experiences it is clear that the majority are constantly active in their attempts to make sense of their relationships, and to do something about it.

Love and Shame

Polarised and hierarchical concepts of reason — associated with masculinity, and emotion — associated with femininity, form the typical context for western thinking (Seidler, 1987; Bryson, 1992) and promote the stereotypes: ‘emotional women’ and ‘rational men’. The increase of sex segregation (men seen as active in the public sphere and women in the private sphere), which occurred as part of the industrialisation of western societies from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, helped to embed these gendered stereotypes as cultural norms. In modernity, men are increasingly seen as individuals, as able to act independently, whereas women are ‘cast as incapable of becoming fully agentic …. In the course of this transmutation women are locked into and overwhelmed by their corporeality, while men rise above it and are defined, determined and distinguished by their sociality’ (Marshall and Witz, 2002, p. 6). The exception to this general ‘rule’, however, is that women are seen as having greater agency in the area of emotions and emotional management, particularly in the private realm of the family.