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Sibling violence is the most prevalent and least studied form of family violence, and little research has examined differences based on severity. This research examines more severe versus less severe forms of sibling violence. Using a subsample of married couples with two or more children ages 0 to 17 drawn from the 1976 National Survey of Physical Violence in American Families, the authors employ Conflict Tactics Scale items for child-to-child conflict to construct a measure of sibling violence severity. Drawing from several theoretical perspectives on family violence and peer aggression, the authors analyze the impact of macro-system variables, family stress and resources, and family subsystems on less severe and more severe sibling violence. Contextual factors are most important in explaining less severe sibling violence. Experience of parental violence and unpredictability are individual factors relevant to severe sibling violence. More research is needed to examine the etiology and impact of different forms of sibling violence.

A 1989 survey of leaders of a sample of Massachusetts AFL-CIO-affiliated union locals indicates that although women are represented in these union locals' leadership in numbers nearly proportional to the female percentage of membership, they are under-represented in the most influential positions. Women are over-represented as secretaries and seriously under-represented as presidents; they chair many committees, but rarely the key grievance or negotiations committees. Minority women appear to be even more under-represented in leadership positions than are white women. Both male and female union leaders said they would like to see more women in leadership, but most of the men did not seem to view the need for more female leaders as urgent, since they indicated that women's issues were adequately represented by male leaders.

Although many have examined care work within families, few have assessed caregiving among adult brothers and sisters. Based on original data, this article lends a multifaceted view of sibling care work by examining the amount and kind of help adults provide to all siblings in their family and the manner in which the social characteristics of sibling care providers, recipients, their shared relationship, and the family of origin shapes caregiving. The authors found that the vast majority of adults provide a wide range of care to their siblings on a yearly, even monthly basis. Gender, age, and social class shape sibling help, whereas race exerts little effect. Unmarried parents receive significantly less help than do their married and childless counterparts. Finally, sibling care work depends on family context: Having a living parent facilitates caregiving among siblings, whereas greater family size forces adults to act judiciously about what and to whom they give.

Women's agency-their ability to make conscious choices and to act on them-is a central consideration in feminist theories of cosmetic surgery. Several key issues in this longstanding debate are how much external or coercive influence women experience (or acknowledge) in their choice to pursue surgery, whether they are aware of sexist ideology more so than non-recipients, and whether their choice to pursue surgery exemplifies a strong sense of self worth. To test this agency hypothesis, we draw on survey data from a volunteer sample of 202 adult women ages 19-86 years from the southern California region in the U.S. to compare cosmetic surgery recipients to non-recipients across these key sociocultural and personal domains. Results reveal that cosmetic surgery recipients were more likely to have friends who had undergone cosmetic surgery, endorsed more covert sexist beliefs, exhibited greater media usage, and had higher household incomes, than non-recipients. Recipients also evidenced lower ratings in global self-esteem than nonrecipients. These findings challenge some of the notions attendant to agency claims, and engage with conceptions of autonomy introduced in the feminist philosophical literature.