Managing Old Age: The Disciplinary Web of Power, Surveillance and Normalization

Health and welfare have emerged as key vehicles used to legitimize and position the identities that older people adopt in contemporary western societies. Both health and welfare contain specific yet continually changing technologies that function to mediate relations between older people and the state. Medico-technical and care management discourses have been presented as adding choice and reducing limitations associated with adult aging. However, they also represent an increase in professional control that can be exerted on lifestyles in older age and thus, the wider social meanings associated with that part of the lifecourse. This article presents a theoretical analysis based on a critical reading of the work of Michel Foucault; identifies the interrelationship between managers and older people in terms of power, surveillance and normalization; and highlights how and why older people remain the subjects of legitimizing professional gazes.     

Are absolute frequencies,relative frequencies,or both effective in reducing cognitive biases?

Biases in probabilistic reasoning are affected by alterations in the presentation of judgment tasks. In our experiments, students made likelihood judgments that an event was produced by various causes. These judgments were made in terms of probability, relative frequency or absolute frequency on a full or a pruned list of causes. When they had little personal experience of the event (causes of death), the pruning bias was smaller with relative frequencies than with absolute frequencies or probabilities. When they had more personal experience of the event (missing a lecture), the bias was less with both types of frequency than with probability but still lowest with relative frequency. We suggest that likelihood information is usually stored as relative frequencies when it has been obtained from public sources but that it is based on event counts when it is derived from personal experience. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding of the current police caution (England and Wales)

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (England and Wales) modified suspects' right to silence during police questioning and required a new police caution. The current 37-word caution was introduced after it was found that a proposed 60-word draft version was too complex. The results of the present study show that, although more succinct, the current caution is no easier to explain. Even under optimal conditions, when the participants could focus on each sentence in turn, only 1 in 10 of the general population (n=15), 6 in 10 of A-level students preparing for university (n=72) and 9 in 10 police officers (n=21) demonstrated their understanding by explaining all three sentences correctly. For all groups, the difficulties were more marked when the caution was presented in its entirety, as would happen in real life. The complexity of the caution has serious implications for suspects in police detention. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why does impression management positively influence interview ratings? The mediating role of competence and warmth

Though interviews assess job applicants' skills and abilities, they can be influenced by extraneous factors, including impression management (IM) tactics. Interviewees’ self‐promotion and ingratiation IM tactics predict higher interview ratings; however, researchers have yet to determine why these tactics work. We assessed whether two fundamental dimensions of social perception, competence and warmth, mediate the relationship between IM tactics and interview ratings. We hypothesized that interviewee competence mediates the relationship between self‐promotion and interview ratings, and interviewee warmth mediates the relationship between ingratiation and interview ratings. Using real employment interviews, we found that competence mediates the relationship between self‐promotion and interview ratings, but warmth did not mediate the relationship between ingratiation and interview ratings in the way we expected.     

How Prevalent is Contract Cheating and to What Extent are Students Repeat Offenders?

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people who employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets (N = 1378) and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students (3.5%), on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples (from 0.3% to 7.9%). Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence.     

Relationship of social support and social burden to repeated breast cancer screening in the women's health initiative.

Direct and interactive effects of social support, social burden (caregiving, negative life events, and social strain), education, and income on repeated use of breast cancer screening among a large (N=55,278), national sample of postmenopausal women participating in the Women's Health Initiative observational study were examined. Repeated screening decreased as emotional/informational support and positive social interactions decreased (ps<.01). Repeated mammography decreased with frequent caregiving (p<.01). Less social strain reduced the frequency of repeated breast self-examinations (BSEs; ps<.01), but frequent caregiving and more negative life events increased repeated use of BSE (ps<.01). Interactive effects suggested that emotional/informational but not tangible support is associated with repeated mammography and clinical breast examinations (ps<.01) and may be particularly important among low-income older women, especially those burdened by caregiving.