Status foe: a psychobiographical investigation of Ida B. Wells.

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) led an extraordinary life as a journalist, educator, and activist while navigating the intersecting social realities of race, gender, and class. She embodied courage, advocating for the civil rights of Black Americans in an uncompromising fashion.Building on decades of research in social psychology, sociologist Cecilia L. Ridgeway presents (2019) a cultural schema theory of status. She contends that issues of status in interpersonal contexts are an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. Despite the ubiquity of status as a sociocultural force, Ridgeway believes that status hierarchies may be undermined.The present study is a psychobiographical exploration of Wells through the lens of Ridgeway's status theory. It explores: the development of Wells' cultural schemas; how Wells navigated her own status; the inter-relationship between Wells and her sociocultural context; and how Wells undermined and overcame status hierarchies.

Postpartum sex taboos and child growth in Tanzania: Implications for child care.

The social context and cultural meaning systems shape caregivers' perceptions about child growth and inform their attention to episodes of poor growth. Thus, understanding community members' beliefs about the aetiology of poor child growth is important for effective responses to child malnutrition. We present an analysis of caregivers' narratives on the risks surrounding child growth during postpartum period and highlight how the meanings attached to these risks shape child care practices. We collected data using 19 focus group discussions, 30 in-depth interviews and five key informant interviews with caregivers of under-five children in south-eastern Tanzania. Parental non-adherence to postpartum sexual abstinence norms was a dominant cultural explanation for poor growth and development in a child, including different forms of malnutrition. In case sexual abstinence is not maintained or when a mother conceives while still lactating, caregivers would wean their infants abruptly and completely to prevent poor growth. Mothers whose babies were growing poorly were often stigmatized for breaking sex taboos by the community and by health care workers. The stigma that mothers face reduced their self-esteem and deterred them from taking their children to the child health clinics. Traditional rather than biomedical care was often sought to remedy growth problems in children, particularly when violation of sexual abstinence was suspected. When designing culturally sensitive interventions aimed at promoting healthy child growth and effective breastfeeding in the community, it is important to recognize and address people's existing misconceptions about early resumption of sexual intercourse and a new pregnancy during lactation period.

Teachers' conflicting cultural schemas of teaching comprehensive school-based sexuality education in Kampala, Uganda.

Teachers can feel uncomfortable teaching sexuality education when the content conflicts with their cultural values and beliefs. However, more research is required to understand how to resolve conflicts between teachers' values and beliefs and those implicit in comprehensive approaches to sexuality education. This study uses cultural schema theory to identify teachers' cultural schemas of teaching sexuality education and the internal conflicts arising between them. In-depth interviews were conducted with 40 secondary school teachers in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Embedded in a context of morality, conflicting cultural schemas of sexuality education and young people's sexual citizenship in traditional and present-day Ugandan society were found: young people are both innocent and sexually active; sexuality education both encourages and prevents sexual activity; and teachers need to teach sexuality education, but it is considered immoral for them to do so. In countries such as Uganda, supportive school regulations and a mandate from society could help teachers feel more comfortable adopting comprehensive approaches to sexuality education.

Supporting older adults' engagement in health-care programs and policies: Findings from a rural cognitive health study.

Although rural seniors are important users of health-care services, their perspectives and input remain largely absent from health programs and policies. This article explores rural seniors' perspectives to support their engagement in patient-oriented research. Guided by lay theory and cultural schema theory, participant observation, concept maps, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 rural seniors in Saskatchewan, Canada. Three themes were identified: community outreach through trust and partnership-building; using flexible data collection methods such as moving to open-ended interviews rather than closed-ended surveys; and developing community-relevant dissemination strategies such as local newspaper articles, posters, and community workshops. In moving forward, collaborative research with seniors is essential to improving health programs and policies for older adults in rural communities and beyond.

Cultural reproduction of mental illness stigma and stereotypes.

This study investigates how schemas and stereotypes about individuals with mental illness shape how information is transmitted between people. Mental illnesses are highly stigmatized identities, and prior work illustrates the persistence of mental illness stigma, despite public health efforts aimed at increasing awareness of the biological origins of mental illness (Pescosolido et al., 2010). Recent work has also demonstrated the utility of combining cultural cognition with social psychological theories of cultural meaning to investigate how stereotypes are transmitted through secondhand narratives (Hunzaker 2014, 2016). We connect this social psychological work with medical sociological literature on mental illness stigmas and propose that stereotypes function as cultural schemas that shape the way stories are remembered and retold about individuals with a mental illness. We then conduct a narrative transmission study to test this proposal, using schizophrenia as a case of interest. Consistent with prior work, we find that individuals who retell a story about a person with schizophrenia alter the narrative so that it becomes more consistent with stereotypes about individuals with schizophrenia. We also find that stereotype-inconsistent information is more likely to be transformed to align with culturally shared beliefs about schizophrenia. The findings extend prior work on how bias shapes the reproduction of mental illness stereotypes, and demonstrate how socially learned cultural beliefs can reinforce stereotypes, biases and stigma about mental illness.