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William R. Tonso has chosen an issue that he knows something about to examine how sociology textbooks address controversy. Appealing for gun control is fashionable, but it is at odds with a fondness that ordinary Americans have for their firearms--one that is supported by a growing body of research on deterrence to crime. There are two sides to the issue, but Tonso shows that in a large sample of texts, the sociology establishment predictably shades, omits, and distorts the politically incorrect position that citizens should not be compelled to relinquish responsibility for the security of their families and property. (Contains 54 notes.)

This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for making thermal images - and employed them to research their surrounding environments. By making and using the thermal flashlights, learners investigated power in two senses: identifying social power relationships embedded within normally unquestioned infrastructures, and exploring these infrastructures' connection to industrial forms of power, such as heat and electricity. Students and instructors came to understand how the control of power, light and temperature is vital to human-made infrastructure and environmental health threats that characterize the 21st century. Through this project, students went from being passive consumers of such power to become active investigators of their socio-technical systems by producing unique knowledge that enabled them to imagine how they might make and inhabit their environments differently. Breaking down the distinction between teaching and research, this article explores the promise of 'making and doing' in university courses to create new collaborative research platforms that could spread laterally and scale to transform social and technical infrastructures.

A central premise of the first demographic transition theory is that demographic change would occur more slowly in rural than urban areas. Few studies, however, have investigated whether rural areas remain holdouts during the second demographic transition. To address this gap, this study (1) examines trends among rural and urban families in Canada and the United States over a 30-year period and (2) determines whether compositional differences in demographic, socioeconomic, and religious factors explain current differences between rural and urban families. We find that rural Canadian women continue to have, on average, 0.6 more children than urban women. However, rural families do not trail behind urban families on any other indicator of family change. In fact, rural women in both countries are now significantly more likely to cohabit and roughly 10 percentage points more likely to have children outside of marriage than urban women. These differences are largely explained by lower levels of education and income among rural American women and fewer immigrants in rural Canada. Examining family change through a rural–urban lens fills important empirical gaps and yields novel insights into current debates on the fundamental causes of ongoing family change in high-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces the articles featured in the spring 2002 issue of The American Sociologist. The half-dozen articles here, along with Brym's engaging introductory essay, help us regain a sense of sociology as an unfolding international movement and also of the distinctive experiences of sociologists in particular national contexts. Rather ironically, in light of the sweep of the paradigms and macro-level theories that are sociology's coin of the realm, there are strong parochial tendencies in the field. In the United States, for instance, many departments of sociology tend to relegate international and cross-cultural matters to anthropologists, and many textbook writers produce analyses that focus overwhelmingly on their home country. One consequence of such tendencies is to speak as though formulas that fit one context have a general or universal applicability. As the papers here inform us time and again, sociology in Canada has struggled with the Anglo-French division of society and culture, which has generated two separate and largely unengaged spheres, and has segregated even the respective social sciences. Meanwhile, Canadian sociologists have worked to develop a voice of their own that is not distorted by the influence of sociology produced in the United States or in Europe.

When the notion that Quebec is a distinct society within Canada became the chief object of discord during the Meech Lake constitutional debate, sociologists were offered a golden opportunity to participate in shaping the evolving understandings that Canadians have of their country. But this opportunity was not grasped. This paper evaluates some of the discursive conditions that have produced the apparent indifference of Anglo-Canadian sociologists to this most crucial of sociological questions as it applies to their own country: what is a society? Of particular interest are the general underconceptualization in sociology of "society," and the conceptual confusion that links "society" to "nation," "state," and "country." Canada's political-economic autonomy relative to the United States is quite limited, and Canadian "sense of society" is vague and is challenged from within.

Previous literature has applied system-focused structures to understand the success of First Nations Peoples' nutrition and exercise group programmes. Existing system-focused measures have included biomedical outcomes, access and service utilization. By broadening the focus of programme success beyond the system, we can evaluate programmes from a First Nations Peoples' lifeworld perspective. Critical hermeneutics and yarning using a lens of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action to the literature has the potential to transform understandings of "success" in First Nations Peoples' nutrition and exercise group programmes. In this literature interpretation, we explored the critical success factors from a lifeworld perspective, giving scope to go beyond a system perspective to include a cultural, social or personal perspective. Our yarning led us to understand that there is a communicative relationship between explicit system structures and implicit lifeworld concepts that are critical success factors for First Nations nutrition and exercise group programmes. We have developed a set of reflective questions to guide others in considering a lifeworld perspective. Our findings represent a shift away from success measured by the dominant power structure to respect the lifeworld culture, knowledges and values of First Nations Peoples towards shared understanding and mutual decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinical symptoms of dementia include difficulty with speech, poor short-term memory, and changes in behavior. These symptoms can affect how the person with dementia understands and performs in social interactions. This qualitative review investigated how people with mild to moderate dementia managed social connections. A systematic search of social science databases retrieved 13 articles; data were synthesized using thematic analysis. Results established the work undertaken by people with dementia to maintain and present a social persona seen as socially acceptable. Interpretations are contextualized within Goffman and Sabat's theories on "self." People with dementia were agentic in impression management: undertaking work to maintain recognized social roles, while being aware of when their illness led to others discrediting them. Wider recognition of strategies used to maintain a social self could inform interventions designed to increase capability and confidence in co-managing social connections following dementia diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a commentary on a paper by Robert A. Stebbins in a previous issue of The American Sociologist which provided an account of professional and amateur sociology in the U.S. The British organization, Mass Observation existed in a relatively nonintrusive society with (as compared to the U.S.) greater concern for one's own and other people's privacy. Canada and Great Britain may in this respect have more built-in defenses against the risks of some kinds of amateur sociology that the U.S. would have. However, according to the commenter, Stebbins already anticipates this objection by requiring amateurs to be supervised and to start with a certain amount of instruction and proper cautionary comments. By engaging primarily in the use of unobtrusive measures and observations, the amateur will avoid the risks of harm to which Stebbins is already sensitive. The commenter relates that one of the public areas in which he has encouraged such unobtrusive observations is in churches, where the observer in outward appearance is similar to the congregation and hence not seen as an intruder. According to him, he has had a fair amount of experience with undergraduate amateurs of the sort described.

This article uses the puzzle of diverging trajectories of immigrant citizenship in the United States and Canada to build a new approach to the study of citizenship and political incorporation. I consider three existing models of citizenship: an approach that considers citizenship adoption as the product of cost/benefit calculations; an approach that understands individuals and groups to be differentially endowed with the skills, resources and interests necessary to acquire citizenship; and an approach that believes countries adopt citizenship regimes which either include or shut out immigrants. I then offer an alternative model of structured mobilization which views political incorporation as a social process of mobilization by friends, family, community organizations and local leaders that is embedded in an institutional context shaped by government policies of diversity and newcomer settlement. The material and symbolic resources provided by government shape the ability and interest of "social helpers" to assist with and mobilize around citizenship. The article concludes by considering the implications of structured mobilization for various debates in immigration and political sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights issues related to sociology in Canada. The generally accepted view of how sociology is constituted as a science commits to procedures, which subsume the regional and local. Methods, such as the construction of typologies, are made use of in recovering from the distinctive local settings attributes, which can be arrayed conceptually in an abstract formal space. frameworks of "theory". The methodological procedures devised by sociologists and presented in standard introductory texts on "methods" are designed to constitute data in such a way that distinctive local and individual features and the characteristic ways in which social phenomena are embedded in and integral to a social organization of local settings become contingent and accidental properties which must be stripped away conceptually. Ethnographic research in sociology provides the endemic problems of its "generalizability." black males throughout the urban United States?" The work of ethnomethodologists seeks also its invariant practices, its forms of law-like statements, while repudiating the established methods of arriving at them.

This article seeks to bring together a display as well as an analysis of the elements of fact and myth, which play their part in Canadian nationalism. The author's efforts to combine the methods of Marxism and phenomenology should be taken as a commitment to a particular style within the possibilities of Canadian sociology. It can hardly be claimed that Canada's experience of US economic domination has driven her into Third World revolution, although Canada shows occasional interest in the Mexican response to its problems with the US border. Everywhere one turns, the facts of US exploitation is clear enough to raise the voice of national indignation. The struggle over nationalist and scholarly interests in the Canadian University is exacerbated by attacks upon the university's role in society. Furthermore, the author discusses Canadian nationalism by turning from the consideration of the intellectual background predisposing to the myth of the nation to the consideration of the problems of national myth-making itself. Canadian sociology remains nerveless, ruled by its poor but legal use of American sociology.