The road user behaviour of New Zealand adolescents

The present study aimed to describe the road user behaviour of New Zealand adolescents and to investigate the applicability of the Adolescent Road user Behaviour Questionnaire (ARBQ) to New Zealand adolescents. In total 944 adolescents were surveyed in the North and South islands of New Zealand. Factor analysis of the scale produced three factors which had acceptable internal reliability and were very similar to those found in the original research. The three factors were “unsafe crossing behaviour”, “playing on the road” and “planned protective behaviour”. This research also found that males and those who were at least part Maori were more likely to put themselves at risk by playing on the road. Furthermore, those who identified themselves as being part Maori also engaged in unsafe road crossing behaviour more often than Caucasian and Asian adolescents. Interestingly, only the interaction effect between age and sex was significantly related to engagement in planned protective behaviour. However, despite differences between New Zealand and England, and differences in the sample characteristics, the scale appeared to be measuring the same latent variables. Therefore, this research confirmed that the ARBQ is a useful tool for investigating the behaviour of adolescents on the road.     

Intergroup Perceptions and Attitudes toward Immigrants in a Culturally Plural Society

The research examined perceptions of Chinese immigrants held by New Zealanders of European and Maori descent. The study (N = 318) adopted an intergroup perspective to test a predictive model of attitudes toward immigrants. It was based on a nation‐wide survey with prospective respondents randomly selected from the New Zealand Electoral rolls. Findings revealed that Maori differed from their European counterparts in predictable ways, reporting more relative deprivation and greater perceived threat, and holding more negative outgroup attitudes. Less contact and greater perceived threat predicted more negative attitudes toward immigrants; in addition, when intergroup boundaries were permeable, the link between perceived threat and negative attitudes was stronger in Maori than New Zealand Europeans. While intergroup relations are traditionally analysed in a dual group formation involving a privileged “dominant” ingroup and disadvantaged “minority” immigrant outgroup, the current research suggests the need to advance beyond this dichotomy to a more inclusive approach and to consider the interface between the historical and political milieux in specific national contexts.     

Examining behavioral and attitudinal differences among groups in their traffic safety culture

The paper explores the concept that, for a given population, there is not a single “traffic safety culture,” but rather a set of alternative cultures in which the individual driver might belong. There are several different cultures of dangerous driving behavior and each might need a separate strategy for intervention or amelioration. First, the paper summarizes the over-arching theory explored in the research, which applies Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling (MSEM) in a modification of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in the explanation of Risky Driving Behavior, based on ten observed explanatory factors. Second, we apply Latent Class Cluster (LCC) segmentation to the full sample, revealing four segments: one cluster reflecting a “Low Risk Driving Safety Group” and three clusters describing three different groups of problematic drivers. We first apply MSEM to two groups; the “Low Risk Driving Safety Group,” and the “High Risk Driving Safety Group,” defined as the members of the three problematic clusters together, revealing how a “Low Risk” culture differs from the “High Risk” culture, with the relative importance of the TPB explanatory factors varying sharply between the two groups. Finally, the three problematic clusters are profiled for demographics and their mean scores for the ten observed explanatory factors. Each of the clusters is reviewed in terms of responses to selected survey questions. Three separate and distinct dangerous traffic safety cultures emerge: first, a culture of risky driving dominated by excitement seeking and optimism bias; a second dominated by denial of societal values; and a third characterized by its propensity to find rational justifications for its speeding behavior. The paper applies two research methods together: LCC segmentation divides our sample into meaningful subgroups, while MSEM reveals both within-group analysis of variance and between-group differences in safety attitudes and outcomes. The paper concludes that the combination of the segmentation powers of the LCC and the analysis powers of the MSEM provides the analyst with an improved understanding of the attitudes and behaviors of the separate groups, all tied back to the over-arching theory underlying the research.     

Attitudes to doctors and medicine: The preliminary development of a new scale

Abstract

The preliminary development of a new scale to measure attitudes towards medicine and doctors is described. The scale comprises four factors: “positive attitude towards doctors,” “positive attitude towards medicine,” “negative attitude towards doctors,” and “negative attitude towards medicine.” Alpha coefficients for the four scales were satisfactory, ranging from 0.69 to 0.76. Test re-test reliabilities ranged from 0.69 to 0.81. Evidence of criterion-related validity was obtained from comparison of the attitudes of five groups involved in health care: nurses, medical students, patients, and sociologists and psychologists who are teachers in medical schools. Patients and medical students held significantly more positive attitudes towards doctors and medicine that did nurses and behavioural scientists. While nurses were as negative towards doctors as sociologists and psychologists, they were significantly less negative about medicine.     

“Hammered down on every side” versus “just being positive”: A critical discursive approach to health inequality

Socio‐economic and health inequality are strongly linked and are increasingly perpetuated by discourses of individual responsibility. However, little research from a critical discursive perspective has addressed how people affected themselves may account for this relationship. This research examined the ways in which people who are in debt, unemployed, or in insecure, minimum‐wage employment construct health and negotiate identities around it. Data from semistructured interviews with 6 participants were analysed and 3 main interpretative repertoires were identified: a medical repertoire of health as a lack of illness; health as adopting the “right” behaviours and attitudes; and health as being heavily influenced by external factors, such as income and life circumstances. The analysis focuses on how participants managed the tension between these latter 2 repertoires by adopting various subject positions around health: that it is “slipping” away from them; that it requires motivation; and that it is unattainable. Underpinning this is a “common‐sense” idea of health as something that is worked towards through culturally approved actions and attitudes.     

‘Where are you from?’ Identity as a key to parenting by 1.5 generation Korean-New Zealand migrants and implications for counselling

In a qualitative study of the experiences of 1.5 generation Korean New Zealanders as parents, a notable finding was the significant part the participants’ identity-related experiences as migrants played in shaping their parenting practices. Interviews were conducted with 18 Korean “Kiwis” (New Zealanders), colloquially referred to as “Kowis,” who had arrived in New Zealand before 2002 as children or adolescents with their parents and were now married with children. Reflecting on the challenges of their migration and identity journeys enabled them to recognise their vulnerabilities and their advantages, and the multiple ways in which identity-related cultural conflicts and confusion influenced their parenting of their children. The implications are identified for further research and for counselling practice.     

Dimensions of adolescent career development: A multi-instrument analysis

Dimensions of adolescent career development were assessed by several well-established, objectively scored instruments. Attention was given to the correlations between measures of academic achievement and career development. Correlations among 19 scales administered to 237 eleventh graders revealed three clusters of converging scale pairs, labeled “Certainty,” “Decision-Making,” and “Activity.” Four orthogonal factors were identified and given the following heuristic labels: “Cognitive Resources for Decision-Making,” “Decision-Making Style,” “Systematic Involvement in Career Decision-Making,” and “Decision-Making Stage/Certainty.” Results are discussed in relation to practical problems of instrument selection and score interpretation and in the context of theories of adolescent career development.     

Womanist Identity and Mental Health

The authors explored the relationship between Helms's “womanist identity” attitudes and the mental health of Black and White women. Results showed that Black and White women have different patterns of responses to both womanist and mental health scales. For White women in the sample, Immersion-Emersion and, to a lesser extent, Encounter attitudes were related to 7 types of psychological symptomatology. For Black women, no such relationship between womanist attitudes and mental health was found.     

Prototypes of Faith: Findings with the Faith Q‐Sort

Defining religion and finding ways to assess it in individual lives has long challenged psychologists of religion. At first, open‐ended questionnaires were used, but with the advent of modern statistical methods, a succession of religiosity scales was developed. But these usually brief scales were typically based on the preconceptions of their authors, who were overwhelmingly Protestant Christian and often conservative, much as were those who completed them. To provide a more adequate way of assessing “faith,” a term here encompassing both religious and nonreligious attitudes, a new assessment device was developed that incorporates the singular advantages of Q methodology. The Faith Q‐Sort consists of 101 statements that respondents sort on a nine‐category continuum, indicating the degree to which each statement describes himself or herself. Factor analysis based on correlations of the sorts rather than individual items yielded, for the initial group of participants, three major prototypes and five minor ones, accounting for 67 percent of the variance. Of the 42 participants, 31 proved to be exemplars of one or another of the eight prototypes. Subsequent explorations illustrate the wealth of possibilities the FQS offers, both as a research instrument and a counseling tool.     

What's in a Name? The Effects of the Labels “Fat” Versus “Overweight” on Weight Bias1

This research examined the effects of the labels “fat” vs. “overweight” in the expression of weight bias, with the prediction that the label “fat” biases individuals to respond more negatively than does the label “overweight.” In Study 1, participants' attitudes toward people labeled as fat were less favorable than were their attitudes toward people labeled as overweight. In Studies 2 and 3, although participants chose similar‐sized figures to depict fat and overweight targets, weight stereotypes and weight attitudes were more negative toward people labeled as fat than those labeled as overweight. In addition, the endorsement of weight stereotypes mediated the biasing effect of the “fat” label on weight prejudice. Implications of this work for prejudice researchers and for public attitudes are discussed.     

Visual asymmetry revisited: Mind wandering preferentially disrupts processing in the left visual field

An emerging theory proposes that visual attention operates in parallel at two distinct time scales – a shorter one (<1 s) associated with moment-to-moment orienting of selective visuospatial attention, and a longer one (>10 s) associated with more global aspects of attention-to-task. Given their parallel nature, here we examined whether these comparatively slower fluctuations in task-related attention show the same visual field asymmetry – namely, a right visual field bias – as often reported for selective visual–spatial attention. Participants performed a target detection task at fixation while event-related potentials (ERP) time-locked to task-irrelevant visual probes presented in the left and right visual fields were recorded. At random intervals, participants were asked to report whether they were “on-task” or “mind wandering”. Our results demonstrated that sensory attenuation during periods of “mind wandering” relative to “on-task”, as measured by the visual P1 ERP component at electrodes sites contralateral to the stimulus, was only observed for probes presented in the left visual field. In contrast, the magnitude of sensory gain in the right visual field was insensitive to whether participants were “on-task” or “mind wandering”. Taken together, our results support the notion that task-related attention at longer time scales and spatial attention at shorter time scales affect the same underlying mechanism in visual cortex.     

Sexual Motives: Cultural,Evolutionary, and Social Psychological Perspectives

Recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to investigate passionate love, sexual desire, and sexual behavior. Specifically, they have started to ask such questions as: “Why do young men and women engage in sexual liaisons?” “Why do they avoid such encounters?” Unfortunately, in attempting to answer such questions, scholars have generally focused on surveys and experiments within their own disciplines and have accorded scant attention to the discoveries of other disciplines. In this paper, we will begin by discussing three theoretical perspectives that have had the most to say about why young people seek out (or avoid) sex—cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology (where theorists often take a biopsychosocial approach). Then, we will (1) describe the many scales that have been used to assess sexual motives, and (2) review the multidisciplinary data which has been assembled in an attempt to answer the questions as to why people seek out (or avoid) sexual activity. Unfortunately, almost all this research was conducted by Western researchers, investigating the attitudes and behavior of young American men and women, who were heterosexual. (Alas, the wider-ranging data one would wish to consider is as yet only rarely available.) Through this multi-disciplinary synthesis, we hope to demonstrate the impact of culture, social experience, and biological imperatives in shaping young men’s and women’s motives for engaging in sexual encounters and provide a sort of “encyclopedia” of sexual motives measures and research for future scholars.     

Self-reported likelihood of sexually aggressive behavior: Attitudinal versus sexual explanations

The present study compared the relative effectiveness of sexuality variables versus attitudes hypothesized to be rape-supportive in the prediction of “likelihood to rape” (LR) and “likelihood to use sexual force” (LF) measures. This research was guided by the suggestion that understanding the variables which underlie LR and LF may shed light on the factors which cause some men to actually commit acts of violence against women. The results were inconsistent with viewing rape as primarily caused by sexual frustration or sexual maladjustment, since sexuality variables were generally not predictive of LF or LR. In contrast, a variety of rape-supportive attitudes and beliefs such as blaming the victim for her rape or viewing sexual violence as sexually arousing to women were successful predictors of both LF and LR. These data were interpreted as supporting theories of rape which consider cultural, socially transmitted attitudes about women and rape to be psychological releasers for sexual aggression. The findings also supported the notion of an “aggression toward women” continuum, rather than a conceptualization of rape as a discrete, isolated phenomenon with its own determinants.     

Attitudes Toward Business as a Function of Student Quality and Career Intentions

This study sought to determine student attitudes toward business as a social institution, careers in business, and businessmen, and then to relate these attitudes to measures of career intention and student quality. A random sample of 91 subjects was administered a double pre-tested questionnaire after results of a pilot study were reviewed. Positive and negative attitudes toward business were analyzed following three popular hypotheses: the “values” hypothesis, the “seduction” hypothesis, the “grey flannel suit” hypothesis. A negative relation between student quality and intention to enter business careers was found. The most consistent underlying explanation for this result was found to relate to student values and motivations and not to attitude sources external to the individual.     

Construction et validation d’un inventaire du soutien dans le contexte de l’arrêt tabagique (ISAT) destiné au fumeur et à son proche

Smoking cessation is a difficult process, often requiring the support of others. Nonetheless, there are no specific inventories assessing this support. This study was carried out on 112 smoker/helper dyads with the aim of reaching internal validation of a “Support Inventory in the context of Smoking Cessation”. The SISC consists of three questionnaires: two intended for the smoker to assess the “received” and “desired” support; the third intended for the helper to assess the “given” support. Each questionnaire includes items assessing three principal types of support: “emotional”, “informational” and “motivational”. The results of factorial analysis confirm the internal validity of the three SISC questionnaires. Each of the three questionnaires consists of 11 items which estimates the “emotional”, “informational” and “motivational” dimensions of support. The three questionnaires and their factors possess a very good internal coherence. Their utility in both clinical applications and the field of research should be tested.     

“Out of the Broom Closet”: The Social Ecology of American Wicca

The fastest growing form of religious identification, spirituality, or “new” religious movement in American society over the last decade is Wicca and related forms of “Neo-Paganism.” However, with no national organization and minimal local organization, little is known about its distribution across a privatized religious landscape nor about the features of state social and cultural environments that are receptive or contrary to its spread. This study uses Internet data to create estimates of the comparative strength of Wiccan-Pagan identification across the 50 states and conducts multivariate analyses of the ability of variables suggested in prior research to explain its distribution. Not only are the findings consistent with expectations, but differences in correlates of Wicca using the Internet data in contrast to existing measures of “New Age” spirituality highlight the empirical importance of maintaining distinctions between the two.     

The Waffle Phenomenon: Negative Evaluations of Those Who Shift Attitudinally1

The past two presidential campaigns have been filed with charges that the Democratic nominee “changed his mind” on various issues. The present research explored the possibility that negative evaluations may be produced by attitude change per se. In the first experiment, subjects responded to a stranger whose attitudes remained stable or who changed his attitudes over a period of two months vs. one year. Individuals who changed their attitudes were generally evaluated more negatively than those whose attitudes remained stable; the amount of time over which the change occurred produced no effect. A second expcriment sought to determine if the direction of change (toward increased or decreased similarity with subjects) influenced evaluations of a stranger. Attitude change which resulted in decreased similarity was rated most negatively. Even when a stranger changed his attitudes in the direction of greater similarity with subjects, however, he was still regarded as less decisive, less reliable, and a worse leader than was an individual with stable attitudes. This negative evaluation of attitude change was labeled the “waffle phenomenon”, and the implications for political candidates were discussed.     

“Why would you want to do that work?” The positive impact on therapists of working with child victims of sexual abuse in Ireland: a thematic analysis

Abstract

Research on the impact on psychotherapists of working with trauma has typically focused on negative impact and protective strategies and supports for therapists working in this field, such as self-care strategies and supervision. Yet many clinicians speak of the rewarding and fulfilling experiences of working with those who have been sexually abused. This study explored the positive impact of working with children who have been sexually abused in a sample of psychotherapists in Ireland. Unstructured interviews were conducted with nine female therapists who work in a specialist sexual abuse service with child victims of sexual abuse. An inductive thematic analysis identified four key themes: “the struggle to talk about the positive impact”, “professional satisfaction from helping children”, “learning life lessons from children” and “the magical connection that happens in therapy”. The findings show that, despite therapists’ tendency to think about negative impact, when encouraged to do so they described finding the work professionally rewarding, experiencing an enhancement of their own attitudes and lives through learning from the children they worked with and feeling uplifted within the therapeutic relationship with the child. Suggestions are offered for future research that may provide a broader understanding of the positive impact of this work.     

On theoretical and realizable ideal conditions in psychophysics: Magnitude and category scales and their relation

By spacing 10 stimuli (white noise) between 40 and 110 dB according to two criteria [equal response ambiguity (ERA) and equal discriminability (ED)], an attempt was made to construct an “ideal” case for magnitude estimation and category rating. The “ideal” case is defined by linear and constant Weber functions (SDs as a function of scale values) for the two scales, respectively. Altogether, three group and two individual magnitude and category rating experiments were run with these two spacings. It was found that the ERA spacing approximated the ideal case well for both Weber functions and the ED spacing only for the Weber function of the category scale. The general psychophysical differential equation that relates scale values and Weber functions for the two scales allowed good prediction of the category scales from the magnitude scales and the Weber functions. The data suggested a distinction between phenotypic (empirical) and genotypic Weber functions, analogous to “real” and “ideal” cases in physics.