February 20, 2008
Sex, Adulthood and the Internet
The Globe and Mail carries an article today by Tralee Pearce entitled "Few Pedophiles Posing as Youths Online." The article describes new research out in American Psychologist, by a team of researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, including Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, Kimberly Mitchell, and Michele Ybarra. The research is notable for attempting to change public dialogue about internet sex predation, a discourse where passions, understandably, run high. Using data from a survey of computer users, age 10-17, and from a survey of law enforcement agencies, the researchers come to the conclusion that most internet sex crimes involving a minor and an adult do not fit prevalent stereotypes. I quote from the abstract of the study below:
The publicity about online "predators" who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape--adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers--than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting. This is a serious problem, but one that requires approaches different from those in current prevention messages emphasizing parental control and the dangers of divulging personal information. Developmentally appropriate prevention strategies that target youths directly and acknowledge normal adolescent interests in romance and sex are needed...
Perhaps out of an abundance of caution, the Globe and Mail article highlights that the researchers still find the practice of statutory rape problematic, and, of course, criminal by definition. But mostly the adults who solicit sex with teenagers on-line do so openly. This does not absolve them of criminal behavior, but it does turn the attention of the researchers away from the adults involved and towards the "at-risk" teens who respond to (or initiate) solicitations. As mentioned in the abstract (but not so much in the Globe & Mail article) it also directs attention towards a more careful consideration of how the development of sexuality does not necessarily begin at the age of consent. As a bright student of mine recently noted in a column for Anthropology News, this article brings home how North Americans tend to pathologize the presence of sex before the age of consent, and the lack of sex thereafter.
For more media coverage of this interesting study, a National Public Radio interview with Dr. Finkelor (presumably the research team spokesperson?) can be found here.
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 9:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 17, 2008
Religion and Family
In the NYTimes today, Michael Slackman writes an article entitled "Dreams Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn to Islamic Fervor." The piece is worth a read. The basic idea is that the inability of young men to afford a family is leading them to turn to religion for solace.
This is fascinating for me, in that it mirrors much of my own research. The author pays a fair amount of attention to what is required to start a family in Egypt, apparently including an apartment, and access to some sort of decent job. Access to these things seems to have declined for the young in Egypt (as access to similar symbolically prerequisites to family formation have also declined in North America and Europe). If the author is to be believed, this is leading a growing proportion of young men into both frustration with the government, and deeper adoption of religion. Thought provoking work.
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Update: Family Studies moves to Sociology
The Family Research Blog has been on hiatus in recent weeks, as the Family Studies department at UBC has moved from the School of Social Work and Family Studies into the Department of Sociology. While the move is ongoing, much has already been done, and I'm hopeful there will be time, once again, to get the blog going! More updates will be forthcoming soon.
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 26, 2007
Carol Smart Lecture: Transitional Moments
Carol Smart, Professor of Sociology at University of Manchester, and Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, will be presenting on "Transitional Moments: Negotiating Personal and Political Life," a study of how same-sex couples in the UK make decisions about commitment ceremonies and whether or not to enter into civil partnerships. She will be speaking at the Green College Coach House on Tuesday, Oct. 30th, 12.30-1.30. The full flier advertising the talk is available here!
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 12, 2007
Aborted Opportunities?
A New York Times article out today by Elizabeth Rosenthal, entitled "Legal or Not, Abortion Rates Compare," considers a study just published in the on-line medical journal, The Lancet. Rosenthal summarizes the Lancet study as suggesting that regardless of whether or not abortion is made legal, international abortion rates tend to look the same. In other words, making abortion illegal does not discourage people from getting abortions. Instead, it just discourages them from getting safe abortions.
The actual Lancet study "Induced Abortion: Estimated Rates and Trends Worldwide", by Sedgh, et al, is available here for those registered with the Lancet (a process which is now free! I just registered today...). The study was apparently put together by researchers working with WHO and the Guttmacher Institute. The researchers involved attempted to accomplish the unenviable task of compiling abortion statistics for just about every country in the world. WHO attempts to collect these statistics on a regular basis. In countries where abortion is legal, the government also tends to keep track of the number of abortions performed (if imperfectly). In other countries, the researchers rely far more on surveys. The researchers, probably justifiably, assume undercounting in all cases.
Thinking about the issue in terms of health, the researchers make a distinction between legal abortions, which they consider likely to be supervised and reasonably safe way, from illegal abortions, which they consider to be unsafe. The relationship between legality and safety seems to make a great deal of sense, and the authors provide some data to back up this assertion, comparing the estimated 650 deaths per 100,000 procedures in Africa (where abortion is almost entirely illegal) to an estimated less than 10 deaths per 100,000 procedures in the "developed" world (where abortion is mostly legal). But as the authors note, the legality of abortion and general access to proficient medical care are highly correlated here, and I would have liked to see a more systematic comparison of legality issues to maternal mortality rates and abortion-related mortality estimates in the study.
Overall, the authors suggest that the legality of abortion has little effect on abortion rates or abortion ratios (which nevertheless vary widely between low ratios of 12 abortions per 100 pregnancies in Middle Africa, to high ratios of 105 abortions per 100 pregnancies in Eastern Europe), but a large effect on the safety of abortion. By contrast the authors suggest that contraceptive availability has a large effect on abortion ratios, with greater contraceptive availability decreasing the proportion of pregnancies that are unwanted. Again, this seems an intuitive finding, for which the authors provide some support, but not a particularly systematic analysis.
One way or another, the authors have provided a good read, and invaluable data for thinking about abortion and social policy around the world. I suggest everyone take a look!
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 2:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 2, 2007
Friends with Benefits
One of the most widely forwarded NYTimes stories of the day concerns people who have "friends with benefits". In "Friends with Benefits, and Stress Too," reporter Benedict Carey writes about a study out of Michigan State University, discussing the study with a Communications professor at Arizona State University. Will this be the new sex scare to replace the "hooking up" debate?
The study, authored by Melissa Bisson and Timothy Levine, was recently published by Archives of Sexual Behavior (the actual study is linked here), and is based upon a master's thesis in Communications at Michigan State University. Bisson and Levine survey a modest set (125) of undergraduate students from Communications courses at MSU about their experiences and thoughts regarding "Friends with Benefits" (FWB) relationships, defined as "when people who are 'just friends' have sex." (p. 2) 75 of the students, or 60% of the population surveyed, had experienced a FWB relationship. A small proportion of FWB relationships mentioned in this sample transformed into romantic unions (10%), with larger proportions either remaining FWBs (28%), remaining friends but without the sex (36%), or ending the relationship altogether (26%).
A second study (it's not entirely clear how this sample relates to the first) surveyed 90 people from Communications classes who had been in FWB relationships, asking them about how they negotiated their relationships. Most people didn't seem to negotiate them at all, with some uncertainty expressed, but little establishment of ground rules. Following a triangular typology of love, the authors score FWB relationships by levels of intimacy, passion, and commitment. The results indicate that FWBs look more like friendships (moderate intimacy, low passion & commitment) than committed romantic relationships (moderate to high on all three dimensions).
Overall, the study had plenty of methodological problems, like the sampling, about which we really know quite little, and like the focus on individuals rather than FWB relationships. I assume, but can't quite tell, that even in the second study, which does provide some information about how many FWB relationships people had experienced, most of the information refers to only ONE of those FWB relationships, rather than ALL FWB relationships. It would be nice to learn more about how FWB relationships differ across the experiences of the same people.
Nevertheless, I really found the study interesting, and a fine example of a nice thesis project. I think it's particularly interesting to see this sort of work going on in Communications, a discipline about which, I must confess, I know quite little. In the end, I'm not sure how useful it is to classify FWB relationships as distinct from hook-ups and other categories, especially since I'm not entirely certain how much the people involved distinguish between the variety of relationships they find themselves in. But it is useful to point out that the contexts for relationship formation these days are mostly distinct from dating, and entirely worth studying. I just wish we could do the studying with a little less panicky alarm, something Bisson & Levine mostly succeed at, but the NYTimes, not so much...
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 2:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 18, 2007
Catching Up with Family Research at UBC
The Family Research Blog has been on hiatus due to a combination of technical issues, the reorganization of Family Studies at UBC, and the summer weather (such as it was). We will be returning to our regular activities now, including boosting the profile of UBC Family Studies researchers in the news!
The recent release of Statistics Canada census results on families and households from the 2006 census has occasioned much press interest, and a variety of UBC researchers have provided commentary in the news, at least two Family Research Blog contributors included.
Jim White in: The Vancouver Sun and the North Shore News, as well as numerous other sources.
Nathan Lauster in: The Province, live on the CBC's BC Almanac (audio archived here for a limited time...), and in other sources.
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 1:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 12, 2007
Musclebound Mysteries
According to a press release by UCLA picked up by a number of media outlets, including Scientific American and the Globe and Mail, more muscular men have more sex partners.
In a recent paper authored by UCLA's David Frederick and Martie Haselton, apparently being published in August's edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the authors interview two sets of male university students, independently rated and self-rated for the muscularity, about how many sex partners they've had. They find that those with higher muscularity ratings tend to state they've had more sex partners. Moreover, they're more likely to state they've had more sex partners who've had other boyfriends at the time.
These findings might be true, though the accuracy of self-reports on number of sex partners and the status of their sex partners' other relationships could certainly be questioned (see below). What's more striking to me is the extraordinary leap of faith the authors take in interpreting these findings. They read their findings as evidence that evolution favors the sexual selection of heavily muscled men as more attractive to women. This, to the authors, explains why young men spend so much time in the gym. Moreover, the authors take this position despite the fact that according to another of their own studies, women actually rate men who are "toned" but not heavily muscled as more attractive.
Let me come up with an alternative explanation in five seconds or less.
Men who like to pump alot of metal might also tend to ascribe to very stereotypical, physical, consumer-based, and competitive versions of masculinity. These are likely to be the same men who actively seek out multiple short-term sexual encounters. Whether or not they are successful in finding these encounters, they are also likely to be the same men who would brag about them*. In this, they seem to share a few fundamental values with the researchers, who seem to view multiple sex partners at University as an unproblemmatic measure of evolutionary success.
It seems to me that a number of different possibilities go unexplored here. First, the question of whether or not muscular men are more likely to seek out and brag about multiple short-term sexual encounters is missing from the current discussion of findings. Even if they're no more likely to seek them out, other factors besides women favoring men with big muscles could account for all the encounters that come their way. Perhaps working out makes men more confident, translating into more attempts at meeting people? Perhaps men who work out really are more aggressive and controlling, turning off potential long-term relationships, and forcing them to make do with short-term relationships? The article isn't out yet providing full access to the authors' findings and discussion, but I suspect these alternative possibilities were not explored.
Why not?
The authors are associated with UCLA's Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture. They're looking for evolutionary explanations for human behavior, and low and behold, they're finding them by surveying local college students. It helps that they're not looking for explanations anywhere else.
* - which is why the results might actually be called into question!
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 14, 2007
"End of Children?" Symposium Follow-Up
Thanks to all the participants in the UBC Symposium: 'The End of Children'?: Fertility and Childhood in Flux (May 10th – 11th, 2007)! I've received word from several of the attendees that they consider the symposium a resounding success! Thanks are especially due to Graham Allan for pulling the event together, and to Graham Riches and Dan Perlman for providing additional funding and support.
As I mentioned during the symposium, the Family Research Blog provides an accessible forum for continuing the discussions sparked by the symposium. This may be done through the addition of comments or through becoming an author on the blog. To write comments, just click on any of the sessions (posted below) and go to the bottom of the post. Comments will be posted as soon as I get the chance to review them or add you to the list as an approved commenter! For those interested in becoming an author, please e-mail me: nlauster (*at*) interchange.ubc.ca. I would be grateful if authors would also send me notification of any errors or changes to their abstracts.
I post my opening comments for the symposium below:
Continue reading ""End of Children?" Symposium Follow-Up"
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 2:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"The End of Children?" Panel One: Disappearing Children?
Panel One: Disappearing Children?
May 10th, 2007: 1.00-4.30
Continue to Read Abstracts Below...
Continue reading ""The End of Children?" Panel One: Disappearing Children?"
Posted by Nathan Lauster at 2:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)