A NOTE ON THE EXPECTED VALUE OF A COEFFICIENT OF REPRODUCIBILITY

In a recent study of the sensitivity of Coefficients of Reproducibility, Cotton (1969) found a lower bound for the expected value of the Green-Sagi (1953, 1959) Coefficient of Reproducibility under the assumption of response independence. It is the purpose of this note to show that the lower bound found by Cotton holds more generally. An appendix gives a nomograph for testing the significance of this coefficient of reproducibility.     

TOWARD A THEORY OF FRIENDSHIP BASED ON A CONCEPTION OF SELF

The present theory of friendship is based on a conception of self that regards a central motive to be the person's concern for the well-being and worth of the entity (s) he identifies as self. This concern manifests itself in tendencies to affirm one's sense of individuality, affirm one's more important self-attributes, evaluate one's self positively, and change toward positive self-growth. Friendship involves investments of self in a relationship characterized by the partners' voluntary interdependence and personalized concern for one another. The investment, entailing expenditures of time, personal resources, and personalized concern yields dividends experienced concretely as a partner's self-affirmation value, ego support value, stimulation value, or utility value. Several facets of friendship growth and change are considered, including the degree to which the relationship is difficult to maintain.     

CONDEMNATION OF A SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE: A CHRONOLOGY AND REFUTATION OF THE ATTACKS AND A DISCUSSION OF THREATS TO THE INTEGRITY OF SCIENCE

On July 12, 1999, our meta-analysis on child sexual abuse published in Psychological Bulletin, one of the American Psychological Association's (APA) premiere journals, was condemned by the U.S. Congress (H. Con. Res. 107). The condemnation followed months of attacks on the article, the APA, and us by various social conservatives and psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was asked by the APA to independently review our article. After considering criticisms of it and the article itself, AAAS declined, but commented that it was the criticisms, not our methods or analyses, that troubled them because these criticisms misrepresented what we wrote. The current article chronicles this whole affair. First, we provide background, explaining why an article such as ours was needed. Then we accurately summarize the article, given that it has been so widely misrepresented. Next we present a chronology of the events leading up to and following the condemnation. We then present and refute all the major criticisms of the article, which have included both methodological and conceptual attacks. Next we discuss the threat to science that these events portend. We conclude by discussing the need to separate moral judgments from scientific research, the conflation of which formed the basis for the distortions and condemnation.     

DEVELOPMENT OF A GLOBAL MEASURE OF PERSONALITY

A common practice among practitioners and researchers doing cross-cultural work is to transport personality inventories developed in one country to another country of interest. This transport process is done with varying degrees of rigor and success. This paper describes the development of the Global Personality Inventory (GPI). The development process involved cross-cultural input from psychologists around the world following best practices that have been identified to date for each step of the development of a cross-cultural measure of personality. Construct validity studies including data from 11 countries and 10 languages are reported. Initial criterion-related validity evidence for inferences made from the GPI about job performance is presented. Examples of challenges and best practices are illustrated in the areas of construct development, item writing, item selection, translation, and data analysis.     

FOUNDATIONS OF A KANTIAN THEORY OF PUNISHMENT

It has recently been argued that there is probably no theory of punishment to be found in Immanuel Kant's writings, but that “if one selects carefully among the many remarks and insights that Kant has left us about crime and punishment, one might even be able to build such an edifice from the bricks provided.”¹ In this paper, I seek to provide part of a foundation of a Kantian theory of punishment, one which is consistent with many, if not all, of Kant's own insights on justice. Finally, I assess the plausibility of Kant's view.     

A WAR OF MEMORIES

This article discusses Renzo De Felice’s Intervista sul Fascismo, published in 1975, as representative of a particular memory in the Italy of that time and considers its influence and impact on the subsequent historiographical and political discourse in Italy about fascism, the War of Liberation, and the Shoah. The starting point is the existence of many competing memories that battle with one another for supremacy. The very diversity of these memories – silent, always contemporary but different – sends one back to the agent par excellence of memory formation: politics. Because the memories of fascism, the war, the Resistance, and the Shoah represent essentially political structures, they are fated to vary in response to the definitions of the diverse identity groups that are dominant in a society in the struggle for the emergence of one memory at the expense of the others.