Religion in Public Schools

If neutrality in religion is truly to be achieved in public schools, then more emphasis must be placed on providing nonbiased instruction on comparative religions and other similar topics.     

Advocates for All Students: An American Right

The question of advocates for students in public schools has generated diverse responses. Administrators may believe that an unnecessary adversarial relationship will be encouraged by an outside advocacy organization. Yet, administrators polled for this study estimated that as many as 50% of students may not have advocates, and the advocates of an additional 25% are relatively unskilled in their advocacy attempts. Considering that the presence of advocates has been shown to increase student retention and academic success, it seems imperative that exemplary programs be identified and modeled throughout our public school system.     

VISION: A Model of Culture for Counselors

Current and popular views of multiculturalism emphasize between-group differences attributable to race and ethnicity with little appreciation of within-group differences, the individuality of each person's phenomenal field, or an individual's capacity to participate in different groups. VISION is a model of culture that accounts for within-group and between-group differences, the disappearance of groups, and the emergence of new ones. VISION has program applications pertinent to counselor education in the areas of mental health counseling and in modeling the multicultural training of counselors. A paradigmatic shift from a group level of abstraction to the individual is commonly contemplated among cultural anthropologists, but the need for this shift is illustrated in a counseling context.     

Test Anxiety Workshops Using Undergraduates as Leaders

Many college students delay seeking counseling for test anxiety until too little time remains before the exams for adequate scheduling with counselors. A one-hour test-anxiety workshop using 13 specially trained undergraduate leaders served 195 students with test-anxiety problems. Most (89%–94%) reported beneficial effects from the low-cost workshops.     

Empathy-congruence-caring are not singular

The conditions which are basic to constructive human relationships in the psychotherapeutic setting are explored as they are currently being expressed in the context of our larger society. The article's thesis is that various elements of our modern society are expressing single dimensions of these necessary conditions, and that these dimensions, when they occur separately, are insufficient for facilitative human interaction.     

Young Children's Creative Solutions To Realistic and Fanciful Story Problems

This study examined the creative problem solving of young children as evidenced in their responses to realistic and fanciful stories posing similar problems (i.e., key character trapped and in need of rescue). One-hundred young children listened to two stories; one about a puppy trapped in a hole (realistic) and one about a prince caught in a tower (fanciful). The children were asked to complete the stories by thinking of ways to get the puppy or the prince out. The children's responses were scored for fluency (number), elaboration (detail), flexibility (conceptual shifts), originality (novelty), effectiveness, and realism. Overall, the results suggest that the children's performance improved with age and experience, although their solutions tended to remain ineffective and unoriginal. As predicted, the children strongly preferred the puppy to the prince story, although preference did not generally affect their creative performance. The practical and theoretical implications of the study are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Career Counseling with Gay Men: Issues and Recommendations for Research

This article reviews the available literature on career issues facing gay men, identifies potentially crucial issues confronting practicing career counselors, and suggests how to work with gay men regarding career issues. Suggestions for future research are also presented.     

Organizational Conflict Management as Disputing Process The Problem of Social Escalation

In this article, organizational conflict management is conceived as a “disputing process” involving the social escalation from grievance stage to conflict and dispute stages. The Disputing Process Instrument (DPI) was designed as a way to study these phenomena quantitatively. Seven behaviors are represented in the instrument: conciliatory negotiation, third-party mobilization, overt retaliation, covert retaliation, toleration, avoidance, and discipline. The DPI demonstrated high reliability, content, discriminant, and construct validity relative to earlier conflict instruments. An empirical study of social escalation was conducted among peers with different strengths of informal relations in an electronics firm. The study results revealed that interpersonal problems among weakly tied peers are likely to be contained at the grievance stage using covert behaviors or to be socially escalated to disputes involving third parties. More strongly tied peers are likely to escalate their problems from grievances to dyadic confrontations only. These results have implications for understanding disparate results from earlier studies of peer conflict in organizations and for arguments regarding the introduction of external third-party conflict consulting in organizations.     

Bulimia: Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment and Relapse Prevention

The authors review the assumptions about processes that maintain bulimic behavior. Specific treatment package recommendations are made on the basis of selected outcome literature. Special issues, such as Axis II diagnosis, hospitalization, and psychopharmaceutics, are addressed.     

Family Therapy Training in Clinical Psychology Programs

In a national questionnaire survey of graduate programs offering the Ph.D. or Psy.D. in clinical psychology, the status of family therapy training was examined. With a 79 per cent response rate (102 programs), the study found that 10 per cent of the nationwide faculty identified themselves as primarily family therapy oriented, 32 per cent of the programs had no family-oriented faculty members, 18 per cent of all psychotherapy courses were family therapy courses, and 21 per cent of the schools had no family therapy course. The ratings of the importance of providing students with family therapy training were found to be unrelated to the number of family therapy courses available but positively correlated with the percentage of family therapy courses within the total curriculum.