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.     

Interpersonal Forgiveness Within the Helping Professions: An Attempt to Resolve Differences of Opinion

Lakatos's (1978) philosophy of science is used as a guide for resolving published authors' differences of opinion about interpersonal forgiveness. We first review the ancient writings and current philosophical works regarding interpersonal forgiveness. With these ideas as a foundation we then critique six published papers on forgiveness, all of which have counseling implications. It is suggested that the works are not yet grounded in the foundational writings on forgiveness. The works, thus, may need some refinement in the area of definition, or proposed consequences for a forgiver, or in the processes used to bring about forgiveness in clients. A process model of interpersonal forgiveness then is described. Implications for the use of interpersonal forgiveness within counseling are drawn.     

Developing and Using Educational and Psychological Tests and Measures: The Unificationist Perspective

This article presents a critical review of traditional testing practices and offers the unificationist perspective as the next logical step in the evolution of psychological and educational measurement. Building on the notion that any activity involving testing should be unified under the rubric of the scientific method, the unificationist view is defined and contrasted to traditional test validation strategies. Implications for test development and for the use of tests and measures in counseling (e.g., interest inventories, personality measures) are delineated from the unificationist perspective.     

Detecting salary discrimination against male and female managers

This paper reports two experiments that examine factors influencing the detection of salary discrimination in organizations. Subjects were presented with information about the qualifications and salaries of female and male managers in 10 departments of an hypothetical company and were asked to judge the fairness of these salaries. It was hypothesized that the amount of information and the format in which it is presented influence fairness judgments. Moreover it was hypothesized that males and females differ in their fairness judgments. The two experiments corroborate these hypotheses. The results are interpreted in terms of two possible information processing biases: encoding bias and attributional bias.     

The division of labor in close relationships: An asymmetrical conflict issue

This research addresses couples’reports of their (hypothetical) attempts to maintain or change a gendered division of labor through conflict interactions. Two experiments in which spouses responded to scenarios showed that spouses reported more conflict over the division of housework than conflict over paid work and child care, and that wives more often than husbands desired a change in their spouses’contribution. Spouses reported more wife‐demand/husband‐withdraw than husband‐demand/wife‐withdraw interaction during hypothetical conflict over the division of labor, but only when the wife desired a change in her spouse's contribution. Together, the data imply that wife‐demand/husband‐withdraw interaction is a likely response to the asymmetrically structured conflict situation in which the wife is discontent with her husband's contribution to housework, while her husband wants to maintain the status quo. We further showed that defenders of the status quo were more likely expected to reach their goal than complainants. In the role of complainant, wives were more likely expected to reach their goal than were their husbands, but only when the conflict issue concerned their own gender stereotypical domain (i.e., family work).