Religious faith and heterosexuality:a multi-faith exploration of young adults

This paper examines the understandings and practices of 515 heterosexual religious young adults living in the UK in terms of their religious faith and sexuality. It presents qualitative and quantitative data drawn from questionnaires, interviews, and video diaries. Four themes are explored. First, participants generally understood sexuality in relation to sacred discourses. Second, regardless of gender and religious identification, the participants drew from religious (e.g. religious community) and social (i.e. friends) influences to construct their sexual values and attitudes. Third, the religious and familial spaces within which the participants inhabited were structured by heteronormative assumptions. Thus, the participants must negotiate dominant norms, particularly those pertaining to marriage and sex within it. Finally, the paper focuses on married participants, offering insights into their motivations for, and experiences of, marriage. Overall, the paper demonstrates that, like their lesbian and gay counterparts, heterosexual religious young adults also had to manage various competing and mutually-reinforcing sexual and religious norms in constructing a meaningful life.

Sexuality and Christianity:understanding the attitudes and negotiations of young adults in the UK

Christianity has historically incorporated numerous strands of thinking on sexuality; in some cases, problematizing sexuality through the endorsement of celibacy and asceticism while at other historical and contextual moments, marriage and procreation become ideals (Price 2006). Contemporary Christians negotiate many sexual scripts (including ‘secular’ ones), but ‘appropriate’ Christian sexuality is still usually defined in terms of monogamy, the containment of sex within marriage, and heterosexuality. This chapter will explore the attitudes, beliefs and practices toward sexuality of young Christian women and men aged between 18 and 25 and living in the UK, based on a qualitative and quantitative research project entitled Religion, Youth and Sexuality: A Multi-faith Exploration, which utilized questionnaires, in-depth interviews and video diaries. The chapter will consider the variations in attitude between young people from different Christian denominations in relation to three themes: sex outside of marriage, celibacy and monogamy.

Fiber-type transitions and satellite cell activation in low-frequency-stimulated muscles of young and aging rats

We examined satellite cell content and the activity of satellite cell progeny in tibialis anterior muscles of young (15 weeks) and aging (101 weeks) Brown Norway (BN) rats, after they were exposed for 50 days to a standardized and highly reproducible regime of chronic low-frequency electrical stimulation. Chronic low-frequency electrical stimulation was successful in inducing fast-to-slow fiber-type transformation, characterized by a 2.3-fold increase in the proportion of IIA fibers and fourfold and sevenfold decreases in the proportion of IID/X and IIB fibers in both young and aging BN rats. These changes were accompanied by a twofold increase in the satellite cell content in both the young and aging groups; satellite cell content reached a level that was significantly higher in the young group (p < .04). The total muscle precursor cell content (i.e., satellite cells plus progeny), however, did not differ between groups, because there was a greater number of satellite cell progeny passing through the proliferative and differentiative compartments of the aging group. The resulting 1.5-fold increase in myonuclear content was similar in the young and aging groups. We conclude that satellite cells and satellite cell progeny of aging BN rats possess an unaltered capacity to contribute to the adaptive response.

Religious and sexual identities:a multi-faith exploration of young adults

Presenting qualitative and quantitative findings on the lived experiences of around seven hundred young adults from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and mixed-faith backgrounds, Religious and Sexual Identities provides an illuminating and nuanced analysis of young adults' perceptions and negotiations of their religious, sexual, youth and gender identities. It demonstrates how these young adults creatively construct meanings and social connections as they navigate demanding but exciting spaces in which their multiple identities intersect. Accessible quantitative analyses are combined with rich interview and video diary narratives in this theoretically-informed exploration of religious and sexual identities in contemporary society. © Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Sarah-Jane Page 2013. All rights reserved.

A comparison of the vocational training system of Britain and West Germany as experienced by minimum-age school leavers.

The sectoral and occupational structure of Britain and West Germany has increasingly changed over the last fifty years from a manual manufacturing based to a non-manual service sector based one. There has been a trend towards more managerial and less menial type occupations. Britain employs a higher proportion of its population in the service sector than in manufacturing compared to West Germany, except in retailing, where West Germany employs twice as many people as Britain. This is a stable sector of the economy in terms of employment, but the requirements of the workforce have changed in line with changes in the industry in both countries. School leavers in the two countries, faced with the same options (FE, training schemes or employment) have opted for the various options in different proportions: young Germans are staying longer in education before embarking on training and young Britons are now less likely to go straight into employment than ten years ago. Training is becoming more accepted as the normal route into employment with government policy leading the way, but public opinion still slow to respond. This study investigates how vocational training has adapted to the changing requirements of industry, often determined by technological advancements. In some areas e.g. manufacturing industry the changes have been radical, in others such as retailing they have not, but skill requirements, not necessarily influenced by technology have changed. Social-communicative skills, frequently not even considered skills and therefore not included in training are coming to the forefront. Vocational training has adapted differently in the two countries: in West Germany on the basis of an established over-defined system and in Britain on the basis of an out-dated ill-defined and almost non-existent system. In retailing German school leavers opt for two or three year apprenticeships whereas British school leavers are offered employment with or without formalised training. The publicly held view of the occupation of sales assistant is one of low-level skill, low intellectual demands and a job anyone can do. The traditional skills - product knowledge, selling and social-communicative skills have steadily been eroded. In the last five years retailers have recognised that a return to customer service, utilising the traditional skills was going to be needed of their staff to remain competitive. This requires training. The German retail training system responded by adapting its training regulations in a long consultative process, whereas the British experimented with YTS, a formalised training scheme nationwide being a new departure. The thesis evaluates the changes in these regulations. The case studies in four retail outlets demonstrate that it is indeed product knowledge and selling and social-communicative skills which are fundamental to being a successful and content sales assistant in either country. When the skills are recognised and taught well and systematically the foundations for career development in retailing are laid in a labour market which is continually looking for better qualified workers. Training, when planned and conducted professionally is appreciated by staff and customers and of benefit to the company. In retailing not enough systematic training, to recognisable standards is carried out in Britain, whereas in West Germany the training system is nevertheless better prepared to show innovative potential as a structure and is in place on which to build. In Britain the reputation of the individual company has a greater role to play, not ensuring a national provision of good training in retailing.

Controlled study into the effectiveness of individual client-centred counselling for young offenders in residential care

This study is toe first documented account in the British Isles of an evaluation of the effectiveness of client-centred counselling with young offenders in secure residential care. It is a test of Rogers' (1957) position on the 'necessary and sufficient' conditions of therapeutic personality change within a counselling relationship. Forty teenage male offenders, the subjects of Training School Orders, were randomly allocated in equal numbers to either an experimental or control group. Boys in the experimental group received weekly individual sessions of client-centred counselling over a seven month period. Boys in the control group received no formal counselling but were shown to have similar intellectual, personality, socio-economic and criminal backgrounds to those in the experimental group. It was hypothesised that counselled subjects would show more positive outcomes than control subjects over a range of measures relating to criminal behaviour and self-conception. The results indicated that the counselled subjects had a significantly lower rate of offending and a srnaller range of offences over a mean follow-up period of 2.5 years. They were also licensed from the institution significantly earlier and spent less time in custody during a one year follow-up after counselling was completed. Self-conception measures gave less clear-cut results. The direction of change towards better adjustment favoured the counselled subjects but the magnitude was often small. Those counselled subjects with most positive behaviour change tended to have significantly improved self-evaluation, less self/ideal self discrepancy and more variation on 'actual' self concept compared to pre-counselling. The results are discussed in the context of client-centred theory, methodological adequacy of the experimental design, and their application to the future treatment of young offenders in secure residential care.

Trainer talk:structures of interaction in teacher training classrooms

The subject of this research is interaction and language use in an institutional context, the teacher training classroom. Trainer talk is an interactional accomplishment and the research question is: what structures of talk-in-interaction characterise trainer talk in this institutional setting? While there has been research into other kinds of classroom and into other kinds of institutional talk, this study is the first on trainer discourse. The study takes a Conversation Analysis approach to studying institutional interaction and aims to identify the main structures of sequential organization that characterize teacher trainer talk as well as the tasks and identities that are accomplished in it. The research identifies three main interactional contexts in which trainer talk is done: expository, exploratory and experiential. It describes the main characteristics of each and how they relate to each other. Expository sequences are the predominant interactional contexts for trainer talk. But the research findings show that these contexts are flexible and open to the embedding of the other two contexts. All three contexts contribute to the main institutional goal of teaching teachers how to teach. Trainer identity is related to the different sequential contexts. Three main forms of identity in interaction are evidenced in the interactional contexts: the trainer as trainer, the trainer as teacher and the trainer as colleague. Each of them play an important role in teacher trainer pedagogy. The main features of trainer talk as a form of institutional talk are characterised by the following interactional properties: 1. Professional discourse is both the vehicle and object of instruction - the articulation of reflection on experience. 2. There is a reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction. 3. The professional discourse that is produced by trainees is not evaluated by trainers but, rather, reformulated to give it relevant precision in terms of accuracy and appropriacy.