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Drawing on data generated in a recently completed qualitative study in a northern, English city, this paper explores the everyday social encounters of Accession 8 (A8) migrants who entered the UK following the expansion of the European Union in 2004. A number of options from permanent residence in another Member State on the one hand, to more fleeting circulatory and multiple short-term moves on the other, now exist for these new European citizens. The relatively short-term and temporary residence of some A8 migrants calls into question the focus of much UK government policy, which emphasises the need for migrants to integrate into diverse yet cohesive communities. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it considers the somewhat different character of A8 migration (encompassing a spectrum from permanency to temporariness) and what this means for routine experiences of mixing between new migrants and established host communities. Second, the paper explores such interactions in terms of 'everyday encounters' in both neighbourhood and work spaces and asks whether such spatio-temporal practices and experiences enhance or inhibit the building of 'good relations' in a multicultural city. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how male Polish builders in London construct themselves relationally to English builders as they negotiate their place within the labour hierarchies of the building site and in the London labour market. This is based on semi-structured interviews and participant photographs taken by Polish migrants arriving in the aftermath of the European Union expansion in May 2004, and now working in building sites across London. These buildings sites are mundane elements of a global city which employ transnational labour, and where differences between Polish and English builders become significant discursive tools of survival in a competitive labour market. The paper illustrates how Polish workers mark themselves as “superior” to English builders through the versatility of their embodied skills, work ethic, artistic qualities, and finesse in their social interactions on the building site. This paper thus provides new ways of understanding the meanings of work and the complexity of identity politics within the spaces of low-paid manual work in a global city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The Covid‐19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on many people living with dementia and carers. Caring for a person living with dementia at home with limited avenues for support and a break challenged many carers. Care homes in England closed to visitors, with very few offering opportunities for a short‐stay. We investigated impact of Covid‐19 on views and expectations of carers of people living with dementia about residential respite. Methods/Design: Qualitative interviews with 35 carers were conducted March–December 2020: 30 women and 5 men, with ages ranging 30–83 years. Interviews explored experiences, views of residential respite, and expectations post‐Covid. Data were thematically analysed and salient concepts were drawn out and discussed within the research team and study advisers. Results: Three themes were identified in transcripts, relating to impact of Covid‐19 on views and expectations of respite: (1) Carers described regularly negotiating risks and stresses of Covid, weighing up how to prevent infection and changing family arrangements to facilitate caring; (2) Carers were balancing different needs, prioritising needs of their relatives while bearing the impact of cumulative caregiving responsibilities. (3) Uncertainty about future residential respite continued, in terms of availability, ongoing restrictions and trustworthy information sources. Conclusions: Residential respite is a positive, acceptable option for some carers to get a break from caring. Covid‐19 may have heighted some of caregiving stressors and there may be an increased need for a break. Views of care homes developed during the pandemic suggest that individual confidence to use respite may need to be rebuilt. Key points: The Covid‐19 pandemic increased demands on carers of people living with dementia with fewer opportunities for social contact and breaksCarers described myriad ways to negotiate risks and stresses of Covid by developing ways to prevent infection and changing family arrangements. Carers also talked of balancing different needs, ways of prioritising the needs of their relatives while facing the impact of cumulative caregiving responsibilitiesThe uncertainty about future residential respite in terms of its availability, ongoing restrictions in care homes, and which sources of information to trust was noteworthyThe Covid‐19 pandemic may have heighted some demands of caregiving, and needs for a break may be greater. Individual confidence to use residential respite may need to be rebuilt [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People with acquired progressive dysarthria typically experience increased problems with intelligibility in everyday conversation as their disease progresses. Such problems are likely to impact on both the person with dysarthria and those with whom they interact. If this is the case then we may ask questions not just about the nature of these problems but how it is that such problems are dealt with by participants when they occur. Aims: To investigate ways through which problems resulting from dysarthria in everyday conversation are resolved by participants. Further, to examine some of the features of repair resolution, particularly where understanding of self-repair attempts themselves prove difficult. Methods & Procedures: Video data of natural conversation from two dyads were selected for this paper. One dyad features a 58 year-old man with multiple sclerosis and moderate intelligibility problems, the other a 79 year-old woman with motor neurone disease with mild to moderate intelligibility problems. Both elected to be recorded in conversation with their spouses. The dyads were video-recorded at home with no researcher present. Using the methods of Conversation Analysis (CA) a collection of sequences was identified and transcribed. The sequences were analysed with reference to how the participants resolve problems in the understanding of dysarthric speech. Outcomes & Results: It is shown how some problems resulting from dysarthria in conversation can be resolved relatively quickly, particularly where a specific element of a prior turn is highlighted by the recipient as problematic. In other instances, the recipient's understanding problem may be more global. These result in longer repair sequences in which problematic elements are addressed individually. Such a resolution method is ultimately successful but may also be characterised by additional understanding problems. These findings draw attention to an important distinction between intelligibility and understandability. Conclusions & Implications: It is concluded that problems resulting from dysarthria in conversation can require extensive repair work involving both parties. This has implications for the assessment of dysarthria in everyday conversation and also the promotion of intervention strategies that encompass the activities of both participants when dealing with dysarthria in interaction. These findings may be usefully employed in informing both direct clinical work and through training those who work with this client group and their significant others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research exploring lay men's and community health professionals’ attitudes towards ‘masculinity’ and ‘preventative health care’ conducted in the northwest of England. It is specifically concerned with the findings from the men's narratives that relate to male embodiment and the relevance of this to health and wellbeing. Whilst there is a burgeoning interest in the ‘sociology of the body’ it is only relatively recently that debates about embodiment have been supported by empirical research. Empirical work on male embodiment remains minimal and even less work has been done in considering the links between masculinity, embodiment and health. A series of focus groups and interviews were conducted with men that captured narratives about the lived (male) body in everyday life and its relation to health. These data allowed for greater insight into Watson's (2000 ) previous empirical work on the ‘male body schema’. Current findings presented here suggest that male bodies need to be considered as both material and representational, and that these two modes are not distinct but continually interact, with each other and with men's conceptualisations of health, to influence health practices and wider social interactions that impact on health and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the notion of communicative competence and the implications that can be drawn from it for language teaching. The impetus for the paper came from the author's experience in Sweden last year. Within the last five years there has been an increasing and justified concern for communicative activities in language teaching. The evidence of it can be seen in the titles of papers, articles and dissertations. A conference was held in England last year on "The Communicative Teaching of English." Communicative competence is not simply a term, but is a concept basic to understanding social interaction. It is commonplace to point out that the tenets and concepts of a discipline profoundly influence the questions one asks and the solutions one seeks. The author suggests a model for language teaching which sets a framework for identifying and discussing strategies and techniques in the teaching process, taking into account the social meaning of language. The necessity to develop communicative competence is especially important in second language and second dialect teaching.

Abstract: This essay provides an overview of some of the key critical approaches to the literature of eighteenth‐century London over the last two decades, before going on to explore a series of examples of the figure of the new arrival in London from the literature of the period. The outsider or new arrival became, for eighteenth‐century writers, something to think with and offered an opportunity to examine London's sense of its own modernity, and interrogate the ways in which commerce might be reshaping social interactions in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of domestic abuse against women has been estimated as high as one in four. The risk is particularly high for women who are younger, economically dependent, unemployed and with children. Research about the factors that maintain situations of abuse has generally focused separately on the coping strategies of women, barriers to leaving the relationship and the perpetrators' means of abuse. In this study we used a community psychology perspective to seek a broader understanding of what maintains situations of abuse, in order to suggest interventions in a rural County in the North of England. Twelve women who had experienced domestic abuse and had used voluntary sector services agreed to be interviewed about their experiences and the resources and strategies available to them. Using grounded theory we generated four themes: (1) Commonalities and contradictions in the experience of abuse; (2) living with abuse; (3) the response of systems reinforced or challenged the abuse and (4) dealing with abuse beyond the relationship. These findings illustrate how situations of domestic abuse can be prolonged by limited options available to victims for support and protection, and a lack of active public acknowledgement that domestic abuse is unacceptable. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst historians’ perceptions of the social organization of early-modern England have recently been dichotomized– perceived from either national or local levels– both interpretations rely on sources that are inherently very rhetorical in their representation of self and others. Is there another way of approaching local social relations? Perhaps there is much to be appreciated by a return to questions of social interaction, in particular at that most basic level of how people addressed each other, demonstrating social distance and closeness, exclusion and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on a study which explored the relationship between representation and identity among young people living in a stigmatized area of London, England. Characteristics of the participants; Methods used; Findings and its implications for future research.

We tested the cross-national similarity of additive and interactive variants of the Contingent Consistency Hypothesis in regard to antinuclear activist behavior. We predicted that attitudinally Consistent behavior is influenced (a) more by specific than general attitudes, (b) by facilitation between normative support and personal attitudes in an interactive manner, and (c) by a fundamental or basic social-psychological process that can be demonstrated in people from different Countries and cultures. These three hypotheses were tested for general (pacifist) attitudes, specific (anti-nuclear) attitudes, normative support, and antinuclear political activism in samples of college students from the U.S., England, and Sweden. In each sample, specific attitudes were strong, unique predictors of activist behavior (more so than general attitudes), while normative support had no additive influence on this behavior beyond that explained by attitudes for U.S. and British students. Interaction effects were found for both pacifist and nuclear attitudes in conjunction with normative support among the U.S. students, but only for pacifist attitudes in the British sample and only with antinuclear attitudes in the Swedish sample. In contrast with other studies where interaction effects were hypothesized for behaviors that were deviant or typically initiated by others, the present interactions were obtained for lawful behaviors that are often begun and/or performed alone. With some notable variations, these results were confirmed in each sample, partially validating the cross-national generality of the interactive attitude-behavior model for activist behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on differences of rural and urban communities. The urbanization of rural communities has been viewed by sociologists and geographers alike within a rural-urban dichotomy. Traditionally it has been argued that there was a clear dichotomy between ways of life in an urban area as opposed to those of a rural area. Such differences in values, mores and behavior are explicable in terms of the influence of the particular environment. Social anthropologists have attempted to show that rural communities have a distinctively social life of their own. Such communities display closely-knit family and kinship networks a clear differentiation in the roles of husband and wife and a uniform value system. A number of studies within inner cities have revealed the existence of social characteristics akin to those usually associated with remote rural areas. The case study presents a typology of rural communities in north Herefordshire, England. Eleven indices of an economic, social and demographic character were chosen for classification.

Earlier research has shown that whereas the elderly appear to be relatively protected from crime, they show the most concern about the crime problem. Research from a survey in Sheffield, England, which replicates these findings, is described. However, a contrast emerged between perceptions of crime on a general level and perceptions of area of residence and crime levels within it, which suggests that earlier distinctions between fear of crime and concern over the crime problem are valid. In general, it appears that while the public may express particular concern over the crime problem, perceptions of one's own risk are possibly underestimates. This, added to the lack of correspondence between perceptions of the crime problem and other variables, raises questions with regard to the validity of such indices, which are used commonly in market research, and the sources on which perceptions of crime are based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply to the comments made by economics historian S. H. Rigby on the literary work related to medieval England. The author compares the ratios of town to country taxation in 1334 with the ratios of town to country taxation in 1524. Rigby calls these findings impressionistic. But, according to the author they are actually correct. The author believes impressionistic in the sense in which actuarial statistics are. They register trends without saying anything about particular cases. And they tell people about relationships. They do not tell about changes in aggregate levels of wealth. Now the impression these findings convey is that of a society in which urban wealth, and hence urban activities, have come to play a more important part in economic and social life by the end of the middle ages, than they had done previously. If true, these are significant findings because towns, at bottom, are processing plants, and their prosperity, in an economy such as that of medieval England, was a reflection of prosperity beyond their boundaries.