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Abstract: In this paper we report an empirical study of the photographic portrayal of family members at home. Adopting a social psychological approach and focusing on intergenerational power dynamics, our research explores the use of domestic photo displays in family representation. Parents and their teenagers from eight families in the south of England were interviewed at home about their interpretations of both stored and displayed photos within the home. Discussions centred on particular photographs found by the participants to portray self and family in different ways. The findings show that public displays of digital photos are still curated by mothers of the households, but with more difficulty and less control than with analogue photos. In addition, teenagers both contribute and comply with this curation within the home, whilst at the same time developing additional ways of presenting their families and themselves online that are ‘unsupervised’ by the curator. We highlight the conflict of interest that is at play within teen and parent practices and consider the challenges that this presents for supporting the representation of family through the design of photo display technology. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we develop a novel way of testing the stigmatization hypothesis. The stigmatization hypothesis argues that people who break traditional norms, experience sanctions from the people that surround them. We apply this hypothesis to the case of divorce and examine whether higher normative intolerance toward divorce in the region of residence lead to declines in social contacts after divorce. To test the hypothesis, we match data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to data from the European Values Study (EVS). The ECHP data are used to model individual changes in social contacts after divorce. The EVS data are used to develop measures of individual attitudes against divorce in 65 European regions. Multilevel analyses are used to link the two, where individuals are nested in regions. The results provide partial confirmation for the stigmatization hypothesis. We first find that attitudes about divorce not only differ significantly between countries, they also differ significantly between regions within countries. Second, in regions where there is more disapproval of divorce, women experience greater declines in contacts with friends and relatives after divorce, men and women experience greater declines in neighborhood contacts, and men are more likely to end their club memberships. Third, we find that the stigmatization effect is primarily present for divorcees who did not move after divorce. Our analyses provide more direct evidence for the operation of social norms than previous studies on family behavior have done. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]