Social Sciences

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Inste

Ever since Aids appeared, migration has been thought to be a driving force behind the epidemic. The disease is often represented either as an “imported pathology”, migrants being the disease (or at least risk), carriers or as a “pathology of adaptation”. Migrants, mainly young men who move around to find work, are subjected to the constraints of a new environment they find in the host region or country. They therefore become economically, socially and emotionally more vulnerable. This situation e

For most of the growing number of women who go out to work, organising childcare for young children is a highly complicated process in which the slightest disruption is likely to cause a crisis, according to new research sponsored by the ESRC.

Among big city-dwellers, pre-school arrangements – even for the most affluent households – involve careful scheduling in time and travel, typically using three or four different types of regular care, says the study, led at University Colle

Whether it is barn-raising or crafting a business plan, humans are among the few creatures that are able to work well cooperatively. According to an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, our success at cooperation results from three distinct personality types.

“In any given group of people, youl find three kinds of people: Cooperators, Free Riders, and what we call Reciprocators. Cooperators do the most work and Free Riders do as little as possible, but

Those abused as adults often say no to marriage, cohabitation

Poor women who are physically or sexually abused at some point in their lives are less likely to maintain stable intimate relationships, according to a new study of more than 2,500 women by sociologists from The Johns Hopkins University and Penn State University.
The women involved in the study said they want fair treatment and companionship from their partners, just like everybody does, the researchers said. Many

Words may be a clue to how people, regardless of their language, think about and process emotions, according to a Penn State researcher.

“It has been suggested in the past that all cultures have in common a small number of emotions or emotion words, but that every culture has multiple ways of nuancing them, sometimes quite differently,” says Dr. Robert W. Schrauf, associate professor of applied linguistics at Penn State.

These words include joy or happiness, fear, anger a