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The period of adolescence is marked by difficulties, objections, conflicts. It is also the period of looking for self-expression, in which changes in teenager’s psychical, inward and emotional world are observed. The cognition of the world becomes essential. The world outlook is being formed. Besides, the attitude towards other people is developing and changing. The teenagers become more active. They experience the needs of communication with contemporaries. On the other hand, the reality of today’s school shows something else. In spite of the fact, that many researchers, who made some studies on the situation of school, claim that there is a special space for spread of some social parts and interaction at the lessons of physical education (Crum, 1996); boys and girls practice separately at those lessons. The separation starts when teenagers are 12 – 14 years-old. It happens at the time when the necessity to communicate and understand each other becomes specific. This is the principal attitude of the authors of this work. It also shows that the problem of sexual education needs theoretical and empirical argumentation. Our research partially has the aim to solve this problem. The objective is - to test and estimate the standpoint of teenagers, who are educated together and separately, to the role of coeducation for their physical-social conditions. The goals of the research: to test and estimate the standpoint of teenagers, who are educated together, to the role of... [to full text]

As recently as 1995, sweet blood did not resonate broadly as an urgent transnational concern. This thesis chronicles how diabetes mellitus, sweet blood, became recognized as a social problem besetting Canada, among many other countries. / This ethnographic study brings anthropological theories---developed for the most part to analyze the lives of "non-Western" peoples---to bear on "Western" philosophy, science, medicine, mass media, governments, and commerce. Throughout, this thesis challenges received wisdom about disease, technologies, kinship, commodification, embodiment, and personhood. / This thesis argues that a statistical concept, the population, is the linchpin of both politics and economics in large-scale societies. Statistically-fashioned populations, combined with the conviction that the future can be partially controlled, undergird the very definition of diabetes as a disease. In turn, biomedical knowledge about diabetes grounds the understanding of sweet blood as a social problem in need of better management. The political economy of sweet blood shows that, under "Western" eyes, persons can remain intact while their bodies---down to their very cells---divide and multiply, both literally and figuratively. As members of statistically-fashioned populations, human beings have a patent existence and many "statistical doubles." These statistical doppelgangers help shape feelings, actions, identities, and even the length of human lives. They permit countless strangers and "lower" nonhuman beings---among them, mice, flies, and bacteria---to count as kin. Through the generation and use of statistics, people and their body parts undergo valuation and commodification, but are neither bought nor sold. The use of statistics to commodify human beings and body parts, this thesis finds, inevitably anchors biomedical practice, biomedical research, health policies, and the marketing of pharmaceuticals and all other things known to affect health.

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As youth in South African are affected by HIV/AIDS, risk reduction research has higWighted the needs of young people for information about sex, sexuality and risk. South African research has looked at young people's sources of sex information and their preferred sources. This thesis examines communication about sex with young people in their families as a protective factor in risk resilience and general problem-solving skills. The study explores how young Zulu women between the ages of 14-15 years understand communication about sex in their families, how and with whom sex is talked about, and how the young women understand the cultural 'taboo' on talking about sex in their families. This study employs an interpretive thematic analysis in analysing semi-structured interviews with eight rural district Zulu-speaking young women. The interview schedule drew on themes related to mother-daughter communication about sex from an American study by Brock and Jennings. The girls felt that there was minimal communication about sex within their families, and this reflected negative verbal and non-verbal messages. The girls wished that their biological parents could communicate with them about sexual issues freely and comfortably, as they would like to do with their own children when they grow up. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

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This thesis addresses the subject of organizational effectiveness in municipal governance. It specifically examines the possibility that urban planning agencies may resolve complex social problems more effectively when using a management approach characterized by "transformational leadership," teamwork, flexibility, and creativity; an approach that fosters the development of innovative planning policies, procedures and/or designs. Successful, innovative, and creative business enterprises that endorse such a holistic management approach have been called "learning" and "well-performing" organizations. The management and transformational leadership attributes that encourage an organization to "learn" relies on a combination of techniques, including non-hierarchical communications, enhancement of job satisfaction, continuous learning, emotive and motivational psychology, and team approaches to creativity and problem solving. A popular term has been coined that captures the essence of successful implementation of these attributes in combination: Excellence. The rationale for examining the concept of Excellence in the context of urban planning agencies' organizational effectiveness derives from assertions made in the planning and governance literature suggesting that such a business management approach may significantly improve government operations. Some writers argue that a new approach to governance is sorely needed. The concept of encouraging attributes of Excellence in local government planning practices has been extolled as a cure for economic and political inequalities, restricted avenues of communication, outmoded operating procedures, "turf wars, and various motivational barriers to innovative practices that limit the effectiveness of governments (and urban planners). Many of the innovative practices lauded in the business management literature as attributes of Excellence appear similar to the community development concepts of individual empowerment, citizen participation in local planning and decision making, collective effort to resolve local issues, consensus building, and visionary leadership. This thesis studies the case of the City of Vancouver's Department of Social Planning and Community Development from 1968 to 1976. The two primary research methods used are: analysis of archival documents concerning Vancouver's social planning department; and, open ended interviews conducted with sixteen key informants familiar with the history, practices, and planning approaches used by department personnel during the study period. The findings of this thesis are that: 1) the social planning department originally exhibited elements of innovation, flexibility, teamwork, transformational leadership, and other attributes associated with the concept of Excellence; 2) in some cases, these attributes may have temporarily overcome various barriers to effective planning and problem solving by developing innovative solutions to minor urban social problems; 3) those innovative elements were not unanimously supported nor encouraged in other municipal departments or community agencies, thus indicating that diffuse innovative practices throughout other organizations was a difficult endeavor; 4) over time, attributes of Excellence faded from the social planning department as the early excitement and energy of planners wore off and new planners were hired to replace the original social planners who had decided to move on to other projects. The important lesson learned is that these supposedly "new" management practices, introduced into business enterprises to help overcome barriers to productivity, efficiency, or effectiveness, are themselves vulnerable to similar organizational, political, or behavioral barriers over time. Constant vigilance, monitoring and evaluation of values, goals, communications strategies and structures, and organizational results are required to sustain Excellence. Greater promotion of Excellence concepts that explain business success may legitimize the expansion of participation of individuals in goverment institutions and result in improvements to their effectiveness. Urban planners, and social planners in particular, should therefore be interested in concepts like Excellence and Learning Organizations as heuristic usable in their search for effective planning, organizing, and management practices toward intentional interventions in social welfare. Without a systematic approach and understanding of the complex variables and dimensions involved, concepts like Excellence may be treated simply as catch-words and trendy marketing ploys. However, as the thesis will show, planners may discover that further research into the qualities and attributes of individuals working in a collective organizational environment, may yield positive strategies for furthering institutional reforms that view workers as factors of human development rather than as units of productivity and efficiency.

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