Sex and cultural differences in the factorial structure of the self-directed search

Holland's Self-Directed Search was administered to 247 male and 252 female high school students, aged 16 to 18 years, attending state schools in New Zealand. Principal factor analysis was used in an attempt to identify six orthogonal factors analogous to Holland's six personality types. The Social and Enterprising scales could not be split into two factors in either sample, and the Investigative and Realistic scales defined a single factor for the female students. Computed distances between pairs of the six personality types in five dimensional factorial space were compared with the relative ordering of the distances expected from Holland's hexagonal model. The positions of the types in space corresponded more closely with the model for the males than they did for the females. The results, in conjunction with those of similar studies in Israel and the United States, imply that the correspondence between some summary codes on the SDS and existing occupational classifications based on Holland's types may be less than perfect, particularly for females. Also, care should be taken when using codes on the SDS to calculate Holland's indices of “consistency,” especially for females.     

Life Change and Psychological Distress: The Role of Perceived Control and Desirability

Two studies were conducted to specify what attributes of life change events increase the risk of future psychological distress. It was hypothesized that the events perceived as both undesirable and uncontrollable would be most likely to be linked to subsequent distress. In the fiist study, which employed a retrospective methodology, 117 college students reported the life changes that occurred to them over a 3-month span and indicated the desirability and controll-ability of each event. These subjects also responded to an inventory, used in studies of community mental health, to assess symptoms of psychological distress. The findings indicated that only events perceived as both undesirable and uncontrollable were related to the incidence of psychological distress symptoms. Study 2 examined the same hypothesis in a prospective methodology. As in Study 1, only undesirable, uncontrollable life events were significantly related to subsequent psychological distress symptoms. The results of both studies implicate the importance of perceptions of control over aversive events in understanding the link between real life outcomes and illness.     

TEACHING THE HANDICAPPED TO EAT IN PUBLIC PLACES: ACQUISITION,GENERALIZATION AND MAINTENANCE OF RESTAURANT SKILLS

This study examined classroom-based instruction in restauranting skills for handicapped persons. Three male students were taught each of four skill components in sequential order: locating, ordering, paying, and eating and exiting. Training was implemented in a multiple baseline design across subjects and consisted of modeling and role playing in conjunction with photo slide sequences and a simulated ordering counter. The use of a menu containing general item classes and a finger matching procedure for identifying errors in the delivery of change greatly reduced the reading and math skills necessary to enter and complete the program. Periodic probes were conducted in a McDonald's restaurant prior to, during, and up to one-year following the termination of training. In addition, two probes (overt and covert observation) were conducted in a Burger King restaurant to assess further generalization to a location different from the one depicted throughout training. Results showed that students' performance on restaurant probes improved as a result of training, generalized to novel settings, maintained over an extended period of time, and was comparable to that of a normative sample of nonretarded persons.     

The more,the better?: Number of decisions as a determinant of memorability

Three experiments tested alternative explanations to the Johnson-Laird, Gibbs, and deMowbray (1978) proposal that the number of decisions made about a word is a major determinant of its memorability. The alternatives considered were increased processing time, retrieval aids, and the number of positive decisions. In Experiment 1, subjects made a speeded classification about each word for a category defined by three properties. Though items with more target properties were processed longer and better remembered, within a property level processing time was not associated with better memory. In Experiment 2, subjects received three properties, but different groups responded “Yes” to words with all three properties, words with any of the three properties, or whether words had each of the properties. As predicted by the number-of-decisions hypothesis, but not by the other hypotheses, with an increasing number of target properties, recall generally increased in the ALL group, decreased in the ANY group, and remained constant in the EACH group. In Experiment 3, this recall pattern was replicated with a different set of two target properties. The number-of-decisions notion is contrasted to the elaboration principle, and a simple model is proposed. It is concluded that the number of decisions is a useful technique for investigating within-level encoding differences     

Speaker bias in children's evaluation of the external consistency of statements

The hypothesis of this study is that an assumption of speaker credibility affects children's judgments of the external consistency of statements. In two experiments, first and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short paragraphs containing contradictory information from a contextual source and a speaker. The contextual source was described as either authoritative or nonauthoritative and discredited. The speaker was either an adult or child. Thus the contextual source was either more or less reliable than the speaker. Subjects were asked to affirm or contradict the speaker's statement, and to choose either the source or the speaker as most believable. The results showed that adult responses varied with the contextual source alone, while the responses of the first graders varied primarily with the speaker's age. The responses of the third graders varied with both factors. The results suggest young children can assess the external consistency of statements but frequently do not because of their assumptions about speakers and other performance factors.