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The primary aim of this chapter is to explore stigmatization, stress, and coping among adolescent mothers and to identify positive coping mechanisms that not only resist stigmatization but also generate positive affect.

Fifty-two pregnant and parenting adolescents in an urban county in the Midwestern United States were recruited to participate. A journaling tool was developed and used to allow participants to express their thoughts and concerns in a real-time, reflexive manner. Data were coded at different “nodes” or themes. Concepts, such as stigma, stress, strength, and empowerment were operationalized into key words and “themes” based on previous published literature. Key phrases were used to code the journaling data.

Adolescent mothers used positive reappraisal of life circumstances to create a positive self-image and resist the stress of stigma and parenting. Overcoming stereotypes and success in parenting were reappraised as “strength,” which allowed the young women to feel empowered in their caregiving role.

The chapter also contributes to the sociological literature on positive coping responses to stigma and stress. Indeed, very few studies have employed the sociological imagination of pregnant and parenting adolescents by describing not only their lives but also seeking their understanding and explaining their lives sociologically. This chapter also has direct implications for several health care providers, including nurses and social workers. For example, nurses and social workers are a vital part of the healthcare team for pregnant and parenting adolescents, and they often serve as the link between the adolescent, her family and significant others, and healthcare and social service agencies.

This chapter described the mechanisms that adolescent mothers use to cope with stress with a focus on how caregiving generates positive affect through the voices of these young mothers themselves. This chapter contributed to the sociological literature on stress and coping. In particular, our findings were also in line with the work of sociologist Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence concept. SOC is a global measure that indicates the availability of, and willingness to use, adaptive coping resources as a key variable in maintaining health.

Purpose: This chapter applies and integrates theories of status and stigma to better understand the mechanisms that drive the combined effects of the status of race and the stigma of criminal record in the context of the labor market. Using these social psychological theories of status and stigma, I propose and test two potential mechanisms – moral expectations and performance expectations – that might explain the compound or “double disadvantage” observed among Black job seekers with a criminal record. Within this synthetic application, I also seek to bridge and extend the literatures on status and stigma processes.

Methodology/Approach: To examine the relationship between race and criminal record and the potential mediating role of moral and performance expectations, I use a laboratory experiment consisting of a hiring scenario where participants evaluate mock, but ostensibly real job applicants who vary on the characteristics of interest. Participant evaluations consist of rankings along a series moral and performance-related scales as well as a set of workplace outcomes.

Findings: Findings suggest that race and criminal record aggregate to intensify disadvantage, with Black applicants who have a criminal record faring worse than other applicants on each workplace outcome. Results also support moral expectations, but not performance expectations, as a key mechanism driving this status-stigma intensification process.

Implications: This study has important implications for studies of race, crime, and employment as well as for theories of status and stigma. Future research should attend more closely to the role of perceived morality both in substantive work on race and criminal record and in bridging work on status and stigma processes. Pinpointing moral expectations as a mechanism of bias related to race and criminal record also opens new avenues for targeted intervention efforts.

We examine whether self-stigmatization may affect the everyday social interactions of individuals with a diagnosed, affective mental health disorder. Past research demonstrates self-stigmatization lowers self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency, leading to the likely adoption of role-identities that are at the periphery of major social institutions. We advance research on self-stigma by examining the likely interactional and emotional consequences of enacting either a highly stigmatized self-identity or a weakly stigmatized self-identity.

Using affect control theory (ACT), we form predictions related to the interactional and emotional consequences of self-stigmatization. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized instantiation of ACT, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder), comparing simulations where the focal actor is a person with a mental illness who exhibits either high or low levels of self-stigma.

Self-stigma is predicted to negatively influence patients’ behavioral expression, leading the highly self-stigmatized to enact behaviors that are lower in goodness, power, and liveliness than the weakly self-stigmatized. Their corresponding emotional expressions during these types of interactions are similarly negatively impacted. Even though these likely interactions are the most confirmatory for people with high levels of self-stigma, they lead to interactions that are behaviorally and emotionally more negative than those who have been better able to resist internalizing stigmatizing beliefs.

This piece has implications for the literature on the interactional and life course challenges faced by psychiatric patients and contributes to the self-stigma literature more broadly. This work will hopefully inform future research involving the collection of non-simulation-based data on the everyday interactional experiences of people with mental health problems.

This chapter responds to calls to “reclaim” the work of Erving Goffman, and specifically his conceptualization of stigma, arguing that Goffman’s ideas can inform a critical social theory of mental illness in sport. The analysis pays particular attention to the challenges to social identity for those experiencing mental illness stigma, the role of personal identity in negotiating mental illness stigma, and strategies for stigma reduction including the adoption of stigma symbols.

The first section of the chapter revisits the concept of stigma, before proceeding to relate this to mental illness stigma as applied to sport. The second section overviews several high-profile cases of mental illness stigma of elite athletes, before presenting some examples of campaigns to address the perceived stigma related to mental health issues in sport.

The chapter proposes that Goffman’s work maintains relevance when related to social contexts other than those directly observed by him, and that the conceptualization of stigma helps understanding of, and challenges to, mental illness stigma in sport.

While sport continues to be proposed as an arena for positive character development, analysis informed by the work of Erving Goffman demonstrates that the culture of sport provides a context within which athletes experiencing mental health issues may be stigmatized. This, in turn, undermines the potential for them to secure the health care that they need, with participation and performance often taking precedence over well-being, even in the campaigns ostensibly designed to address mental illness stigma.

This chapter reviews qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years to explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training have affected research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research.

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 78 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals, and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities.

The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

We argue that self-stigma places patients on a path of marginalization throughout their life course leading to a negative cycle of opportunity and advancement. Mental health patients with higher levels of self-stigma tend to have much lower self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency; therefore, they will be more inclined to adopt role-identities at the periphery of major social institutions, like those of work, family, and academia. Similarly, the emotions felt when enacting such roles may be similarly dampened.

Utilizing principles from affect control theory (ACT) and the affect control theory of selves (ACTS), we generate predictions related to self-stigmatized patients’ role-identity adoption and emotions. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized version of ACT and ACTS, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder) with comparably high or low levels of self-stigmatization.

Self-stigma among affective patients reduces the tendency to adopt major life course identities. Self-stigma also affects patients’ emotional expression by compelling patients to seek out interactions that make them feel anxious or affectively neutral.

This piece has implications for the self-stigma and stigma literatures. It is also one of the first pieces to utilize ACTS, thereby offering a new framework for understanding the self-stigma process. We offer new hypotheses for future research to test with non-simulation-based data and suggest some policy implications.

Goffman (1963) provided us with an explanation of the operation of stigma in microinteractional contexts. However, his definition and explication of the experiences and processes of stigmatization predate what many consider to be the most major shift in discourse and categorization to develop in the twentieth century – the rise of the language of risk. In this chapter, I discuss the intersections of risk discourse and stigma. Drawing on my empirical research with families affected by incarceration, I illustrate the shift toward structural stigma as an exercise of power and governance. I argue that contemporary “common-sense” understandings and usage of the term stigma emphasize negative individual interactions while ignoring the ways that risk categorizations, even in seemingly benign contexts, create structural disadvantage and serve to “other” stigmatized individuals. Singular focus on stigma at the microinteractional level, particularly in destigmatization campaigns, obscures the pervasive structural stigma couched in the language of risk management that permits systematic marginalization.

Gender balance has been a declared goal in business and society for decades as gender diversity leads to more equality and better decision-making, enhances financial performance of organizations, and fosters creativity and innovation. Although there is a steady upward trend in the number of women actively participating in the workplace, there is still a dearth of women in top leadership positions. This motivates a closer look at the reasons why this happens. Stigmatization – a social process of disapproval based on stereotypes or particular distinguishing characteristics of individuals (e.g. gender) – has been recognized as one of the primary explanations for the barriers to career advancement of women. This chapter aims to address workplace inequality by analysing different sources of stigma women face in the workplace. Previous research has mostly focused on visible sources of stigma, such as gender or race/ethnicity. We propose to go beyond visible sources of stigma and expand the focus to other physical (e.g. physical appearance, age, childbearing age), emotional (e.g. mental health) and societal (e.g. flexibility) sources of stigma. We are especially interested in the consequences of stigma for women in the workplace. Stigmatization of women is a multi-level process, so this chapter focuses on the antecedents (sources of stigma) and outcomes (consequences of stigma) for women at the individual level, organizational level and the societal level. The proposed chapter will make contributions to the areas of management, diversity and gender studies.

Stigma is a major impediment to human rights in health care that causes discrimination, isolation and the exclusion of individuals from essential health-care services. It fosters fear, leading to negative stereotyping of individuals based on their social, cultural or health status and undermines their dignity and respect, consequently violating their right to health. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the moderating role of psychological flexibility in the relationship between stigma (enacted, anticipated and internalized), mental health and the quality of life of substance users.

This study was based on a cross-sectional design and included 200 male patients with an age range of 18–65 years from 23 rehabilitation centers in four cities in Pakistan. The purposive sampling technique was used, and the sample size ranged from 4 to 23 participants for each site. Four scales were used to measure stigma, general mental health, quality of life and psychological flexibility in substance users.

The data were analyzed using SPSS and Smart PLS, which showed that stigma (enacted, anticipated and internalized) had a detrimental effect on substance users’ mental health and quality of life. Additionally, psychological flexibility acts as an efficient moderator between them.

This research unveils the moderating role of psychological flexibility in mitigating stigma’s adverse effects on individuals with substance use disorders. Future investigations should prioritize interventions aimed at enhancing psychological flexibility to ameliorate the repercussions of stigma, ultimately enhancing the well-being and quality of life of substance users.

Experiencing stigma after abortion may decelerate the accumulation of human capital. Despite the importance of studying the relationship between religiosity and abortion stigma, the topic is understudied, especially in Islamic contexts. Abortion was legalized in Iran in 2005. Under the new law, far more cases are allowed for abortion. This change provided an opportunity to explore the interplay of abortion stigma, legalization and religiosity in Iran.

Using regression analysis based on 291 completed questionnaires from two cities in Iran, this study analyzes the relation between abortion stigma level and religiosity in Iran, controlling for contextual and individual variables. The time trend is also identified. The authors use different manifestations of abortion stigma as dependent variables.

The authors found that abortion stigma and its two manifestations decreased after the new law, suggesting that its legalization might have caused abortion stigma to decrease gradually. Another finding of this study is that the correlations between abortion stigma (internalized stigma) and individual religiosity level are meaningful and positive; religious people feel higher levels of abortion stigma.

The study supports the idea that effective health regulations (in the specific case of abortion) would result in less cost/risk of social issues like stigma. Policymakers in religious societies must pay more attention to the specific case of abortion stigma since it is very important for the mental health of women who think of abortion and/or select it.