Two forms of minority-group test bias as psychometric artifacts with an animal model (Rattus norvegicus)

Controversy abounds over attributing group differences on tests to nature, nurture, or test bias. Limitations of correlational sampling from natural populations necessitate experimental methods to resolve underlying issues. In classical psychometrics test items are selected from a larger item pool through analysis of item responses in a sample of subjects. Rats of six inbred strains (n = 366) were tested in multiple mazes to provide a large item pool. Six populations were created, each with differing proportions of each strain. Items selected through independent item analyses within each population yielded six tests. An independent cross-validation sample (n = 146) provided scores on all six tests. This sample was also tested in another set of maze problems defined as the criterion to be predicted. Strain means and intrastrain predictive validities for the six tests varied with strain representation in the population used for item selection (p less than .001). Conventional item-selection procedures clearly produced two forms of minority test bias.     

Coping with victimization: The impact of rape on female survivors,male significant others,and parents

This paper reports on an unusual study of survivors of rape and the effects on the victim, her significant male other person, and her parents. All survivors were victims of the same rapist and were interviewed from 21 months to ten years after the event. The study indicates that the long-term effects of rape may be more significant than previous researchers and practitioners thought was the case. Recommendations are given for more effective help for survivors and those close to them.This study was funded by the Ohio Department of Mental Health, Office of Program Evaluation and Research, Columbus, Ohio, 1985.     

Individual differences in reverse Hindsight bias: I never thought something like chernobyl would happen. Did I?

Hindsight bias was studied in the context of the accident in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which took place on April 26th 1986. An individual difference factor which relates to the motivation to process information, need for cognition, was expected to moderate the occurrence of hindsight bias. Probability estimates of many casualties due to the use of nuclear power in The Netherlands were obtained from 212 individuals two months before the accident in Chernobyl. These estimates were compared with similar estimates made in hindsight by the same individuals five months after the accident. Loglinear Analyses reveal a systematic hindsight bias. However, the direction of the bias was contrary to expectations. In hindsight, individuals gave lower probabilities than they actually did two months before the Chernobyl accident. These results reveal a reverse hindsight bias. As hypothesized, need for cognition moderates hindsight bias: individuals low and medium in need for cognition express a systematic reverse hindsight bias, while individuals high in need for cognition do not. High need for cognition individuals also show higher literal consistency between the two measurements, which supports a memory explanation of the moderating effect of need for cognition.     

Learning from lectures: The effect of varying the detail in lecture handouts on note-taking and recall

Previous research on the effect of lecture handouts on student learning indicates that students who are given skeletal handouts usually perform better in course examinations than students who take all their own notes. The present study investigates whether the amount of detail in the handout is a critical factor in this. A randomized groups experiment was conducted in the context of a course on dental surgery. Four lecture handout conditions (headings and full text; headings and key points; headings only; no supplementary materials) were compared on tests 2 days and 2 weeks after the lecture. The significant differences between conditions were: ‘headings only’ better than ‘headings and key points’ on the first test; ‘headings only’ better than ‘no supplementary materials’ on the second test; and ‘headings and full text’ better than ‘no supplementary materials’ on the second test. These results indicate that the amount of detail is a critical factor in handout effectiveness.     

Edward Kellog Strong,Jr.: First Author of the Strong Interest Inventory

Ralph Bedell, professor emeritus of educational and counseling psychology, was interviewed to gain insight into the influence of the National Defense Counseling and Guidance Institutes on the history of counseling and to learn about the man who was responsible for the NDEA program.     

UCLA's Career Counseling Center: A Dialogue About a Unique Service

In this interview, two counseling psychologists describe aspects of a relatively unique career counseling service that has been validated by 40 years of success in the marketplace. Composed of 3 intensive individual interviews and 15 to 25 hours of educational and psychological testing, the service assists clients in identifying and beginning pursuit of suitable educational and occupational goals. The counselors describe how they organize and sift through test results to formulate recommendations for a client's unique career circumstances, why they accept responsibility for developing and presenting concrete recommendations, and what the changes in their clients' concerns suggest about the evolution of work in the United States. Their specificity and professionalism will help counselors understand the craft of career counseling.     

Marx,technocracy, and the corporatist ethos

Communism, in Marx' mind, did not mean simple liberation, but the economics of liberation. The realm of necessity (technē) was to become the primary field for emancipation (praxis), the latter taking form in new institutions, responsive to real socio-economic needs. In this sense, the problem of technocracy and the corporatist ethos in Marx are part of a broader discursive structure, which links the experiences of workers through the industrial revolution with the philosophies ofpraxis as they reach from Hegel through Marković.     

Evaluation of a mutual help network for the elderly residents of planned housing

We set up a mutual help network among the elderly residents of a government-subsidized apartment building and evaluated its impact on their social ties, social support satisfaction, and depression. A quasi-experimental design was used, with the residents of a similar building located in the same neighborhood serving as the control group. A total of 230 individual services were exchanged, and 28 group activities were organized during the study period. There was almost no difference between experimental and control groups with respect to the change over the study period in the number of social ties with other residents of the building. Support satisfaction decreased in both groups, but the decrease was larger in the experimental group. The control group had a slight decrease in the frequency of their depressive symptoms, whereas the experimental group had a moderate increase. More research is needed on the ability of social support interventions to produce beneficial effects on mental health among individuals who are not experiencing a particular life stress.     

A longitudinal study of the psychosocial impact of stroke on primary support persons

We investigated longitudinally the effects of a stroke on the social support systems and well-being of the patient's primary support person, both acutely and as the condition stabilized. Individuals who had suffered a first stroke and a primary support person participated in two waves of data collection, carried out in 6-month intervals beginning 7 weeks after the stroke. Our data show that the prevalence of depressive symptoms is from 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 times higher than rates found among representative samples of middle-aged and elderly populations. Mean level of depression did not change over time, although level of optimism declined significantly. Multiple regression analyses showed that levels of depression and perceived burden in support persons are highly related to aspects of the stroke such as its severity, and that demographic variables such as age and income play a relatively minor role in attenuating these relations in the acute adjustment phase. However, from 7 to 9 months after the stroke, well-established demographic variables such as health, income, and age were significant predictors of depression. Individuals who were older and who had good health and higher incomes were least depressed.     

A content analysis of the conversational behavior of accepted and rejected children

The present study was designed to assess whether the conversational behavior of children separated into accepted, rejected, and mixed-status dyads differed along the dimensions of listening to, paying attention to, and indicating interest in their dyadic partner. Conversations of 40 third-grade dyads were analyzed as they occurred in a 2- min waiting period and a 4- min conversation period. Seventeen categories of verbal behaviors that indexed these dimensions were used as content codes. Multivariate analyses of variance performed on the observational data yielded significant main effects for status, sex, and experimental condition. Results are interpreted in terms of previous social skills research, and suggestions for future research are offered.