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The purpose of this paper is to look at perceptions of young Japanese consumers towards the convenience store, or konbini, with a view to understanding what attracts them to this retail format and exploring well-being in a new way that is more relevant the retail experience.

The study looks at the emergence of the konbini as part of the Japanese food retail environment and reports on an online survey (n=453) of young Japanese consumer’s (>18 years old) attitudes towards this retail format.

The preliminary analysis of the data finds the konbini is a popular choice for young consumers for specific types of everyday goods. The main appeal lies in the ease of access, location of the stores and the ambience of the space that appeal to young consumer’s sense of well-being.

This is a purposeful sample of young Japanese consumers surveyed across several academic institutions.

Konbini must continue to innovate to attract young consumer while acknowledging the implications of their stocking policy on consumer well-being.

This offers a unique insight into the ways in which young Japanese consumers avail themselves of the food retail provision and provides a broader perspective on well-being in a retail environment that resonates with consumer practice.

This study aims to understand the role of seeking social support in the relationship between perceived helplessness, self-efficacy and satisfaction among graduate students during the pandemic, drawing upon the transactional model of stress and coping. Graduate students are composed of nontraditional students who are considered significantly different from traditional students. Nonetheless, research has yet to explore how seeking social support contributed to graduate students’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially to the relationship between feelings of helplessness and positive mental health. More specifically, this study examined how seeking social support from others mediates the relationship between perceived helplessness and self-efficacy, academic satisfaction and general life satisfaction among graduate students.

Using quantitative data collected from 545 graduate students at a large, research-intensive university in the USA, structural equation modeling was used to test our conceptual model.

The results of this study indicate that perceived helplessness has a direct and adverse relationship with self-efficacy. Social support mediates the negative relationship between the two variables, buffering the negative psychological experience students feel and leading to higher levels of self-efficacy and two domains of satisfaction. Self-efficacy is positively associated with academic and general life satisfaction among graduate students. Academic satisfaction positively predicts general life satisfaction, as well. A conceptual model was developed, yielding acceptable goodness-of-fit statistics.

This study adds to the postsecondary education literature and contributes to the larger discourse identifying the positive role of social support in supporting graduate students to cope with psychological challenges that may be exacerbated under stressful conditions.

Teacher residency programs (TRPs) offer an alternative to traditional models of teacher preparation with the aim of developing teachers to work and stay in hard-to-staff schools. Research on these extended field placement programs is limited and typically examines program outcomes or the experiences and development of the pre-service teachers, or residents. This study focuses on a relatively unexamined area of TRPs to explore how providing mentoring and coaching supports the professional development of the in-service TRP coaches.

This study employed a qualitative case study design. Fourteen coaches in an urban teacher residency program were interviewed over a three-year period. Using a semi-structured protocol, participants’ experiences and the influence of program participation were explored.

Findings revealed that coaches experienced professional growth in their instructional practices and deepened or renewed their commitment to teaching. Program components such as evidence-based observational tools and protocols encouraged reflective practice and (re)evaluation of teaching that contributed to beliefs about improved practice.

In-service teachers experience development in their pedagogical practices and may feel a renewed sense of professional engagement through serving as a coach for a pre-service teacher. Additionally, hard-to-staff schools that partner with TRPs to recruit and develop new teachers may find an added benefit in retaining a greater number of veteran teachers who participate as coaches in residency pre-service education programs.

Much of the teacher residency literature explores the outcomes and experiences of pre-service teacher residents and has little focus on how these programs may benefit TRP coaches. Coaches have an essential role in the implementation and influence of residency programs on pre-service teachers, yet little is understood about how the act of coaching impacts the in-service teacher coach. This article suggests that coaches experience meaningful professional benefits of participation in TRPs and has implications for effective residency program design.

Literature from across the social sciences and research evidence are used to highlight interdisciplinary and intersectional research approaches to food and family. Responsibilisation emerges as an important thematic thread, as family has (compared with the state and corporations) been increasingly made responsible for its members’ health and diet.

Three questions are addressed: first, to what extent food is fundamentally social, and integral to family identity, as reflected in the sociology of food; second, how debates about families and food are embedded in global, political and market systems; and third, how food work and caring became constructed as gendered.

Interest in food can be traced back to early explorations of class, political economy, the development of commodity culture and gender relations. Research across the social sciences and humanities draws on concepts that are implicitly sociological. Food production, mortality and dietary patterns are inextricably linked to the economic/social organisation of capitalist societies, including its gender-based divisions of domestic labour. DeVault’s (1991) groundbreaking work reveals the physical and emotional work of providing/feeding families, and highlights both its class and gendered dimensions. Family mealtime practices have come to play a key role in the emotional reinforcement of the idea of the nuclear family.

This study highlights the imperative to take pluri-disciplinary and intersectional approaches to researching food and family. In addition, this paper emphasises that feeding the family is an inherently political, moral, ethical, social and emotional process, frequently associated with gendered constructions.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the question of young consumer’s discretionary consumption in Japan where the ready access to convenience stores, or “konbini”, presents a unique retail landscape and to look at how young Japanese consumers use this store format as part of their discretionary food consumption.

This is an exploratory study that draws on primary qualitative data based on in store observations, accompanied shopping and a survey with young Japanese consumers. This approach provides an insight into the convenience store food offering and young consumer’s everyday food practices and experience of using these retail stores.

The data reveals a relatively limited range of purchases on each store visit with some variation across time of the day and between individuals and groups of young consumers. Visits before and after school remain the most popular and young consumers make around two to four visits per week to a convenience store. It finds young consumers actively engaged in independent purchasing decisions in this retail format.

This is an exploratory study with a geographically constrained sample conducted in several areas in and around Tokyo, Japan. It is a convenience sample recruited using student contacts and snowballing techniques.

Convenience stores represent an important “shopping habitat” for young consumers to engage in discretionary food shopping. While these convenience store purchases are not always unhealthy the promotion and pricing strategies used by retailers can have an influence on the final selection of products and convenience stores provide a unique opportunity to cultivate more healthful behaviour among young consumers.

This offers a unique insight into the relationship between young consumer’s discretionary food choice and local retail provision in the convenience sector. It adds to the debate on the role of food environment on food choice and the extent to which young Japanese consumers are socialised into particular food practices through their engagement with the convenience retail sector.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges of using participant-produced photographs in family food research.

Families participating in a study on family dinners agreed to take photos of their weekday evening meal using their mobile phone and a Selfie-Stick. These images were subsequently used as a photo elicitation cue in a long interview.

“Selfies” or participant directed photographs, are a way to involve all family members in the research. Giving participants control over the composition and production of the image reveals how participants see themselves and how they wish to be seen while uncovering some of the physical, material and social realities of contemporary family practice. Photographs not only capture rich contextual and spatial details but also act as an aide memoir and interview stimulus to investigate broader socialisation around family feeding. Visual images reveal otherwise unrecalled aspects of the family dinner and encourage more reflection and discussion by participants around the social realities of their family practice. Photographs taken using a mobile phone and selfie stick complement and stimulate traditional methods of qualitative investigation.

The paper contributes to the debate about the challenges in using visual methods and how the selfie technique can be used, the photographs shared and visual data incorporated as part of the research method. As communicative affordances, the mobile phone, camera and selfie stick frame the practices around family dinner and afford the subject an agentic perspective as both producer and consumer of the image.

This study aims to analyze the exemplary historic case of Ms Viola Turner – an African-American insurance executive in the early 1900s to gain insights into how individuals negotiate the tension between intersecting identities and moral foundational values over time.

This study uses a mixed research design and a genealogical-pragmatic approach to analyze this exemplary case. This study uses computer-aided textual analysis software to analyze interviews conducted with Ms Turner, generating quantitative insights. This study qualitatively codes the interviews to aid in establishing the behavioral patterns across Ms Turner’s lifespan.

This study found that Ms Turner altered her underlying configurations of moral foundations to better align with her intersecting identities. This study also revealed cross-level interactions of intersecting identities, life stages and social contexts. Individuals manage and cope with power imbalances through these identity-value alignments.

The findings shed light on how intersectional history contributes to understanding the ways in which individuals deal with power relationships embedded in intersecting identities over time.