Sorting Out Support for Democracy: A Q‐Method Study

Support for democracy is crucial to democratic stability. Yet the nature and range of democratic belief systems, and whether these belief systems are idiosyncratic to specific individuals and polities or are more general, remain largely unknown. Such unknowns complicate an already daunting measurement task. Extant survey‐based measures are fraught with validity problems and say little about the democratic beliefs individuals most strongly hold or reject. To address these problems, this study blends focus groups, interviews, and Q‐sort methodology to examine patterns of subjective, behavioral renderings of democratic support profiles. It finds seven shared profiles of beliefs concerning democracy, alternative regimes, and political and civil freedoms across Chile and Argentina. Their resemblance to democratic belief systems found with other methods bolsters their validity and generalizability. The analyses reveal the relative weight of each orientation within each belief profile and their intensity across profiles. In so doing, they identify which items are crucial for within‐ and across‐case comparisons. Altogether, these insights should inform survey‐based approaches to detecting and describing the democratic support profiles latent in the polity.     

Women's Descriptions of Drinking in Bars: Reasons and Risks

Fifty-two women bar drinkers participated infocus group discussions about women's reasons fordrinking, victimization experiences, and behaviors thatinfluence risk for victimization, in bars. The majority of the participants were White (67.3%),one-third were Black (30.8%), and one was NativeAmerican. Qualitative data analytic techniques were usedto assess the content of these discussions. Womendescribed distinct reasons for going to bars and providednumerous accounts of aggression they had witnessed orexperienced associated with this setting. Depictions ofphysical violence ranged from having an object thrown at them or being pushed, to accounts ofrape and attempted murder. These women also describedobservable changes in other women's behavior followingalcohol consumption, and how these behaviors increase risk for victimization in bars. The qualitativefindings are discussed in terms of what they tell usabout women bar drinkers and the insight theyprovide fordesigning future studies and interventions that focus on education and prevention.     

The Evaluation of Parental Fitness in Termination of Parental Rights Cases: A Functional-Contextual Perspective

This article highlights issues involved in carrying out evaluations for termination of parental rights cases and suggests caution for mental health professionals doing such evaluations. It argues that current models of parenting that come from the child development and child maltreatment fields are too narrow in their focus to act as a foundation for such evaluations and are often based on research with select groups in our society making them open to bias. Similarly, it is argued that traditional assessment measures are limited in their utility for responding to the kinds of relational and basic care questions asked in such evaluations. A functional-contextual model is offered as an alternative with examples of potentially useful measurement strategies. With such a frame as a starting point, the field might progress to providing more useful information to courts. Future research directions to improve this practice arena are discussed.     

Social Comparison of Health Risks: Locus of Control,the Person-Positivity Bias,and Unrealistic Optimism1

People typically attribute lower health risks to themselves than to others, a phenomenon referred to as unrealistic optimism. The present study tested the person positivity bias as a previously unexamined explanation of the phenomenon and analyzed the relationship between unrealistic optimism and expectations of control. High-school students estimated their own and one of three other persons’(the average student's, a randomly chosen student's, or their best same-sex friend's) chances of getting health problems. They also filled out questionnaires measuring locus of control and health-protective behavior. In contrast with the person positivity explanation, unrealistic optimism was not restricted to the “average other” condition. However, unrealistic optimism was stronger in subjects with a more internal locus of control than in subjects with a rather external locus of control. An unpredicted effect of estimation order was observed: Unrealistic optimism was stronger in subjects who estimated the comparison person's risks first than in subjects who started with own risks. This effect can be understood in terms of Codol's observation that people perceive others as more similar to themselves than they themselves are to others.     

Fetal Risks,Relative Risks,and Relatives' Risks

Several factors related to fetal risk render it more or less acceptable in justifying constraints on the behavior of pregnant women. Risk is an unavoidable part of pregnancy and childbirth, one that women must balance against other vital personal and family interests. Two particular issues relate to the fairness of claims that pregnant women are never entitled to put their fetuses at risk: relative risks and relatives' risks. The former have been used—often spuriously—to advance arguments against activities, such as home birth, that may incur risk; the latter implicate the nature of relationships in determining the acceptability of coercing or precluding activities. Motivated reasoning by clinicians and judges leads to inaccurate risk assessments, and judgments based on false claims to objectivity. Such judgments undermine the moral and legal standing of pregnant women and do not advance the interests of fetuses, pregnant women, families, or states.     

Parental Cooperation with Social Services and Termination of Parental Rights in Israeli Court Cases of Child Maltreatment

Parental cooperation with social services in child maltreatment cases is fundamental to all forms of family intervention. If rehabilitation efforts fail and the child cannot be safely reunified with his parents, the state is authorized to initiate termination of parental rights (TPR) proceedings. Given the scant literature on parental cooperation and TPR, the present study examined associations between parental cooperation and TPR in Israeli court cases of child maltreatment. Comparisons between uncooperative (n = 106) and cooperative parents (n = 155) revealed that uncooperative parents were more than three times more likely to have their parental rights terminated than cooperative parents, controlling for child and parent characteristics. Parents who did not cooperate with social services had high levels of mental health problems, substance abuse, criminal records, and poverty and their children had more mental health concerns and suffered more from neglect. We discuss the important implications resulting from these findings, which include: the need to view the engagement of parents in the child welfare process as a specific goal in itself and develop research-based models specifically targeting multiple-problem families at high risk of TPR; the need for professionals to build a good working alliance with parents in order to strengthen their participation; the need to take into account different background conditions and stressors related to the parents in order to facilitate greater cooperation; and the need to assess the potential mental health needs of children involved in cases of maltreatment with low parental cooperation.     

Attachment Styles and Personality Disorders: Their Connections to Each Other and to Parental Divorce, Parental Death, and Perceptions of Parental Caregiving

Attachment theory was explored as a means of understanding the origins of personality disorders. We investigated whether adult attachment styles and personality disorders share a common underlying structure, and how both kinds of variables relate to family background factors, including parental death, parental divorce, and current representations of childhood relationships with parents. A nonclinical group of 1407 individuals, mostly adolescents and young adults, were surveyed about their attachment styles, parental marital status, parental mortality status, perceptions of treatment by parents in childhood, and 13 personality disorders. Results indicated substantial overlap between attachment and personality-disorder measures. Two of the personality-disorder dimensions are related to the two dimensions of the attachment space; that is, there is a two-dimensional space in which both the attachment patterns and most of the personality disorders can be arrayed. The one personality-disorder factor that is unrelated to attachment appears akin to psychopathy. Both personality disorders and attachment styles were associated with family-of-origin variables. Results are discussed in terms of encouraging further research to test the idea that insecure attachment and most of the personality disorders share similar developmental antecedents.     

Revising Reasons Reactivity: Weakly and Strongly Sufficient Reasons for Acting

In Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza propose an account of moral responsibility according to which an agent is morally responsible for an action just when that action is the product of her own moderately reasons-responsive mechanism, where reasons-responsiveness is explained in terms of the mechanism’s regular reasons-receptivity and weak reasons-reactivity. In a review of Fischer and Ravizza’s book Mele contends that their weakly reasons-reactivity condition is inadequate, constructing a case in which, according to their theory, an extreme agoraphobic is morally responsible for his staying in his home. In this paper I modify Fischer and Ravizza’s account of moral responsibility in light of Mele’s problematic example, suggesting a refinement of their weakly reasons-reactivity requirement via a distinction between weakly sufficient reasons and strongly sufficient reasons.     

Parental consent for psychological evaluations: Legal,ethical and practical considerations

This article explores the legal, ethical, and practical considerations underlying the requirement for acquiring parental consent prior to a psychological assessment of children in school settings. Publ. L. 94-142 now mandates that parents for all children potentially labeled as handicapped give permission for a preplacement evaluation. This article reviews in detail specific aspects of that mandate, argues that this procedure be generalized to all situations where psychologists propose to evaluate children by reviewing both current ethical codes and standards for practice and public policy which favors such an undertaking. Finally, the authors indicate methods for implementing the mandate by discussing such issues as who should obtain consent and what information parents should receive prior to giving consent.     

Reasons for Having Children: Ends, Means and 'Family Values'

This essay suggests some links between concern about the decline of 'the family', or of 'family values', the use of reproductive technology, and the claim that some people have children for the 'wrong reasons'. It is argued that where conceiving and bringing a child to term is a matter of choice, a person must have a reason or reasons for doing so and further, that those reasons are of moral significance. By appealing to Kant's Categorical Imperative: 'Act in such a way that you always treat humanity … never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end', a distinction is made between morally desirable and morally undesirable reasons, on the grounds of the extent to which the parent or parents will be able or likely to treat the child as an end in herself. In conclusion it is argued that whilst 'the family'is vital to the health of children, and to the health of society, it is not so much the form that the family takes that is significant, but the extent to which it allows for the development and maintainance of a certain sort of relationship.