COMMONALITY ANALYSIS: A METHOD FOR DECOMPOSING EXPLAINED VARIANCE IN MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSES

Commonality analysis is a procedure for decomposing R² in multiple regression analyses into the percent of variance in the dependent variable associated with each independent variable uniquely, and the proportion of explained variance associated with the common effects of predictors. Commonality analysis thus sheds additional light on the magnitude of an obtained multivariate relationship by identifying the relative importance of all independent variables, findings which can be of theoretical and practical significance. In this paper we offer a brief explication of commonality analysis; a step-by-step discussion of how communication researchers may perform commonality analyses using output from computer-assisted statistical analysis programs like SPSS; and we provide an extended example illustrating a commonality analysis.     

Child Abuse: parental rights and the interests of the child

ABSTRACT I criticise the 'liberal'view of the proper relationship between the family and State, namely that, although the interests of the child should be paramount, parents are entitled to rights of both privacy and autonomy which should be abrogated only when the child suffers a specifiable harm. I argue that the right to bear children is not absolute, and that it only grounds a right to rear upon an objectionable proprietarian picture of the child as owned by its producer. If natural parents have any rights to rear they derive from duties to bring their children into rational maturity where they can exercise rights for themselves. The presumption that natural parents are best suited to rear their own children should be discounted, as should the assumption that alternatives to natural parenting are unacceptably bad. I reject the suggestion that parents should be 'licensed'but argue for a much closer monitoring of the family. Familial privacy, which such monitoring breaches, is shown to have a culturally specific and, given the facts of abuse, dubious value. In conclusion, I briefly specify the forms of monitoring I approve.