Development and effects of client trust in criminal defense attorneys: preliminary examination of the congruence model of trust development

The present study examines the relation between client participation in attorney-client relationships, the development of client trust in criminal defense attorneys, and client satisfaction with attorneys and case outcomes. The congruence model of trust development (CMTD) is proposed to explain the relation between desired participation by clients, allowed participation by attorneys, and the development of client trust in attorneys. The CMTD predicts that clients who trust their attorneys will subsequently be satisfied with their attorneys and case outcomes. A sample of 96 experienced criminal defendants currently in prison completed the Attorney-Client Trust Scale (ACTS: Boccaccini and Brodsky, 2002) and provided information about their experiences with their most recent criminal defense attorneys. Findings were generally consistent with the CMTD in suggesting that (i) allowed participation is associated with trust in attorneys, and (ii) trust is associated with satisfaction with attorneys and case outcomes.     

A Community Psychology View of Environmental Organization Processes

Environmental organizations have a key role in addressing environmental degradation and promoting ecologically and socially sustainable societies. Psychosocial processes underpin their work, however, empirical studies of these processes remain underdeveloped. This paper presents the first stage of a community psychology study involving in-depth interviews with leaders in environmental organizations. Qualitative analysis revealed a framework of five types of psychosocial processes that assist environmental organizations to achieve a range of outcomes, namely: problem analysis; influencing decision-making; inter-organizational relationships; community participation and knowledge transfer. These psychosocial processes were used in substantially different ways depending on the organizations' orientation. Three key orientations towards outcomes were evident: on-ground conservation, developing innovation in specialist areas and transforming wider social institutions. The findings provide a model of the psychosocial processes involved in fostering sustainable futures and exemplify the contribution of community psychology to this critical global issue.     

Decision making and job satisfaction among youth workers in community-based agencies

Sixty-four counselors and 32 alternative school teachers in 13 grass-roots agencies reported on levels of participation, influence, and competence in making clinical and administrative decisions. The data supported predictions that (a) professionals would report greater decision-making opportunities and abilities than nonprofessionals, and (b) that workers in general would report higher levels of participation, influence, and competence in clinical than in administrative domains, and higher levels of competence than influence in both domains. However, regression analyses testing the effects of the decision-making variables on different aspects of job satisfaction did not support predicted interactions among participation, influence, and competence. Rather, decision-making involvements had positive effects and decision-making abilities had negative effects on worker morale. The discussion high-lights the need for further research to identify the underlying processes involved in the observed relationships.     

Support group processes: Perspectives from HIV-infected women in South Africa

This study examined the experiences and perceived benefits of support group participation among HIV-infected women in South Africa. From a qualitative analysis of responses, key psychological processes through which support groups are potentially beneficial were identified. These processes included: identification; modeling; acceptance; and empowerment. The participants' consequent life changes were explored in order to associate these processes with the positive outcomes of support group participation. Through understanding the relationship between the psychological processes within a support group setting and the potential benefits, and by targeting these processes in the development and implementation of future support group interventions, a framework is provided for achieving positive outcomes associated with support group participation.     

Experiences from active membership and participation in decision-making processes and age in moral reasoning and goal orientation of referees

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of experiences of active membership and participation in decision-making processes and age on moral reasoning and goal orientations of referees in sport. The sample consisted of 148 referees of whom 56 judged soccer, 55 basketball, and 37 handball. Their ages ranged from 17 to 50 years (M=36.6, SD=7.4). Of the total number of referees, 8.3% have no experiences from active membership and participation in decision-making processes in organizations (social, athletic, political), 53.1% were simply active members, and 38.6% were involved in decision-making in their respective organizations. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance showed an interaction between experiences and age on moral reasoning and goal orientation of referees.     

The internet,empowerment, and identity: an exploration of participation by refugee women in a Community Internet Project (CIP) in the United Kingdom (UK)

This article considers the relationship between the Internet, empowerment, identity and participation; and focuses on refugee women in the United Kingdom (UK) participating in a Community Internet Project (CIP) to learn Internet skills. Semi‐structured interviews and a non‐participant observation were conducted with six refugee women and the course tutor participating in the final session of the CIP. Thematic analysis of the interviews supplemented with findings from the observation, revealed outcomes associated with technological engagement and participation. Technological engagement outcomes included intermediate outcomes of maintaining links and re‐building networks, and facilitating resettlement and integration; and empowerment and identity outcomes facilitating the maintenance and development of personal identities, and fostering psychological empowerment. Participation outcomes included the development of social identity and community narratives, and collective consciousness‐raising. These findings are used to reflect on the theory of the social psychology of participation (Campbell & Jovchelovitch, 2000 ), by contextualising technological engagement within participatory processes. The article concludes by discussing individual agency within participation; and calls for further research into the utility of digital technologies in community participatory processes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Less guilty by reason of adolescence: developmental immaturity, diminished responsibility, and the juvenile death penalty

The authors use a developmental perspective to examine questions about the criminal culpability of juveniles and the juvenile death penalty. Under principles of criminal law, culpability is mitigated when the actor's decision-making capacity is diminished, when the criminal act was coerced, or when the act was out of character. The authors argue that juveniles should not be held to the same standards of criminal responsibility as adults, because adolescents' decision-making capacity is diminished, they are less able to resist coercive influence, and their character is still undergoing change. The uniqueness of immaturity as a mitigating condition argues for a commitment to a legal environment under which most youths are dealt with in a separate justice system and none are eligible for capital punishment.     

What Difference Does Youth Group Make? A Longitudinal Analysis of Religious Youth Group Participation Outcomes

Though many congregations structure youth ministry programs to foster desired religious and social outcomes, questions remain regarding whether participation in religious-based youth programs is beneficial for the youth involved. Studies show that religion typically results in positive life outcomes for youth, but less is known about the causal mechanisms through which religion makes a difference in their lives. Data analyzed are from two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). This article examines the effect of youth participation on adult support, church connections, and moral values. A multivariate analysis with lagged dependent variables indicates some effects of youth group participation as well as self-selection processes.     

Power,participation and partnerships: reflections on the co-creation of knowledge

Narrative writing was used to critically reflect on the reasons for the success and failure of two research partnerships: one between the authors and a community group, the other between the authors and academic colleagues. The reflections relate to a vignette constructed on the experiences of the authors and somewhat fictionalised, but brought together to highlight the contrasts, whereby one research partnership was successful in producing outcomes while the other was not. An analysis of these reflections was informed by Wenger’s Communities of Practice framework. This helped draw out issues around power and participation as fundamental for successful research partnerships, particularly multidisciplinary partnerships, intent on the co-creation of knowledge. Such issues related to recognising partnerships and the underlying assumptions when these partnerships cross boundaries include transparent communication, power and decision-making processes, critical self-awareness, and negotiated meaning and identity.     

The legal self: executive processes and legal theory

When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but what is important to the law is what is done with the workspace content rather than the content itself. This makes executive processes more important to the law than consciousness, since they are responsible for channelling conscious decision-making into intentions and actions, or inhibiting action. We provide a summary of the current state of our knowledge about executive processes, which consists primarily of information about which portions of the prefrontal lobes perform which executive processes. Then we describe several examples in which legal principles can be understood as tacitly singling out executive processes, including principles regarding defendants' intentions or plans to commit crimes and their awareness that certain facts are the case (for instance, that a gun is loaded), as well as excusatory principles which result in lesser responsibility for those who are juveniles, mentally ill, sleepwalking, hypnotized, or who suffer from psychopathy.     

Institutional structures and variation of information: An international comparison of transport infrastructure decision-making

Many analytical studies purporting to aid decision-making are produced and yet their contribution to actual decision-making is questioned. This article focuses on how institutional structures influence the way analytical information is actually used. A variation of information criterion for quality of decision-making is developed and used to analyze what types of structures incite actors to both generate and store a variety of ideas and arguments. An international comparison on transport infrastructure planning is used to demonstrate the relevant institutional mechanisms and how different structures lead to different processes of information exchange and to differing product outcomes.     

An Anlaysis of Parental Participation as a Means of Reducing Bias in the Education of Handicapped Children

Individual and program decision-making have been central themes within the recent "progressive era" of special education and related legislation. More specifically, parent participation in the decision-making process has been viewed as an important safeguard to help protect the rights of children, and as a means of reducing bias in the placement of children. Further, many converging lines of evidence suggest that parental participation may improve the quality of educational services. However, parents' rights in decision-making may not be exercised for a number of reasons, including : (a) lack of parental preparation for the role of participant; (b) inappropriate behavior by school personnel; and (c) lack of parental interest or devaluation of the importance of their own participation. A number of issues influencing parental participation in educational decision-making conferences are discussed.     

A dynamic context model of interactive behavior

A dynamic context model of interactive behavior was developed to explain results from two experiments that tested the effects of interaction costs on encoding strategies, cognitive representations, and response selection processes in a decision-making and a judgment task. The model assumes that the dynamic context defined by the mixes of internal and external representations and processes are sensitive to the interaction cost imposed by the task environment. The model predicts that changes in the dynamic context may lead to systematic biases in cognitive representations and processes that eventually influence decision-making and judgment outcomes. Consistent with the predictions by the model, results from the experiments showed that as interaction costs increased, encoding strategies and cognitive representations shifted from perception-based to memory-based. Memory-based comparisons of the stimuli enhanced the similarity and dominance effects, and led to stronger systematic biases in response outcomes in a choice task. However, in a judgment task, memory-based representations enhanced only the dominance effects. Results suggested that systematic response biases in the dominance context were caused by biases in the cognitive representations of the stimuli, but response biases in the similarity context were caused by biases in the comparison process induced by the choice task. Results suggest that changes in interaction costs not only change whether information was assessed from the external world or from memory but also introduce systematic biases in the cognitive representation of the information, which act as biased inputs to the subsequent decision-making and judgment processes. Results are consistent with the idea of interactive cognition, which proposes that representations and processes are contingent on the dynamic context defined by the information flow between the external task environment and internal cognition.     

The MRCI with juvenile detainees: optimizing performance or emphasizing ecological validity?

The Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI) are intended to be administered to legally involved youths in a setting free from distractions and stressors with the explicit goal of assessing the examinee's best understanding. However, marked disparities have been observed between juveniles' MRCI performance and their unassisted recall of a representative Miranda warning. We hypothesized that youths' very strong MRCI performance might be partially due to prompts and clarifications used whenever incomplete or ambiguous answers are provided. In this archival study, we systematically re‐scored three MRCI instruments from 231 legally involved youths to evaluate their original responses (i.e., non‐queried scoring). This approach is viewed as more ecologically valid because actual Miranda warnings are typically provided in a routine manner without assistance following each Miranda component. For the large majority of legally involved juveniles, only small differences were noted between standard and non‐queried scoring. However, some dramatic decrements were observed, especially on the Comprehension of Miranda Rights‐II (CMR‐II). More specifically, 15.7% of CMR‐II percentiles dropped precipitously by 60% or more, when using the non‐queried scores. The results are discussed within the context of optimized performances versus ecological validity as applied to Miranda evaluations.     

The Effects of Participation in Decision-Making on Worker Satisfaction and Productivity: An Organizational Simulation1

Although correlational evidence of a positive relationship between participation in decision-making and satisfaction is relatively consistent, whether participation in decision-making has a causal effect on satisfaction remains unclear. The present research examined, through an organizational simulation in which high and low levels of participation in decision-making were manipulated, the causal effect of participation on satisfaction and productivity. The subjects were 128 male undergraduates randomly assigned to 32 four-person groups. Results of the experiment showed that participation in decision-making had a significant positive effect on satisfaction. In addition, the correlation between perceived influence and satisfaction was positive (r= .31). Contrary to theoretically derived predictions, participation had no impact on productivity.     

Counterfactual Evaluation of Outcomes in Social Risk Decision-Making Situations: The Cognitive Developmental Paradox Revisited

We report a study that examined the existence of a cognitive developmental paradox in the counterfactual evaluation of decision-making outcomes. According to this paradox adolescents and young adults could be able to apply counterfactual reasoning and, yet, their counterfactual evaluation of outcomes could be biased in a salient socio-emotional context. To this aim, we analyzed the impact of health and social feedback on the counterfactual evaluation of outcomes in a laboratory decision-making task involving short narratives with the presence of peers. Forty risky (e.g., taking or refusing a drug), forty neutral decisions (e.g., eating a hamburger or a hotdog), and emotions felt following positive or negative outcomes were examined in 256 early, mid- and late adolescents, and young adults, evenly distributed. Results showed that emotional ratings to negative outcomes (regret and disappointment) but not to positive outcomes (relief and elation) were attenuated when feedback was provided. Evidence of development of cognitive decision-making capacities did also exist, as the capacity to perform faster emotional ratings and to differentially allocate more resources to the elaboration of emotional ratings when no feedback information was available increased with age. Overall, we interpret these findings as challenging the traditional cognitive developmental assumption that development necessarily proceeds from lesser to greater capacities, reflecting the impact of socio-emotional processes that could bias the counterfactual evaluation of social decision-making outcomes.     

Decision participation in public and private organizations

In recent years, there has been a convergence of democratic theory and management theory regarding the importance of participation in strategic decision making. In both the public and private sectors, the goal of increasing participation has been sought as a means to: (1) enhance the wisdom and effectiveness of decision-makers in crafting policy, and (2) secure the support of key actors in an organizations environment. Reform efforts, such as reinventing government and re-engineering the corporation, often have a goal of increasing participation by changing the structure of the organization. Despite the apparent enthusiasm for participation, it is not as easy to achieve as it might seem. Studies of the strategic decision-making process suggest that structural adaptations are not a particularly effective route to increase participation. In this study I examine participation in the strategic decisions of public and private organizations. A survey of 368 senior managers in public and private organizations is used to examine a model that relates participation to the decision type, the structure of the organization and the environment in which the decision is made. In doing so, I also examine the influence of internal (employees) and external (elected officials) participation in the decision processes of public and private organizations. The degree to which a decision falls under public and legal scrutiny, and the amount of “red tape” found in the organization prove to be critical factors influencing the amount of participation.     

Governance Processes and Change Within Organizational Participants of Multi-sectoral Community Health Care Alliances: The Mediating Role of Vision,Mission, Strategy Agreement and Perceived Alliance Value

Multi-sectoral community health care alliances are organizations that bring together individuals and organizations from different industry sectors to work collaboratively on improving the health and health care in local communities. Long-term success and sustainability of alliances are dependent on their ability to galvanize participants to take action within their ‘home’ organizations and institutionalize the vision, goals, and programs within participating organizations and the broader community. The purpose of this study was to investigate two mechanisms by which alliance leadership and management processes may promote such changes within organizations participating in alliances. The findings of the study suggest that, despite modest levels of change undertaken by participating organizations, more positive perceptions of alliance leadership, decision making, and conflict management were associated with a greater likelihood of participating organizations making changes as a result of their participation in the alliance, in part by promoting greater vision, mission, and strategy agreement and higher levels of perceived value. Leadership processes had a stronger relationship with change within participating organizations than decision-making style and conflict management processes. Open-ended responses by participants indicated that participating organizations most often incorporated new measures or goals into their existing portfolio of strategic plans and activities in response to alliance participation.     

The Exchange Boundary Framework: Understanding the Evolution of Power within Collaborative Decision-Making Settings

Many community decision-making bodies encounter challenges in creating conditions where stakeholders from disadvantaged populations can authentically participate in ways that give them actual influence over decisions affecting their lives (Foster-Fishman et al., Lessons for the journey: Strategies and suggestions for guiding planning, governance, and sustainability in comprehensive community initiatives. W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Battle Creek, MI, 2004). These challenges are often rooted in asymmetrical power dynamics operating within the settings (Prilleltensky, J Commun Psychol 36:116–136, 2008). In response, this paper presents the Exchange Boundary Framework, a new approach for understanding and promoting authentic, empowered participation within collaborative decision-making settings. The framework expands upon theories currently used in the field of community psychology by focusing on the underlying processes through which power operates in relationships and examining the evolution of power dynamics over time. By integrating concepts from social exchange theory (Emerson, Am Soc Rev 27:31–41, 1962) and social boundaries theory (Hayward, Polity 31(1):1–22, 1998), the framework situates power within parallel processes of resources exchange and social regulation. The framework can be used to understand the conditions leading to power asymmetries within collaborative decisionmaking processes, and guide efforts to promote more equitable and authentic participation by all stakeholders within these settings. In this paper we describe the Exchange Boundary Framework, apply it to three distinct case studies, and discuss key considerations for its application within collaborative community settings.     

Peer rejection as an antecedent of young children's school adjustment: an examination of mediating processes.

A short-term longitudinal design (N = 399) was used to examine peer relations processes that may mediate the relation between peer rejection and children's emotional and academic adjustment during kindergarten. These proposed mediating processes extend the current literature by explicating behavioral pathways via which the attitudinal construct of peer rejection may affect adjustment outcomes. Structural equatiton modeling results supported the hypothesis that negative peer treatment (e.g., victimization, refusal of peer group entry bids, and exclusion from peer activities) and classroom participation partially mediate the relationship between rejection and adjustment outcomes. Rejected children were more likely to experience negative peer treatment, more likely to show decreases in classroom participation, and more likely to report loneliness, to express a desire to avoid school, and to perform less well on achievement measures.