Relevant replies to questions: Answers versus evasions

A taxonomy was developed that accounts for all relevant partner responses to questions in the natural discourse of nursery school dyads. Evasive replies as well as answers must be included in such a scheme. Evasive replies are discoursally linked to questions, whereas answers are grammatically linked to questions. Nursery school children in this sample tended to inspect the nature of the relevance of a reply to a question and, at least on some occasions, to acknowledge replies to questions (explicitly or implicitly) and to respond differently to evasive replies than replies in general.This work was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation to the second author.     

Sex Role Ideology, Relationship Context, and Response to Sexual Coercion in College Females

This study examined the impacts of traditional sex role orientation and relationship context upon women’s responses to sexual coercion in a sample of 114 female undergraduates in the northwestern USA. We examined differences in the amount of time participants allowed a simulated sexually coercive situation to continue, comparing groups based upon the extent to which participants endorsed traditional feminine sex roles on the Sex Role Ideology Scale, as well as the context of the relationship in which such behaviors occurred, which was manipulated as an independent variable. Results indicated that individuals in the long-term relationship condition took significantly longer to terminate the vignette than did their peers. However, no significant effect of traditionality upon response latency was observed.     

Processes linked to contact changes in adoptive kinship networks

The purpose of this study was to reveal underlying processes in adoptive kinship networks that experienced increases or decreases in levels of openness during the child's adolescent years. Intensive case study analyses were conducted for 8 adoptive kinship networks (each including an adoptive mother, adoptive father, adopted adolescent, and birth mother), half of whom had experienced an increase in openness from indirect (mediated) to direct (fully disclosed) contact and half of whom had ceased indirect contact between Waves 1 and 2 of a longitudinal study. Adoptive mothers tended to be more involved in contact with the birth mother than were adoptive fathers or adopted adolescents. Members of adoptive kinship networks in which a decrease in level of contact took place had incongruent perspectives about who initiated the stop in contact and why the stop took place. Birth mothers were less satisfied with their degree of contact than were adoptive parents. Adults' satisfaction with contact was related to feelings of control over type and amount of interactions and permeability of family boundaries. In all adoptive kinship networks, responsibility for contact had shifted toward the adopted adolescent regardless of whether the adolescent was aware of this change in responsibility.