Gender-related assessment of childhood play

Parent-report based scales for the assessment of sex-dimorphic behavior are an important tool in research on psychosexual differentiation and its disorders. This paper presents the factor analysis and corresponding scale development for the slightly expanded Child Game Participation Questionnaire (Bates & Bentler, 1973), based on the parents of a demographically diverse school sample of 355 girls and 333 boys aged 6 to 10 years. Evidence supporting each of three theoretical positions in gender assessment — unidimensional bipolar, two-dimensional unipolar, and multidimensional — was provided. Effect sizes were unusually large for gender, but small for age, socioeconomic level, and race/ethnicity.This research was supported in part by a NICHD postdoctoral fellowship (NRSA HD06726; sponsor: Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg) awarded to Dr. Sandberg, by grants to Dr. Ehrhardt and Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg from the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and NIMH (center grant 2-P50-MH43520, Anke A. Ehrhardt, Ph.D., Principal Investigator), and by the NIMH Clinical Research Center grant MH-30906.We thank the children and parents who participated in the study. Dr. Jacob Cohen consulted on statistical matters. Ms. Patricia Connolly provided word processing services. A portion of this work was presented as a poster at the XIth Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 3–7, 1991 (Abstracts, p. 285).     

Social integration and social support in a life crisis: Effects of macrosocial change in east Germany

This process evaluation study examined what variables moderate and mediate treatment effects on days in stable housing and client satisfaction for homeless mentally ill clients. In general, demographic characteristics did not moderate either outcome variable. Housing contacts, entitlement contacts, mental health contacts, and supportive services were significant mediators of the treatment effect on days in stable housing. Program contacts, mental health contacts, and supportive services were significant mediators of client satisfaction. The authors thank the National Institute of Mental Health for their financial support (MH43248, MH42357) for this project, Dorothy Gano for word processing and editorial assistance, and Gitry Heydebrand, Melissa Dannelet, Betty Tempelhoff, Ruth Smith, and Laeeq Ahmad for assisting in the interviews of clients. We are also appreciative of the cooperation given to us by the staffs of Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center, St. Patrick's Center, the Community Advocacy and Support Alliance Program, and the St. Louisemergency shelters. Finally, we thank all of the participants in this study; we hope that their homelessness has now ended. (The conclusions presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect official National Institute for Mental Health policy.)     

Depression and unemployment: Panel findings from the Epidemiologic Catchment Area study

Studies that have found an association between unemployment and psychological depression often fail to establish the direction of causal influence. Analyses of Epidemiologic Catchment Area panel data revealed that of employed respondents not diagnosed with major depression at first interview, those who became unemployed had over twice the risk of increased depressive symptoms and of becoming clinically depressed as those who continued employed. Although the increase in symptoms was statistically significant, the effect on clinical depression was not, possibly because of the low power of the test. The reverse causal path from clinical depression at Time 1 to becoming unemployed by Time 2 was not supported. The unemployment rate in the respondent's community at time of interview was not related directly to psychological depression but appeared associated indirectly with depression via its impact on the risk of becoming unemployed. Implications for policy and further research were discussed. The research described in this paper was supported by Grant #5 RO1 AA08379-02 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The authors appreciate the suggestions provided by members of the Consortium for Research Involving Stress Processes sponsored by the W. T. Grant Foundation and by two anonymous journal reviewers.     

Preparing to Counsel Clients of Different Religious Backgrounds: A Phenomenological Approach

With a clientele reflecting the profound demographic changes taking place in the United States, counselors in the 1990s need to acquire a practical understanding of religious beliefs that may be new and different to them. In their religious research and study, counselors must avoid the pitfalls of bias and stereotyping. The phenomenological method is proposed as a means of studying religion with minimum distortion from personal prejudices and presuppositions.     

My place,your place,and no place: Behavior settings as a risk factor for HIV-related injection practices of drug users in Baltimore,Maryland

Information is sparse on the social context of illicit drug injection behaviors and their relationship to HIV infection. This study examined relationships between injection settings, injecting with others, and HIV risk behaviors of sharing needles and not cleaning contaminated needles in a sample of 630 inner-city injecting drug users in Baltimore, MD. Through open-ended interviews, five primary settings of injection behavior were identified. These settings included one's own, friends' and mother's residence, shooting galleries, and semipublic areas. Most participants reported injecting in their own residence (92%) and friends' residence (86%) in the prior 6 months. In a multiple regression analysis, injecting at friends' residence, in shooting galleries, and in semipublic areas and frequency of injecting with others were significantly associated with frequency of sharing uncleaned needles, “slipping” (i.e., failure to disinfect shared needles), and not always cleaning used needles before injecting. Results suggest that interventions may benefit from targeting settings as well as behaviors to reduce the spread of HIV. This research was supported by grants DA04334, DA05911, DA06313, and DA08985 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.     

Accounting for macro-level causation

By a macro-level feature, I understand any feature that supervenes on, and is thus realized in, lower-level features. Recent discussions by Kim have suggested that such features cannot be causally relevant insofar as they are not classically reducible to lower-level features. This seems to render macro-level features causally irrelevant. I defend the causal relevance of some such features. Such features have been thought causally relevant in many examples that have underpinned philosophical work on causality. Additionally, in certain typical biological cases, we conceive of causally relevant features at various compatible levels of analysis. When elaborated, these points make a strong prima facie case for macro-level causal relevance. However, we might abandon both the philosophical guideposts and the corresponding explanatory practice in the special sciences were we convinced that no reflective philosophical account could provide for the causal relevance there supposed. I show that such drastic measures are not necessary, for we can make sense of macro-level causal relevance by drawing on Paul Humphreys' recent work in ways suggested by the concrete examples considered here.Some of the work on this paper was undertaken at the 1991 NEH Summer Seminar on Causality, directed by Paul Humphreys. I wish to thank my fellow participants, and Paul Humphreys, John Tienson, and Terry Horgan for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

An analysis of latency and interresponse time in free recall

In four experiments, subjects freely recalled previously studied items while a voice key and computer recorded each item’s recall latency relative to the onset of the recall period. The measures of recall probability and mean recall latency were shown to be empirically independent, demonstrating that there exists no a priori relationship between the two. In all four experiments, latency distributions were fit well by the ex-Gaussian, suggesting that retrieval includes a brief normally distributed initiation stage followed by a longer exponentially distributed search stage. Further, the variation in mean latency stemmed from the variation in the duration of the search stage, not the initiation stage. Interresponse times (IRTs), the time elapsed between two successive item recalls, were analyzed as well. The growth of mean IRTs, plotted as a function of output position, was shown to be a simple function of the number of items not yet recalled. Finally, the mathematical nature of both free recall latency and IRT growth are shown to be consistent with a simple theoretical account of retrieval that depicts mean recall latency as a measure of the breadth of search.     

Memory impairment and source misattribution in postevent misinformation experiments with short retention intervals

The four experiments reported here provide evidence that (1) misleading postevent suggestions can impair memory for details in a witnessed event and (2) subjects sometimes remember sug-gested details as things seen in the event itself. All four experiments used recall tests in which subjects were warned of the possibility that the postevent information included misleading sug-gestions and were instructed to report both what they witnessed in the event and what was men-tioned in the postevent narrative. Recall of event details was poorer on misled items than on control items, and subjects sometimes misidentified the sources of their recollections. Our re-sults suggest that these findings are not due to guessing or response biases, but rather reflect genuine memory impairment and source monitoring confusions.     

Repairing the reticulated model of scientific rationality

InScience and Values (1984) and other, more recent, works, e.g. (1987a, 1987b, 1989a, 1989b, 1990), Larry Laudan proposes a theory of scientific debate he dubs the reticulated model of scientific rationality (Laudan, 1984, pp. 50–66). The model stands in sharp contrast to hierarchical approaches to rationality exemplified by Popper (1959), Hempel (1965), and Reichenbach (1938), as well as the conventionalist views of rationality defended by Carnap (1950), Popper (1959), Kuhn (1962), and Lakatos (1978). Ironically, the model commits some of the same errors Laudan finds in hierarchicalist and conventionalists approaches to scientific rationality. This paper will show that the model can be fixed by recognizing that criteria of goal assessment have no privileged status. These rules are best viewed as simply rules of rationality (or rules of scientific method) by another name.