Factors Affecting Employer Preference for Female Managerial Applicants

This study examines aspects of job interview behavior that influence employer preference for a female applicant for a managerial position in the human service field. The authors used an analogue methodology simulating videotaped job interview vignettes to present a female applicant exhibiting varying leadership and personality styles, ranging from a “warm” cooperative style to a “cold” task-oriented style. Employers in the human services field rated their preference for the simulated applicants. There were significant differences in preference for the various types of applicants; the most preferred were those who combined warmth with goal-oriented leadership skills.     

BEYOND FORMAL EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: TOWARDS AN EXPANDED VIEW OF THE TRAINING EVALUATION PROCESS

Textbook treatments of training evaluation typically equate evaluation with the measurement of change and focus on formal experimental design as the mechanism for controlling threats to the inference that the training intervention produced whatever change was observed. This paper notes that two separate questions may be of interest: How much change has occurred? and, Has a target performance level been reached? We show that the evaluation mechanisms needed to answer the two types of questions are markedly different, and discuss circumstances under which an evaluator's interests will focus on one, the other, or both of these questions. We then discuss alternatives to formal design as mechanisms for reducing various threats to validity, and discuss trade-offs between internal validity and statistical conclusion validity.     

When Students Cannot or Will Not Change Their Behavior: Using Brief Strategic Intervention in the School

The authors describe an application of the Mental Research Institute (MRI) brief therapy model for working with schoolchildren who either do not want to change or feel they cannot change their problematic behavior. This short-term, problem-focused approach centers on changing the cycles of interaction surrounding a student's problem, in which school staff and/or family members may be engaged. Assumptions undergirding this approach are described along with specific working procedures.     

Effects of day care and maternal teaching on child educability

Two groups of matched mother-child pairs, a day care sample (N = 38) and a home reared sample (N = 38) participated in a study testing mothers for degree of decentred teaching and children for degree of decentred educability. The children were seven years old. Mother and child were tested in separate settings, thus preventing interdependency among scores. The study used a matched-pair design with control of five background variables; age of the child, mother's educational level, mother's occupational status, family SES level, and type of family. The results showed strong positive effects of both day care experience and maternal teaching on child educability. Day care experience improved the educability of children independent of the mother's teaching strategy and gender of the child.     

The PACE Employment Program: An Inmate-Employer Mutual Development Strategy

The PACE Employment Program, funded by the Office of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, brings together potential employers and employees in a jail setting. The program is administered by the PACE Institute, a private educational organization housed within the Cook County Jail (Chicago). The program seeks to strengthen the nontechnical employment skills of inmate-students, while also sensitizing prospective employers to the value and employment potential of these students. This is done by having both groups participate in a variety of exercises related to the development and strengthening of personal and interpersonal skills.     

Reading Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures

Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures provides an unusual and important reading of Michel Foucault's later work. This response is an effort to introduce McWhorter's project and to describe the challenge it presents to engage in askesis, the transformative exercise of thinking, which McWhorter's work itself exemplifies.     

Visual processing speed in old age

Mental speed is a common concept in theories of cognitive aging, but it is difficult to get measures of the speed of a particular psychological process that are not confounded by the speed of other processes. We used Bundesen’s (1990) Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) to obtain specific estimates of processing speed in the visual system controlled for the influence of response latency and individual variations of the perception threshold. A total of 33 non‐demented old people (69–87 years) were tested for the ability to recognize briefly presented letters. Performance was analyzed by the TVA model. Visual processing speed decreased approximately linearly with age and was on average halved from 70 to 85 years. Less dramatic aging effects were found for the perception threshold and the visual apprehension span. In the visual domain, cognitive aging seems to be most clearly related to reductions in processing speed.     

Adding a Family Counseling Training Component to a Community Agency Counseling Master's Degree

This article presents an example of the planning and implementation of a program to retrain counselor education faculty members and then to add a family counseling specialty component to a master's degree community agency counseling program. Implications for professional development, credentialing, and improving relationships with agencies and the community are discussed.