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Silence and (in)viSibility in Men'S accountS of coping with StreSSful life eventSJoseph R. schwab Michael e. addis chRistopheR s. Reigeluth Joshua l. beRgeR clark university, usa the present study investigates the importance of emotional disclosure and vulnerability in the production of hegemonic masculinities. of particular interest is the role that silence and invisibility play in how men talk about recent stressful life events. one-on-one interviews with men who experienced a stressful life event in the past year illustrate how men often talk about these events in simultaneously visible and invisible ways. we use the term "cloudy visibility" to describe this engagement, identified both in terms of what men articulate in relation to their past stressful experiences and how they articulate these experiences within the present moment of the interview. the conversational consequences of these linguistic devices are analyzed to illustrate how men obscure their inner emotional lives, thus reproducing hegemonic masculine ideals of staying strong and stoic in the face of adversity, while they also seek to make aspects of their inner lives seen and heard to an interviewer.

Religion and spirituality have often been areas of exploration in which individuals tell stories to others to explain their belief systems and religious practices. In order to better understand this meaning-making process, life story narrative interviews were conducted in which individuals told stories about past experiences with religion and spirituality, constructing in the present interview context an identity in relation to these topics. Analysis of the discursive construction of identity shows that participants used specific linguistic devices to position between three contradictory qualities of identity: (a) continuity/ change, (b) sameness/difference, and (c) agency/nonagency. The differing positions that individuals construct in relation to other individuals, institutions, and dominant discourses are presented, highlighting the different religious meaning-making strategies used in story constructions. The utility and value of microanalytic discursive investigations in the study of religion and spirituality are explained.

Qualitative methods are viewed as central to the theory of emerging adulthood, but there remains a relative dearth of qualitative inquiry that fully captures the richness and complexities of emerging adulthood life. One of the challenges to conducting such research is the lack of familiarity with qualitative methods. Accordingly, this article describes foundational issues in qualitative inquiry by delineating the commonalities among all qualitative approaches. Meta-theoretical issues regarding ontology, epistemology, and methodology are discussed, as rigorous qualitative inquiry must always be aware of and transparent about how these issues inform and constrain the methods used. A step-by-step guide-including design of research questions, methods of data collection, sampling, and analysis-is presented to demonstrate how to conduct research that fully utilizes the affordances of rigorous qualitative inquiry. Examples from research on emerging adulthood are used to illustrate each decision made during the qualitative inquiry research process.

Scientific and social values are inevitably embedded in any scholarship, but theory and research on gender can be particularly precarious given the contextual and constitutive nature of gendered experiences. We consider the body of research on precarious manhood from a broader perspective on values and goals in theory and research on gender. We address not only the internal validity of research on precarious manhood, but also its potential broader social implications. We begin by summarizing a functional-contextual epistemic perspective on research and scholarship in the psychology of men and explain how it can be useful for evaluating programs of research. This leads to three sets of questions regarding the role of assumptions about the nature of gender within research on precarious manhood, before the research is conducted, and afier the research has been disseminated. An alternative approach to studying the precariousness of gender is offered to promote the deconstruction of gender stereotypes.