Abstract This study examined how highly under-resourced Latina/o/x/e families used technologically mediated communication to maintain their relationship when experiencing migration-based family separation. Drawing on relational maintenance literature, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 family triads, each including a father, mother, and child (children between 9 and 17 years old). The findings extend past research on relational maintenance by elucidating how structural barriers and culture contribute to tensions in relational maintenance and by providing within-family and between-family triangulated perspectives. Across families, three recurring relational maintenance strategies were consistently tensional: (a) sustaining routine contact, (b) prioritizing real-time interaction, and (c) practicing selective disclosure. The findings from within-family and between-family analyses showed how relational maintenance, which was primarily mediated by technology, became highly tensional under structural barriers and cultural norms and had unevenly distributed costs for family members.
Organizational socialization is challenging for anyone, but especially for individuals with stigmatized identities, such as autistic people. Although the modern workforce is increasingly neurodiverse, autistic individuals continue to face persistent socialization challenges rooted in neuronormative expectations embedded in the social, cognitive, and sensorial environments of the workplace, which often conflict with autistic ways of relating, thinking, and feeling in organizations. Drawing on literature on organizational socialization and assimilation, stigma, autism, and neurodiversity, and interviews with 31 autistic workers, we theorize assimilation labor: the deliberate, sustained, and often invisible efforts individuals with stigmatized identities expend to adapt to normative expectations. We identify the structural conditions that give rise to assimilation labor, describe the individual practices through which it is enacted, and discuss theoretical and practical implications for understanding and recognizing the disproportionate burdens stigmatized individuals face "behind the scenes" during organizational socialization.
Current explanations for political divides in entertainment media use identify divergent preferences for or evaluations of content. According to the theory of normative social behavior (TNSB), extratextual information such as cues about the audience may also influence exposure intentions due to viewers' perceptions of ingroup norms. Social media users discuss and form communities around entertainment content while conveying partisan and racial identities. A preregistered experiment exposed Black and White partisans (N = 1,259) to tweets in which a television show was endorsed by co- or out-partisans who were racial in- or out-group members. Exposure intentions were stronger when endorsement came from co-partisans; however, this effect was stronger for White partisans. Treatment effects were mediated by perceived ingroup norms and perceptions of how much of the audience consisted of ingroup members. Implications of multiple identities (i.e., race and partisanship) for the TNSB and the study of partisan entertainment divides are discussed.
This daily diary study examined dynamic processes of relational turbulence theory. Dating partners (N = 202) completed measures of pretest relationship uncertainty, followed by 30 days of daily rumination and relational turbulence, and then posttest collaborative planning. Using dynamic structural equation modeling with random effects, we found that for the typical partner: (a) on days when they ruminated more about their relationship than usual, they experienced greater than usual relational turbulence; and (b) when partners experienced more than typical turbulence on a day, the next day they ruminated more than usual. We found that partners who had higher (c) month-long averages in rumination, (d) ruminative inertia, and (e) ruminative volatility had higher averages in month-long relational turbulence. We also found that individual differences in partners' relationship uncertainty predicted person-specific daily rumination (means, volatility) and relational turbulence (means, inertia, volatility), but only relational turbulence averages, in turn, predicted future collaborative planning.
Scholars have worried that messages about racial equity can produce backlash from White respondents. Drawing upon psychological reactance theory, we compared cognitive and affective responses to a message emphasizing how a redistributive policy would benefit everyone (universalist message) to a message that also emphasized how the policy would especially benefit minoritized racial groups (targeted universalist message) among a sample of 871 White Americans. Participants in the targeted universalist condition experienced more anger, endorsed more harmful stereotypes about racial outgroups, and saw the government as less responsible for addressing poverty than participants in the universalist condition. Mediation analyses suggest that anger, stereotyping, and perceived government responsibility have a negative, indirect effect on policy support. Our findings underscore the need for future work to identify strategies for communicating about racial equity that avoid activating harmful stereotypes.
