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To investigate how parental divorce and gender might influence the likelihood of engaging in a friends with benefits relationship (FWBR), and the likelihood of binge drinking and unprotected sex practices.

Using self-report measures, 99 undergraduates shared their parental marital history, experiences with FWBRs, and health risk behaviors.

Men, as compared with women, reported significantly more FWBRs as did participants with divorced/separated parents, as compared with those with married parents. Participants who had engaged in an FWBR reported significantly more binge drinking than those with no prior FWBR experience; however, no differences were found for gender or parental marital status. No significant differences emerged regarding the prevalence of unprotected sex.

The current study employed the use of self-report surveys, which can be subject to social desirability. All participants were recruited from a single liberal arts college with a limited sample of men with divorced or separated parents.

Using mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to explore young adults’ predictors and outcomes of engaging in FWBRs provided unique insights into how gender and parental relationships influence both casual sex and health-related behaviors.

With almost half of college undergraduates engaging in friends with benefits relationships (FWBRs), the current study sought to explore the sexual decision making strategies and potential physical and psychological health outcomes behind these relationships.

Using self-report measures, Study 1 asked 207 undergraduates to rate the importance of motivations, maintenance rules, and future outcomes of FWBRs in their own personal experience and for other men and women. Study 2 sampled 142 undergraduate women who were asked to indicate the percentage of time they engaged in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol or marijuana and the frequency with which they used safe sex practices in an FWBR.

Both genders appeared equally motivated to begin an FWBR; however women reported establishing permanence rules and avoiding over-attachment in the relationship as significantly more important than men. Men were more likely to prefer that the FWBR remain unchanged, however both genders agreed that a transition to a committed relationship was unlikely. Alcohol use was not significantly more prevalent in an FWBR, nor was the likelihood of practicing safe sex.

Both studies employed the use of self-report surveys from a single university and were subject to social desirability.

Quantitatively examining young adults’ reasoning behind choosing to engage in FWBRs provided insight into their overarching fear of “being hurt” and their preference for “easy access” to sexual experiences. These trends may suggest a shift in dating patterns and a preference for avoiding the emotional complexities of a committed, monogamous relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to forward an extension of reception analysis as a way to incorporate and give insight to social media mediations and big data in a qualitative marketing perspective. We propose a research method that focuses on discursive developments in consumer debates for example on YouTube – a large-scale open-access social media platform – as opposed to the closed and tightknit communities investigated by netnography.

Online reception analysis

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we find that big data can enrich online reception analyses by showing new aspects of weak tie online networks and consumers meaning making.

The potential of online reception analysis is to encompass a discursive perspective on consumer interactions on large-scale open-access social media and to be able to analyze socialities that do not represent shared cultures but are more representative of transitory everyday interactions.

Our method contributes to the current focus to define levels of analysis beyond research centered on individuals and individual interactions within groups to investigate other larger socialities. Further, our method also contributes by incorporating and investigating the mediatization of interaction that social media contributes with and therefore our methods actively work with the possibilities of social media. Hence, by extending the advances made by netnography into online spaces, online reception analysis can potentially inform the current status of big data research with a sociocultural methodological perspective.

Maintaining and protecting employee well-being and health is of paramount importance for organizations in order to prevent financial losses due to illness, absenteeism, and fluctuation. This chapter discusses the role of team meetings for employee well-being. As the contemporary workplace is shaped by team work, team meetings increasingly shape employees’ experiences at work. As such, team meetings may also have a major influence on employee well-being as they consume large amounts of time and thus strongly influence workers’ schedules. While previous research has predominantly focused on negative aspects of meetings and mainly considered them as a workplace stressor, this chapter advances a positive perspective on meetings as opportunities for boosting rather than impairing employee well-being. Upon reviewing the extant evidence about linkages between workplace meetings and well-being, the authors highlight the role of team dynamics during meetings for individual well-being and suggest new perspectives for future research. The authors also discuss actionable implications for structuring and facilitating meetings in order to avoid negative and increase positive effects of team meeting interactions on employee well-being.

This research looks at the significance of friends and relatives as an information source for consumers planning holidays. Recent research has largely ignored friends and relatives as destination information sources and has focused instead on the Internet. Two categories of friends and relatives are identified, friends and relatives who live in a destination and friends and relatives who have visited a destination of interest. An exit survey of 1,203 tourists departing a major international destination in Australia found that while the Internet was an important source of information, friends and relatives were as important, if not more, regardless of country of origin and age. These findings indicate that information from friends and relatives and the Internet are complementary rather than exclusive in the minds of consumers.

Social networks are not just patterns of interaction and sentiment in the real world; they are also cognitive (re)constructions of social relations, some real, some imagined. Focusing on networks as mental entities, our essay describes a new method that relies on stylized network images to gather quantitative data on how people “see” specific aspects of their social worlds. We discuss the logic of our approach, present several examples of “visual network scales,” discuss some preliminary findings, and identify some of the problems and prospects in this nascent line of work on the phenomenology of social networks.

Using the example of LEGO Friends, we investigate the discourses that develop when second-order consumers attribute moral weight to the production and marketing of toys perceived to sharpen and enforce gender norms.

We analyze reactions to LEGO Friends through a discourse analysis of online data collected from English-language blogs and news sites. The data is coded iteratively within the two primary categories of gender and the market.

We argue that children’s toys have reemerged as a moral battlefield where consumers stake out positions on the feminization and sexualization of young girls, forcing companies to take strong ideological stances while competing for market share. We show that in the debate over LEGO Friends, consumers’ discursive constructions of moral play were embedded in a heteronormative middle-class ideal that discourages expressions of stereotypical femininity.

Our data is limited to a number of online forums blogs and web sites. We do not claim to have exhaustively catalogued the reactions to LEGO Friends, but merely to have explored discursive positions staked by consumers in the unfolding debate.

This research shows that companies can benefit from addressing second-order consumers’ negotiations of brand meanings in their marketing research and campaigns, and thus avoid becoming the next target of a moral panic.

Our paper addresses brand meaning negotiations by second-order consumers, in this case buyers of children’s toys.

Purpose – Occasionally, we find our social roles transitioning from friend to researcher. This chapter is a reflexive account of one such transition. The author examines the emotions, the concerns and the rewards and stresses of this shift in her relationship with individuals and community.

Methodology/Approach – The author moved to Arviat, Nunavut, in 2004 and gradually found her inner sociologist could not be contained. Through a process of consultation with the Inuit community in which she was residing, she transitioned from the role of friend to that of researcher. This was complicated by her social location as a Western outsider who had been accepted as a community member.

Findings – Reflexivity is a key component of mitigating the challenges which arose and pursuing ethical research, as well as managing the dynamic range of experiences and feelings which emerged during this process.

Despite the recent increase of segregated neighborhoods and schools (Schmitt, 2001), many children find themselves playing with others from different racial and/or ethnic background (Nieto, 2000). Within social science literature, there are a number of studies that explore social interactions and youngsters’ friendship groups (Adler & Adler, 1998; Corsaro, 1985; Eder, 1995; Rizzo, 1989). While instructive, too few analyze what occurs among and to students of color (for exceptions, see Fordham, 1993; Goodwin, 1990, 1998; Grant, 1984). As a consequence, intragender distinctions remain misunderstood and White girls’ group dynamics often eclipse or trivialize the cultural happenings of their racial opposites – African-American girls.