• Rethinking Individualized Marriage: What Couples Actually Do
  Presented by: Carrie Yodanis, Sean Lauer

• Ecology, Symbolic Interaction, and Biosocial: Three Perspectives that help us Understand Parental Coping of Children with Special Health Care Needs
  Presented by: Katharine Wickel

Rethinking Individualized Marriage: What Couples Actually Do
Presented by: Carrie Yodanis, Sean Lauer

In this paper, we discuss an alternative to recent arguments regarding the individualization of marriage. We use descriptive data from three data sets from Amato et al. (2007), who focused on change and increasing individualization in marriage. We show how, looking at this data another way, it could be concluded that marriage is not individualized. The goal is to spark discussion about another perspective that is often overlooked - conceptual and theoretical issues in examining uniformity rather than variation in marriage. 

Ecology, Symbolic Interaction, and Biosocial: Three Perspectives that help us Understand Parental Coping of Children with Special Health Care Needs
Presented by: Katharine Wickel

Parents, who have children with a diagnosis of a chronic or serious illness, have additional concerns in their experiences and different environments in which they interact.  This paper explores this context in looking at parents in this situation and the affects of coping and stress through the theoretic lens of Biosocial Theory, Human Ecology, and Symbolic Interactionism. Each of these theories has assumptions that help further the understanding of parental coping in this context. Further, Hill’s (1949) ABC-X Model is used to structure the interaction of the previously mentioned theories, to build a new and integrated conceptual framework.