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Abstract: Objective: This study analyzes the prevalence of child sexual touching before puberty (age 11 or younger) and its connection to family structure during adolescence. Method: Data were analyzed from the National Health and Social Life Survey, a stratified random probability survey of 3432 non-institutionalized respondents who were 18 to 59years of age. Results: A total of 566 respondents (16.5%) reported prepubertal sexual touching. The overall percentage differences between these “reported” respondents and the rest of the respondents by gender, race or socioeconomic status measures were not significant. The odds of being touched were 1.589 times higher when the child did not live with both parents at age 14 due to parental divorce, and 2.134 times higher due to institutionalization of one or both parents. Conclusions: Policies should focus on supporting single mothers and parents who both work outside of the home to reduce the likelihood that children are left vulnerable and at risk of being sexually touched. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Sport films depict sociocultural issues in American society and serve as a purveyor of values, mores, and customs. This study examines and analyzes American sport films over time (1930-1995). Emphases were placed on various trends, including sports depicted in films and their shifts over time, film content and theme, social and cultural relevance, and technological impacts. Archival research and content analysis were employed for 590 films. The major findings were (a) major shifts in the number of sport films and the proportion of particular sports among all sport forms during the 66-year period; (b) numerous shifts in the content, especially with respect to physical contact in contrast with non-physical contact sports; (c) the fewest number of sport films for the 1960s contrasted with any decade; and (d) a shift in the frequencies of sport films by their associations with socioeconomic sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing replies from a selected sample of contributors to the literature of symbolic interactionism, this paper examines the nature and extent of institutional ties among respondents holding similar views as to appropriate methodology in sociology. The specific institutional ties examined are those as: (1) fellow graduate students, (2) teachers and students, and (3) departmental colleagues. The methodological differences between the Chicago and Iowa schools, described in other studies, manifest themselves in the present sample, as do other views not neatly classifiable within either of these schools of symbolic interactionism. The more unconventional the conception of methodology held by a respondent, the more likely is the respondent to have been a fellow graduate student, a departmental colleague, and/or involved in a teacher-student relationship with other symbolic interactionists favoring the same conception. Respondents preferring the more orthodox methodological stances in modern sociology are less likely to have shared in such institutional flea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nexus between substance use and aggressive crime involves a complex interrelationship among mediating individual and community-level variables. Using multilevel logistic regression models, we investigate how community-level concentration of poverty variables mediate the predictive relationships among individual level social attachment variables and substance use on aggressive crime in a large national sample of male arrestees (N = 20,602) drawn from 24 U.S. urban areas. The findings support our hypothesis that individual social attachments to marriage and the labor force (education and employment) are the principal individual-level pathway mediating the substance abuse/aggression nexus. In the random intercept model, 3.17% of the variation not explained by the individual-level predictor variables is attributable to community-level variation in urban area female-headed households and households receiving welfare. This confirms our hypothesis that social structural conditions of an urban environment differentially expose persons to conditions that predict being arrested for an aggressive crime. Our findings tend to counter the cultural theorists who argue for an indigenous culture of violence in inner-city ghettos and barrios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]