The purpose of this study was to explore how mothers construct their worker-parent identity within a cultural context of competing mothering ideologies. We used narrative data from interviews with 95 married mothers with at least 1 child under the age of 5 to compare the construction of intensive mothering expectations by middle-class fulltime employed mothers, part-time employed mothers, and at-home mothers. Although previous research has shown that mothers alter work status to live up to intensive mothering expectations, our results show that mothers also alter their construction of intensive mothering expectations to reconcile these demands with their work status choices. The results also suggest that mothers with different employment decisions differ in their construction of Y. Elvin-Nowak and H. Thomsson's (2001) 3 discursive positions-accessibility, happy mother/happy child, and separation of work and home. Keywords Motherhood . Work and family . Ideology and identityWe live in an era of contested motherhood ideologies. However culturally and historically aberrant (Coontz, 1992;Degler, 1980;Shorter, 1975) and individually restrictive (Maushart, 1999;Rich, 1976) the dominant motherhood ideology of the last century may have been, motherhood expectations were clearly defined. The traditional mother

This study uses dialectical theory to explore the interaction of worker identity (perceived financial need and job/career identity) and intensive mothering expectations in mothers' identity construction. This study is based on extensive interviews with 98 at-home, part-time employed and full-time employed mothers of one or more pre-school children from the Midwestern United States. The narrative analysis reveals that mothers embrace intensive mothering expectations. Because of these cultural expectations, mothers must modify either societal mothering expectations or worker expectations in order to construct an integrated workermother identity. We found that while at-home mothers can embrace intensive mothering expectations, employed mothers engage in cognitive acrobatics to manage the tension between employment and the dominant mothering ideology.

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This study identifiesfour motivations adolescents report for viewing graphic horrorfilms: gore watching, thrill watching, independent watching, and problem watching. On the basis of a uses and gratifications model of media effects, it is argued that viewing motivations are predictors of responses to graphic b. This study also seeks to extend Zillmnn's excitationtransfer model of media effects to predict under what conditions viewing-generated arousal is transferred to positive 01 negative affect. The dispositional characteristics of feaffulness, empathy, and sensation seeking are found to be related to different viewing motivations, providing a viewing-related personality profile for the four diferent types of adolescent viewers. The four viewing motivations are found to be related to viewers'cognitiveand affective responses to horrorfilms, as well as viewers' tendency to identib w'th either the killers or victims in thesefilms. Directionsforfuture research addressing the role of viewing motivations in the relationship between violent media, cognitive and affective responses, and subsequent behavioral aggression are discussed.