1,721,174 research outputs found
Fathers, Daughters and Sons : The Construction of Gender and Parenthood in Father-Child Relationships
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to give a contribution to the debate on gender socialization of children and parenting, with a focus on fathers and the construction of gender and parenthood in discourses around interaction with and expectations from daughters and sons. Drawing from discursive interviews with first time fathers of children aged 0 to 3 years, an exploratory description of three different discourses will be proposed: desire for male or female children, gendered characteristics of children, and relationship with sons and daughters. Overall, the relevance of the personal gendered life experiences and characteristics of fathers in constructing appropriate parenting skills to act out with daughters and sons emerges clearly in the interviewees’ words, calling for further research on the specificities of father-son and father-daughter interaction
Transition to fatherhood: how does economic crisis influence the use of parental and paternity leaves?
Get PDFIt is well known that periods of economic recession usually have an influence on family formation dynamics and transitions such as cohabitation, marriage and parenthood. Such an influence may be direct, by reducing couples’ incomes and their possibilities of childbearing, and indirect, by affecting state family policies.
This paper aims to give a contribution to the observation of how macro level economical factors – labor market conditions, welfare policies and especially child care policies – influence couples’ transition to parenthood in the Western world, with a focus on Mediterranean Europe. A comparison is proposed between Spain and Italy, as Spain is a country that relies upon a labor market system and a welfare state regime comparable to the Italian ones. In Spain, quantitative studies on how economic crisis and uncertainty in the labor market impact on first time parenthood show that the decision to have a child is more and more postponed, if not abandoned at all, by contemporary Spanish couples. This is due to the increasing economical insecurity deriving from deregulation and transformations in the labor market subsequent to the economic recession. A recent research, though, argues that, while Spanish welfare policies and gender attitudes are changing towards a dual-earner-model norm, in Italy the male-breadwinner model and the reliance on the family for most of the care services are still predominant, both on the institutional level and on the individuals’ representations of family life. [Noguera, Golsch,& Steinhage 2002; Lapuerta, Baizan, & Gonzales 2011; Naldini & Jurado 2013; Sobotka, Skirbekk & Philipov 2011] In order to give a contribution to better define such a situation, this paper presents the results of an empirical research on how Italian dual-earner couples deal with the transition to parenthood and, especially, how external factors like the economic situation and family policies influence such a transition, with particular regard to decisions couples make about parental leaves and child care organisation.
The qualitative data come from the project “Practices and policies around Parenthood” (http://www.unito.it/unitoWAR/page/dipartimenti8/D072/D072_progetti2?path=/BEA%20Repository/5048067). The research, based on a panel-type design, draws upon in-depth interviews on 17 dual-earner couples, most of them with a higher education level, living in Torino (North-Western Italy) and surroundings. All couples have been interviewed twice: the first time a few months before the birth of their first child, and the second time a year and a half after. Partners were interviewed separately.
The aim of this paper is to observe whether economical factors’ influence on couples’ decisions change during the transition to parenthood, and whether the birth of the child makes a difference in partners’ representations of work-family balance and career expectation, given the macro institutional factors (labour market features and family policies). A special attention has been paid to the male side of the couple, thus focusing on the transition to fatherhood; within this perspective, practices of doing gender and, more broadly, features of the gender relations within the couple have been taken into account. The panel-type design of the research gives the unique chance to check what kind of influence the external economical have during the process of transition to parenthood. Furthermore, the comparison with the Spanish situation has constantly been taken into account, both on the side of the institutional level, by considering labour market characteristics, family policies and parental leaves regulation, and on the micro level of couples’ decisions over work-family balance and child care organization.
Expected results would be, in the first place, that the economic recession and its consequences on the labour market and the family policies, together with a welfare regime embedded in an overall traditional gender system, influence a reinforcing of the male-breadwinner model in contemporary Italian couples’ transition to parenthood. This outcome would be reached, for instance, by indirectly hindering the taking of parental leaves by men, who usually have the highest income within the couple, and thus fostering the traditional assignment to women of most of the child care work. On this regard, a difference with Spain will be marked, since family policies have been committed, in the last decade, to equalitarian principles when it comes to work-family balance and child care services. Secondly, it is expected that the birth of the child itself would contribute to strengthen the traditional gender role system, accordingly to evidence found in other national and international research. The last expected result is that fathers who show, before the birth of the child, a strong commitment to the taking of the father’s role (fatherhood as a project), will enact alternative strategies to deal with requests both of flexibility on the work place and of child care work, for instance by reducing working hours, re-defining the job career and so on.
Noguera C.S., Golsch K., Steinhage N., Increasing Uncertainty in the Spanish Labor Market and Entry Into Parenthood, in «Genus», vol 58, n.1, 2002, pp.77-119
Lapuerta I., Baizan P., Gonzales M.J., Individual and Institutional Constraints: An Analysis of Parental Leave Use and Duration in Spain, in «Population Research Policy Review», Vol 30, 2011, pp.185-210
Naldini M. & Jurado T., Family and Welfare State Reorientation in Spain and Inertia in Italy From a European Perspective, in «Population Review», vol. 52, n.1, 2013, pp 43-61
Sobotka T., Skirbekk V., Philipov D., Economic Recession and Fertility in the Developed World in «Population and Development Review», vol. 37, n. 2, 2011, pp.267-30
Fathers in (Italian) TV Commercials : Between New Intimacy and Hegemonic Masculinity
No full textThis article analyses the representations of fathers in Italian TV advertisements. After conducting a content analysis of 55 TV spots, we found that, in line with the existing literature, fathers continue to be represented as playmates and rarely as primary caregivers. Although this resonates with research on Italian fatherhood, the represented men also enact a form of intimate fatherhood that is innovative because it involves a dimension that we label «familiarity» which is based on an emotional bond and a horizontal day-to-day interaction. Because this aspect is peculiar to the father-daughter relationship, we think this has to do with the social construction of and the socialization to masculinity
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Cosa vede il mio bambino: consigli per lo sviluppo delle capacità visive nel primo anno di vita
No full textAppropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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