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The actual number of HIV/AIDS cases in Turkey is higher than the number of cases reported, and People Living with HIV (PLWHIV) may refrain from acknowledging their sickness or seeking help because of the stigma associated with HIV and fear of discrimination from their close friends, workmates, and even their families. In this paper we aim to explore HIV-positive people's relationships with significant others such as family members, friends, sexual partners, employers and health professionals in order to present the patients' perceptions about stigma and attitudes that lead to pro-social or anti-social behavior towards them. We carried out a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 16 PLWHIV in order to understand the conditions of people living with HIV/AIDS in Turkey. Our results revealed that except for family relations, the fear of contagion is the main obstacle for HIV-positive people's relations with others. HIV-positive people are severely afflicted with discrimination due to the overlapping "instrumental" and "symbolic" stigmas that directly affect their relations. The attribute of responsibility is related to gender and socio-economic status of PLWHIV living in Turkey.

Attitudes towards elder abuse were explored through a survey on International Perspectives on Family Violence and Abuse in a Turkish convenience sample of 25 females and 14 males, ranging in age from 22 to 58. Participants gave examples of behaviors considered in their culture to be extremely abusive, moderately abusive, and mildly abusive from an adult child toward his or her older parent. Responses were coded into four major categories of abuse, each of which had several subcategories: psychological aggression (including the subcategories of verbal aggression, emotional abuse, disrespect, disobedience, power assertion, blame, and imprisonment), neglect (including physical neglect, psychological neglect, abandonment, and putting the older individual into a nursing home), physical aggression (including beating and hitting), and mistreatment related to goods and services (including economic demands, economic withholding, and labor). The most common examples of extreme abuse were neglect, particulary physical neglect, followed by physical abuse. At the moderate and mild levels, various forms of psychological aggression were most commonly mentioned. The only significant gender difference was that men listed more instances of verbal aggression as examples of extreme abuse than women. A positive correlation was found between age and the number of abandonment examples at the extreme level. Results were interpreted from a cultural perspective.

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The aim of this paper is to define respondents' levels of worries and to find out the main predictors of each worry factor by comparing the results of earthquake (2001) and bird flu (2006) studies carried out in Turkey. Assuming that the critical power‐conflict perspective was appropriate; several types of worries, namely, traffic accidents, natural disasters, unemployment, health and sickness, nuclear plants, war and terrorism, and environmental problems defined by Kamano have been analysed using parametric and non‐parametric statistical significance tests. The results revealed that earthquake hazards affected respondents' level of worries more than bird flu disease mainly because of the enormous economic and human losses of the 1999 earthquake. It was also found that the main predictors were not the same for both studies: the education variable was more effective on the level of worries of earthquake survivors, and gender was more influential for the bird flu study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.