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Adolescents’ ability to access health care depends on sharing accurate information about concerns, needs, and conditions. Parents and other adults serve as both resources and gatekeepers in adolescents’ ability to access and manage care. Understanding information sharing between adolescents and parents, adolescents and providers, and parents and providers is thus critical. This chapter distinguishes between adolescents’ routine and self-disclosure of information. The former refers to sharing information required for the partner to perform their role. The latter refers to voluntarily sharing more information than required. Because the roles of parent and provider are distinct relative to the adolescent, disclosure decisions can conflict. These differences are discussed in the context of communication privacy management theory and the literature on legitimacy of authority. A framework for understanding information sharing processes is developed that considers stage of care, type of care, stigma/privacy associated with the condition, and the age of the adolescent.
This chapter examines the role of self-disclosure and secrecy in adolescent–parent relationships from a social perspective, highlighting their importance in monitoring and regulating relationship quality and closeness. Although adolescent–parent relationships share characteristics with other close relationships, they also differ. Both these similarities and differences have implications for the dynamics of self-disclosure and secrecy. A distinction is made between intimate self-disclosure and routine disclosure – the daily details of life – both of which play a critical role in these dynamics. The chapter conceptualizes the adolescent–parent relationship, examines the nature of self-disclosure and secrecy, and explores their interrelations within adolescent–parent relationships. It also considers the variability of self-disclosure as influenced by social norms and cultural background. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions, particularly in the context of evolving communication technologies, and their implications for understanding the dynamics of self-disclosure and secrecy between adolescents and their parents.
This chapter focuses on adolescents’ use of strategies to conceal information about their whereabouts, behaviors, and activities from parents. The chapter describes the concealing strategies assessed by researchers, adolescents’ relative use of strategies, and adolescents’ reasons for concealing information from parents. Concealment strategies range from partial disclosure to secrecy to lying. Most adolescents use partial and passive concealment strategies (e.g. omitting details) more often than active concealment strategies (e.g. lying). Adolescents conceal activities they believe to be personal and to avoid punishment. The chapter also summarizes research on potential implications of concealment for both the parent–adolescent relationship and the adolescent’s adjustment. Research evidence links the use of concealing strategies with poorer quality parent–adolescent relationships and with poorer behavioral and psychological adjustment. Recommended future directions include integrating research on concealment with the literatures on self-disclosure, lying, and secrecy outside the parent–child relationship, and further tests of the hypothesized benefits of concealment.
This chapter reviews research on disclosure and secrecy in Turkish adolescents’ relationships with their parents in comparison with research from other cultures. Research on the topics, targets, and justifications of, and demographic differences in adolescent disclosure to and secrecy from their parents show that adolescents across cultures are more similar than different in managing their privacy with their parents. With development, adolescents construct their private and communal self, through selecting the topics to disclose, to whom to disclose, and the extent of disclosure. Disclosure and secrecy are similarly associated with parenting behaviors and well-being across cultures. Variations, however, stem from socioeconomic differences of families. Future research may consider going beyond broad categorizations of cultures (e.g. individualism and collectivism) and focus on the extent of convergence between the worldviews of adolescents and parents, which is likely to determine the scope and the frequency of sharing information with parents.
Delve into the ideal resource for theory and research on parental monitoring and adolescents' disclosure to and concealment from parents. This handbook presents ground-breaking research exploring how adolescents respond to parents' attempts to control and manage their activities and feelings. The chapters highlight how adolescents' responses are as important for their mental health and behavior as parents' attempts to regulate them. Examining responsive, intrusive, and invasive parenting behaviors, the volume addresses modern challenges like monitoring in the digital age and medical decision-making. It covers cutting-edge research on diverse cultures and groups including Latinx, Turkish, Chinese, LGBTQ+, and chronically ill youth. The internationally recognized contributors offer insights from different theoretical perspectives and describe novel methodological approaches, focusing on variations across different developmental stages, contexts, and cultures.
In contrast to a view of secrecy as a tool of statecraft, where the game of ‘covering/uncovering’ dominates as the central way of interpreting secrecy’s power, we set out ‘secrecy games’ as an approach for understanding secrecy’s power and influence. To do so, we offer a set of three games to illustrate the more varied ways that secrecy operates and draw attention to the ways in which non-state actors use secrecy and shape its effects. In particular, we offer an analysis of: (1) the secrecy games of tunnelling in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the role of mobility as part of secrecy; (2) the secrecy game of camouflage and how stowaways blend in to facilitate access to global shipping routes; and (3) the secrecy game of maze-running and maze-making within urban warfare. Drawing these together, we show how secrecy involves a wider set of actors, practices, and associated knowledge-(un)making strategies than currently understood within International Relations. In turn, this expanded understanding of secrecy helps to make sense of the more complex ways in which secrecy is presented, used, resisted, and transformed – including and especially as a force that limits sovereign power – and, therefore, as central to what shapes global politics.
Conventional wisdom holds that open, collaborative, and transparent organizations are innovative. But some of the most radical innovations—satellites, lithium-iodine batteries, the internet—were conceived by small, secretive teams in national security agencies. Are these organizations more innovative because of their secrecy, or in spite of it? We study a principal–agent model of public-sector innovation. We give research teams a secret option and a public option during the initial testing and prototyping phase. Secrecy helps advance high-risk, high-reward projects through the early phase via a cost-passing mechanism. In open institutions, managers will not approve pilot research into high-risk, high-reward ideas for fear of political costs. Researchers exploit secrecy to conduct pilot research at a higher personal cost to generate evidence that their project is viable and win their manager's approval. Contrary to standard principal–agent findings, we show that researchers may exploit secrecy even if their preferences are perfectly aligned with their manager's, and that managers do not monitor researchers even if monitoring is costless and perfect. We illustrate our theory with two cases from the early Cold War: the CIA's attempt to master mind control (MKULTRA) and the origins of the reconnaissance satellite (CORONA). We contribute to the political application of principal–agent theory and studies of national security innovation, emerging technologies, democratic oversight, the Sino–American technology debate, and great power competition.
This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.
As Christianity continued to transition from school churches to the monepiscopate, the role of hiddenness and openness in Christian teaching become an increasingly contested issue. Three writings associated with the so-called Hippolytan school – the Traditio apostolica, the Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, and De Christo et antichristo – shed light on the tensions between hiddenness and secrecy in baptismal instruction.
This article traces the spread of a norm of confidentiality within elite political culture during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Instead of an emphasis on secrecy within military and administrative contexts, it explores discussions of “leaking” (xie 泄/洩 or lou 漏) and characterizations of “confidentiality” (zhou 周 and mi 密) in idealized representations of political action. While Warring States texts drew upon a medical language of qi circulation to fashion a model of a perfectly leakproof ruler, by Western Han attention had shifted from rulers to officials. This valorization of official confidentiality was connected to institutional developments, especially proscriptions against leaking from privileged spaces at the imperial court, visible in sources from the late Western Han. In this final period there arose a celebrated norm of circumspection, shared by rulers and officials alike, that in theory would allow all parties to evade disaster.
This chapter describes the role of economists during Honecker’s consumer-oriented Unity of Social and Economic Policy. Drawing on the example of Erwin Rohde (1927–2010), professor of public finance at Humboldt University, it illustrates the professional practices of university economists including functionary positions, teaching reforms, and research efforts subject to revised plans and institutional control. The chapter argues that this organization resulted in an increasing turn inward that was inherent in the epistemic regime of East German economists and deprived them of a critical role in social discourse. To a large extent, the ongoing reforms had the ideological function of creating political stability through future promises, while the actual strategic activities that were incompatible with this ideology were covered by a veil of secrecy. This is illustrated with the example of the so-called area for commercial coordination.
Almost all technology is dual use to some degree: it has both civilian and military applications. This feature creates a dilemma for cooperation. States can design arms control institutions to curtail costly competition over some military technology. But they also do not want to limit valuable civilian uses. How does the dual use nature of technology shape the prospects for cooperation? We argue that the duality of technology presents a challenge not by its very existence but rather through the ways it alters information constraints on the design of arms control institutions. We characterize variation in technology along two dual use dimensions: (1) the ease of distinguishing military from civilian uses; and (2) the degree of integration within military enterprises and the civilian economy. Distinguishability drives the level of monitoring needed to detect violations. When a weapon is indistinguishable from its civilian counterpart, states must improve detection though intelligence collection or intrusive inspections. Integration sharpens the costs of disclosing information to another state. For highly integrated technology, demonstrating compliance could expose information about other capabilities, increasing the security risks from espionage. Together, these dimensions generate expectations about the specific information problems states face as they try to devise agreements over various technologies. We introduce a new qualitative data set to assess both variables and their impact on cooperation across all modern armament technologies. The findings lend strong support for the theory. Efforts to control emerging technologies should consider how variation in the dual use attributes shapes this tension between detection and disclosure.
This chapter explores the cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland. Following the institution of the Chappe télégraphe in revolutionary France, this long-distance communications technology was widely innovated and subsequently adopted by numerous governments including, briefly, the British administration at Dublin Castle. The chapter begins by discussing the promotion, in the Belfast Northern Star, of the telegraph designed by the ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It then considers the politics of telegraphic discourse in Ireland in the years leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, with a particular focus on the associations between telegraphy and the United Irish press. Finally, it suggests some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s tale ‘The White Pigeon’ (1800) and her father’s telegraph. In its connection with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance, I argue, the telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland.
Cryptology of the long eighteenth century became an explicit discipline of secrecy. Theorized in pedagogical texts that reached wide audiences, multimodal methods of secret writing during the period in England promoted algorithmic literacy, introducing reading practices like discernment, separation, recombination, and pattern recognition. In composition, secret writing manipulated materials and inspired new technologies in instrumentation, computation, word processing, and storage. Cryptology also revealed the visual habits of print and the observational consequences of increasing standardization in writing, challenging the relationship between print and script. Secret writing served not only military strategists and politicians; it gained popularity with everyday readers as a pleasurable cognitive activity for personal improvement and as an alternative way of thinking about secrecy and literacy.
Chapter 5 looks at deliberations. The traditional view of deliberations is that jurors are capable from the moment they are selected to deliberate in a way that yields a fair and just verdict. In contrast, the transformation view recognizes that jurors must perform a task for which they have not volunteered; they must be aware of their personal biases and try not to be swayed by them; they must deliberate to try to reach a unanimous verdict with a group of strangers; and they must decide the facts and apply the law even though both are new to them. However, the experiences they have gone through as jurors have helped to prepare them to deliberate. In addition, the setting and structure of the deliberations help them to maintain the necessary discipline. The jurors are secluded in the jury room; they are required to vote and to give reasons to the group; if unanimity is required they must come to a group understanding; and they must make a decision that has serious consequences. There are features of deliberations that help jurors to assume their role as jurors, such as having a foreperson, a diverse jury, a group deliberation, and the judge's instructions.
This chapter discusses how Saudi women have actively negotiated gender boundaries and expanded their scope through the daily practice of charity work and the networks established among fellow social workers and volunteers. Founded in 1961–2 as a women-only initiative, the First Women’s Welfare Association in Jeddah counts among the oldest extant welfare associations in the kingdom enlisted with the Ministry of Social Affairs. The longue-durée perspective adopted in the chapter pays attention to the changing aspirations of different generations involved with the charity organization.
Although the First Women’s Welfare Association is often considered a "traditional charity" with an "Islamic aid" approach, its focus on single women, female-headed households, and the feminization of poverty transgresses traditional norms in multiple ways. The chapter discusses the charity’s use of donations, zakat and ṣadaqa, food banks, endowments, and shelters for single women and female-headed households. By situating practices of almsgiving within the wider legal and political framework of the zakat tax imposed by the Saudi state, as well as within the context of further legislation targeting money laundering and terrorist financing, the research highlights that religious ideals are subject to interpretation and object to various authoritative claims.
This article presents a formal model that shows how states can credibly reassure each other simply by maintaining a cooperative outward narrative. The reassurance literature to date has focused largely on costly signaling, whereby benign states must distinguish themselves by taking specific actions that hostile types would not. The mere lack of overtly expressed hostility without costly signals has been considered “cheap talk,” on the assumption that this behavior is costless for hostile states and thus uninformative. In contrast, this paper argues that maintaining a cooperative façade while secretly formulating and executing exploitative policies carries inherent trade-offs, and thus constitutes a credible reassurance signal. Foreign policy planning and implementation requires communication among various individuals, groups, and organizations, which has some probability of being observed and punished by outside actors. Yet efforts to conceal the policymaking process and reduce this probability are costly—they require investments in internal monitoring and restrictions on internal communication that can substantially degrade policy outcomes. Thus, to the extent that a state's foreign policymaking process is transparent—that is, that concealing internal communications is difficult—the absence of positive signals of hostility is a credible signal of its benign intentions. The argument is illustrated with a case study of German reassurance signals during the July Crisis preceding World War I.
This paper seeks to shed light on the metaphorical discourse of the secretive minority religion of Yārsān. Metaphor is demonstrated as a central rhetorical device, applied as a linguistic apparatus that serves the ideology of concealment. To express heterodox concepts, Yārsān texts principally employ two rhetorical devices, metaphor and lexical substitution. The metaphorical models objectively conceptualize highly abstract religious notions and serve to obscure heretical concepts that strongly vary from established orthodox beliefs. As for lexical substitution, the most frequent metaphorical models are verbalized using foreign loanwords that are not common in Kurdish dialects. Together, these strategies construct a highly puzzling and mysterious discourse that is too difficult for outsiders to unravel. It can be argued that the metaphorical discourse of Yārsān functions as an anti-language that effectively challenges the limitations of expression imposed by the orthodox mainstream in the medieval era. Yārsān followers are able to express non-expressible ideas and disguise them within complicated imageries.
Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.