Social Categorization and the Influence of Drug Involvement on Drug Attitude Structures: Implications for Assessing Drug Use and Tolerance in the Workplace1

Theories of social categorization were used to generate hypotheses concerning the impact of drug involvement on the attitudes and knowledge structures that people use in making drug-related judgments. Data indicated that greater drug exposure tended to foster more complex knowledge structures for drugs and drug users as revealed by subjects’ perceptions of drug users, tolerance for drug use, and perceptions of drug seriousness. Basically, high drug involvement in terms of personal alcohol use and associating with illicit drug users was related to greater individuation of drug user types. Therefore, high-involved subjects, relative to low-involved individuals, were better able to discriminate between different drug user subtypes and drug user subtypes were more important to high-involved subjects when responding to drug-related survey items.     

A note on the normal ogive or logistic curve in item analysis

It is common to assume that the proportion of correct answers to an item has a normal-ogive or logistic relationship to total test score. However, this is shown to be a mistaken and an undesirable notion.     

Some relations between guttman's principal components of scale analysis and other psychometric theory

Guttman's principal components for the weighting system are the item scoring weights that maximize the generalized Kuder-Richardson reliability coefficient. The principal component for any item is effectively the same as the factor loading of the item divided by the item standard deviation, the factor loadings being obtained from an ordinary factor analysis of the item intercorrelation matrix.     

A significance test for the hypothesis that two variables measure the same trait except for errors of measurement

The likelihood-ratio significance test is derived for the hypothesis that after correction for attenuation two variables have a perfect correlation in the population from which the sample is drawn.The writer is indebted to Professor John W. Tukey for his valuable suggestions on an earlier draft.     

An application of confidence intervals and of maximum likelihood to the estimation of an examinee's ability

A mathematical definition of the theoretical relation between the examinee's actual responses to the test items and his “true ability” is selected. A maximum-likelihood solution is obtained for estimating the examinee's “true ability” from his responses to the items. The standard error of the maximum-likelihood estimate is obtained, its relation to the discriminating power of the test is pointed out, and some generalizations are drawn as to the optimum level of item difficulty. The Neyman-Pearson power function is applied to determine which of two psychological tests is the most powerful for the selection of “successful” examinees.     

Patterns of Growth in Adaptive Social Abilities Among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Adaptive social skills were assessed longitudinally at approximately ages 2, 3, 5, 9, and 13 years in a sample of 192 children with a clinical diagnosis of autism (n = 93), PDD-NOS (n = 51), or nonspectrum developmental disabilities (n = 46) at age 2. Growth curve analyses with SAS proc mixed were used to analyze social trajectories over time. Both individual characteristics and environmental resources emerged as key predictors of adaptive social behavior outcome. The gap between children with autism and the other two diagnostic groups widened with time as the social skills of the latter groups improved at a higher rate. However, within diagnostic groups, improvement ranged from minimal to very dramatic. Children with autism most at risk for problems with social adaptive abilities later in life can be identified with considerable accuracy at a very young age so they can be targeted for appropriate early intervention services.     

Neighborhood crime and self-care: risks for aggression and lower academic performance

This longitudinal study evaluated associations among official rates of neighborhood crime, academic performance, and aggression in a sample of 581 children in 1st-3rd grade (6.3-10.6 years old). It was hypothesized that the influence of crime depends on children's unsupervised exposure to the neighborhood context through self-care. Average weekly hours in self-care were trichotomized into low (0-3), moderate (4-9), and high (10-15). Moderate and high amounts of self-care were linked to increased aggression and decreased academic performance for children from high-crime areas (11,230 crimes per 100,000 persons) but not average-crime areas, when the authors controlled for neighborhood, family, and child covariates. In high-crime areas, academic outcomes were more favorable when self-care occurred in combination with after-school program participation.     

Beyond pleasure: emotion activity affects the relationship between attitudes and behavior

The research examined an additional proposed moderator of the attitude-behavior relationship: the activity level of emotions associated with an attitude object. In Experiment 1, participants who self-generated active rather than passive emotions as being associated with gay men displayed greater attitude-behavior consistency in hiring recommendations for a gay job applicant, as did participants who rated active rather than passive experimenter-provided emotions as being associated with gay men. In Experiment 2, participants who were instructed to associate active rather than passive emotions with gay men subsequently displayed greater attitude-behavior consistency in similar hiring recommendations. It is suggested that future research on the affective component of attitudes might benefit from going beyond consideration of whether the associated emotions entail displeasure or pleasure.     

The impact of previous leaders on the evaluation of new leaders: an alternative to prototype matching

In 2 studies, this research demonstrated the existence of leader transference, a cognitive process whereby mental representations of previous leaders are activated and used for evaluation when new, similar leaders are encountered. The 1st study demonstrated that exposure to a new leader who was similar to a past leader led to erroneous generalization of leader characteristics and associated underlying attributions. The 2nd study showed that expectations of just treatment and abuse were also subject to transfer from old to new, similar leaders, although positive and negative affective responses were not. Results suggested that individuals exposed to a leader who was not reminiscent of an old leader were more likely to use a general leader prototype to form leader expectations, whereas individuals exposed to a leader who was similar to an old leader activated a significant other mental representation for use in making judgments. These results have implications for individual- and relational-level processes as characterized by implicit leadership theory and leader-member exchange theory as well as macro theories of leader succession and organizational culture change.