Fifty years of child guidance: A psychologist's View

Abstract

MARTHA HARRIS, B.A.: Inside Information on Understanding Infants, (birth to 5 years). A paperback published by the Dickens Press, price 5s. Od.

MARY MILES?: Live and Learn. George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 18s.

DILYS DAWS: Your One Year Old; CHRISTOPHER DARE: Your Six Year Old; MARTHA HARRIS: Your Eleven Year Old, Your Twelve to Fourteen Year Old, Your Teenager; ELSIE L. OSBORNE: Your Four Year Old, Your Five Year Old, Your Seven Year Old; EDNA O'SHAUGHNESSY: Your Eight Year Old, Your Nine Year Old, Your Ten Year Old; DINA ROSENBLUTH: Your Baby, Your Two Year Old, Your Three Year Old, Corgi Books (1969), Cash Sales Department, P.O. Box 11, Falmouth, Cornwall. 3s. (15p).     

Domestic violence in primary care: The psychologist's role

This paper highlights the difficulties facing medical and mental health professionals in helping families in which there is violence. Emphasis is placed on how domestic violence presents in primary care medical settings. Physician and patient characteristics that interfere with domestic violence detection are reviewed. A role is outlined for psychologists in primary care settings to facilitate detection and treatment. Facilitative efforts include educating physicians through collaboration and serving as an on-site resource for information and consultation.     

The psychologist's biographer: Writing lives in the history of psychology

How should historians employ psychological insight when seeking to understand and analyze their historical subjects? That is the essential question explored in this methodological reflection on the relationship between psychology and biography. To answer it, this paper offers a historical, historiographical, and theoretical analysis of life writing in the history of psychology. It touches down in the genres of autobiography, psychobiography, and cultural history to assess how other historians and psychologists have answered this question. And it offers a more detailed analysis of one particularly useful text, Kerry Buckley's (1989) Mechanical Man, to illuminate specific ways in which historians can simultaneously employ, historicize, and critically analyze the theories of the psychologists they study. Although ostensibly about writing biographies of eminent psychologists, this article speaks to a methodological issue facing any historian contemplating the role psychological theories should play in their historical narratives.     

The creative achievement scale

The Creative Achievement Scale (CAS) was designed to measure the creative accomplishments of deceased individuals based on information extracted from biographical sources (e.g., published biographies). The CAS contains 11 items which pertain to personal attributes, product qualities, and sociocultural factors. Statistical analyses conducted on one small (n = 12) and one larger sample (n = 50) of subjects revealed the CAS to be a reliable and valid instrument.     

The ethics of creative accounting

Creative accounting, which generally involves the preparation of financial statements with the intention of misleading readers of those statements, is prima facie a form oflying, as defined by Bok.¹ This paper starts by defining and illustrating creative accounting. It examines and rejects the arguments for considering creative accounting, in spite of its deceptive intent, as not being a form of lying. It then examines the ethical issues raised by creative accounting, in the light of the literature on the ethics of lying. This literature includes the evaluation of various excuses and justifications for lying, and these are examined here in relation to creative accounting. It is concluded that even in circumstances in which creative accounting would arguably serve a worthy purpose, that purpose would be at least as well served by honest communication.     

The ethics of creative growth

Explicitly ethical discussions among guidance and personnel professionals generally involve intraprofessional concerns and the specifying of minimal standards of professional behavior. The author of this article proposes that wider, more challenging, ethical issues should not be treated as special topics within these professions but should be considered crucial parts of the mainstream of ethical thought and practice. This shift would help to make critical moral problems the professional concern of all guidance and personnel workers, not the specialty of only a few.