Analysing the perceptions of pedestrians and drivers to shared space

Shared space is an approach to improving streets and places where both pedestrians and vehicles are present, with layouts related more to the pedestrian scale and with features encouraging drivers to assume priority having been reduced or removed. It creates a more pedestrian-friendly environment than conventional street layouts, which are based on greater segregation between pedestrians and vehicles, while at the same time introducing uncertainty, which makes drivers engage more fully with their surroundings, leading to lower vehicle speeds and improved safety. This paper investigates the importance of certain person-, context- and design-specific factors affecting the perceptions of pedestrians and drivers to shared space. Using two web-based stated-preference surveys, two sets of responses are collected from pedestrians and drivers, who are presented with different combinations of binary factors forming scenarios. Regression analysis is carried out with logit models for each survey. The results suggest that pedestrians feel most comfortable in shared space under conditions which ensure their presence is clear to other road users – these conditions include low vehicular traffic, high pedestrian traffic, good lighting and pedestrian-only facilities. Conversely, the presence of many pedestrians and, in particular, children and elderly, makes drivers feel uneasy and, therefore, enhances their alertness.     

Rationalism,irrationalism and taylorism

From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness, by Bernard Doray, London: Free Association Books, 1988, 229 pages, hb £27.50, pb £11.95.     

Psychological treatment and reconstruction with a chronic pain patient

This article describes the psychological treatment of a chronic pain patient using a single case design methodology in order to evaluate changes in symptomatic measures as well as in Repertory Grid Test scores. These changes included a substantial reduction in levels of subjective pain and anxiety as well as a reduction in symptom superordinacy, level of self-dissatisfaction, and positive meaning (“payoff”) of anxiety. Results are discussed in relation to the literature on pain and on personal construct theory.     

ACTIONS,HABITS AND CONSTITUTION

In this paper I offer a critique of the view made popular by Davidson that rationalization is a species of causal explanation, and propose instead that in many cases the explanatory relation is constitutive. Given Davidson’s conception of rationalization, which allows that a huge range of states gathered under the heading ‘pro attitude’ could rationalize an action, I argue that whilst the causal thesis may have some merit for some such ‘attitudes’, it has none for others. The problematic ‘attitudes’ are those which can be attributed to the agent only on the basis of her history of doing a certain sort of thing. In other words, they are among the agent’s habits. I argue that such temporally extended states cannot be the causes of any present occurrence. Instead, I suggest we should think of the present action as partly constituting the state in question, and give a corresponding interpretation of the explanatory relation. Such explanations invite us to abandon a conception of agency narrowly based on psychology, in favour of an enriched one which takes an agent’s habits to partly constitute the agent.     

Authoritarianism as an Agent of Status Quo Maintenance: Implications for Women's Careers and Family Lives

We examined how right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) influenced career and family plans and life outcomes in 2 samples of educated women. In the college-aged sample, participants who planned to earn professional degrees scored higher on RWA than those who planned to earn graduate degrees in the humanities or social sciences. RWA was also positively related to the expression of preferences for male partners who possess masculine characteristics. In the midlife sample, RWA scores were higher for participants with traditional career and family outcomes at midlife. For midlife participants following a nontraditional career path, RWA was positively related to compartmentalizing career and family responsibilities and finding role combination stressful. Authoritarianism is important for understanding women's decisions about combining career and family.     

Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis

Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Said's work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant culture. Orientalism remains even more critical now than twenty-five years ago because the task of taking hold of self-representation has become, for Palestinians, a matter of life and death. Resistance (muqãwamah) was first applied to literature by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani, and the example of post-colonial literature remains the crucial model for the Palestinian people. This article proposes that the post-colonial strategy of transformation turns resistance from a simple opposition to a control of the means of representation. Success for the Palestinian people will never come from armed struggle but from the control of representation and the communication of the Palestinian situation to a dominant audience. In this way the achievement of Orientalism can be extended to the level of contemporary politics.     

Learning Through Shared Christian Praxis: Reflective Practice in the Classroom

The cultivation of reflective practice has become a commonly accepted goal of theological education. However, theological educators must face the challenge of teaching and assessing reflective practice. Hypothesizing that this concern is best addressed in community, the authors of this article devised a collaborative action‐research project using Thomas Groome's “shared Christian praxis” model. They describe the ways in which they have, over the course of the project, modified their pedagogy to improve their students' reflection on practice.     

Traditional and Nontraditional Women's Attributions of Responsibility to Physically Resistive and Nonresistive Rape Victims1

This research examined the interactive effect of women observers' sex-role attitudes and a victim's use of physical resistance on perceptions of victim responsibility for a sexual assault. Women read one of two rape scenarios in which a victim either did or did not physically resist a rapist's attack and made judgments concerning victim responsibility. The observers were categorized as being either traditionally conservative or nontraditionally profeminist in their attitudes toward women and their roles in society. An analysis of responsibility judgments indicated that traditional women perceived a victim who resisted the attack as being more responsible for her own victimization than did nontraditional women, whereas nontraditional women assigned more responsibility to a victim who did not resist than did traditional women. These results are considered from a sex-role socialization perspective; the implications of these findings for legal and health care professionals are discussed.     

Gender typing,importance of multiple roles,and mental health consequences for women

The present study examined the interactive influence of gender role typing and multiple role involvement with regard to specific mental health concerns among middle-class Caucasian women. As with previous research, depression and anxiety proved to be a function of gender role typing (feminine-typed and undifferentiated women displayed greater depression and anxiety relative to masculine-typed or androgynous women) with no differences attributable to multiple role involvement. For substance abuse, however, an interaction effect was obtained. Gender-typed (both masculine and feminine) women striving to excel across multiple roles engaged in greater substance abuse than women not gender typed (androgynous and undifferentiated); indeed, the latter displayed low risk comparable to women not similarly striving at multiple roles regardless of gender typing. A similar interaction previously has been reported with regard to disordered eating. These findings suggest that the lack of gender typing for women may enable them to cope more effectively with the conflicting demands of multiple roles and thereby reduce certain health risk behaviors (e.g., disordered eating and substance abuse), but that other mental health concerns (e.g., depression and anxiety) may not be similarly affected.