A community program to reward children's use of seat belts

This paper reports on a community-wide effort to increase elementary school children's use of seat belts. Twenty-five schools serving over 9,000 children participated in a program of rewards (stickers, bumper strips, and chances on pizza dinners) administered by parent-teacher organization volunteers. Comprehensive observations were made at three representative schools. Categorization of compliance with safety rules required all passengers to be buckled into safety devices before the children received the rewards. The rewards, on average across schools, increased compliance from baseline of 18.1% to 62.4% during the interventions. Withdrawal of the rewards resulted in a decrease to 49% compliance, but this rate remained above baseline. The involvement of community groups and institutions in this safety program is highlighted.     

DOMINANCE AND INEQUALITY IN X-RATED VIDEOCASSETTES

Feminists have been concerned about the debasement of women in sexually explicit material. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of domination and sexual inequality in x-rated videocassettes through a content analysis of 45 widely available x-rated videocassettes. The sample was randomly drawn from a list of 121 adult movie titles widely available in family videocassette rental stores in southern California. Over half of the explicitly sexual scenes were coded as predominantly concerned with domination or exploitation. Most of the domination and exploitation was directed by men toward women. Specific indicators of domination and sexual inequality, including physical violence, occurred frequently. The growth of the videocassette rental industry and the popularity of x-rated films, coupled with the messages these films convey, is a cause for concern.     

Attributed influence: The importance of observing change

The presence of a target's unexpected change in behavior following an influence attempt was hypothesized to be a critical variable for attributing influence to a particular agent. Observers read a brief story in which an agent's intervention was followed by the target's compliance, noncompliance, or countercompliance to the request. The results indicated that influence was attributed to the agent in the conditions demonstrating change, i.e., compliance and countercompliance, regardless of the direction of that change. Additional findings indicated that influence attributed to an agent decreased if the target delayed final compliance with the intervention.     

Masculinity,femininity, academic performance,and health: Further evidence concerning the androgyny controversy1

Spence and Helmreich's (1978) claim that individual differences in four components of achievement motivation (mastery, work, competitiveness, and personal unconcern) are attributable to masculinity and femininity rather than to gender was generally supported, with one exception: Masculinity was associated with competitiveness for males but not for females. Furthermore, competitive women were more likely than noncompetitive women to have mental and physical health problems, but there was no such difference for males. In general, masculinity emerged as a beneficial constellation of traits for both males and females, correlating negatively with achievement conflicts and stress symptoms, and positively with mastery and work. Femininity, on the other hand, appeared to be a detrimental cluster of traits for both sexes, at least in terms of academic performance and health. Implications for the controversial concept of androgyny were discussed, and it was suggested that, in the future, research inspired by an ideal conception of adult behavior confront the ideal directly rather than describe it in terms of the traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity. Any such research effort will have to deal with the pivotal role of competitiveness.