Groups as social network members: Overlooked sources of social support

In a study of the link between physical disability and social relationships among the elderly, questions about social network and social support evoked a surprisingly large number of group responses. People mentioned "my grandchildren," "the people in my building," "people at the senior center," and other groups in ways that suggested that the real unit of support was extraindividual and could not be accurately understood by reference to individual people within those groups. This paper describes the frequency of such responses and the circumstances under which they emerged. Definitions of social support and of social network should not be restricted to dyadic relationships between individuals; better understanding of social support processes would derive from consideration of the kinds of social support functions best offered by groups vs. individuals and consideration of differences in the ways in which support is derived from groups and individuals.     

Counsellor training: An evaluation of the effectiveness of a residential outdoor pursuits activity weeked on the personal development of trainee counsellors

Trainee counsellors were taken on an outdoor development weekend training course, organised as a component of a two year part-time professional counsellor training course. The weekend was held during the final term of the second year of the course at an outdoor pursuits centre in the Lake District. The weekend's activities included canoeing, abseiling, onenteering, hill walking, rope work and climbing as well as other adventure exercises. Attendance at the weekend was compulsoy for all the 17 students on the course. This training weekend was an innovation in counsellor training and therefore a pilot study was designed to evaluate its effectiveness in making a contribution to the overall development of the trainees as counsellors. The study used a same subject experimental design and data was collected pre and post the weekend. The assessment procedure adopted for the purpose of this research included the use of repertoy grids and a series of questions with analogue scales for responses. There was some evidence to suggest that as a result of the weekend the participants experienced an increase in their self esteem, changes in their level of self confidence, felt more co-operative towards their fellow students, felt more helped by and helpful towards others and had an increased awareness of their competitiveness and stamina. It was concluded that the weekend made some contribution to the personal development of counsellors in training, particularly with regard to team building, co-operation and group cohesion.     

Impact of intuitive theories on feature recruitment throughout the continuum of expertise

Expertise in object domains involves both the perceptual learning of the differentiating and higher order features that are indicative of concepts and the elaboration of intuitive theories. Triad-similarity judgments, feature-salience ratings, and verbal protocols were used to investigate the effects of theories on the recruitment of features across different categorization contexts, as well as the degree to which expert categorization skills transferred to less familiar domains. Whereas novices considered features that indicated overall similarity to be more perceptually salient than were modified parts that indicated taxonomic relations, experts found them equally salient. Experts’ theories were instrumental in directing feature recruitment in contexts involving identification, image generation, and similarity decisions. Experts’ theories also supported the transfer of categorization skills to related, less familiar domains. The relation of mutual dependence between perceptual learning and theory development throughout the continuum of expertise is considered.     

Alcohol First Use and Attitudes Among Young Children

We describe the attitudes and first use of alcohol by children, grades 3-6, who participated in the Bogalusa Heart Study, 1993-94. Questionnaire data reflected that more than one-third of the children had experimented with alcohol at the time of the study. The dominant environmental factor in experimentation was family modeling, and the dominant personal factor was curiosity, regardless of race, gender, or grade. Most children believed that alcohol use can lead to accidents, that drinking has negative social consequences, and that alcohol use hurts only if done to excess. Indications are that young children generally have negative attitudes regarding alcohol use, and that public and family alcohol education efforts need to be more specific about deleterious effects of even low levels of alcohol use in the young.     

INCREASING INDICES OF HAPPINESS AMONG PEOPLE WITH PROFOUND MULTIPLE DISABILITIES: A PROGRAM REPLICATION AND COMPONENT ANALYSIS

We replicated a program to increase indices of happiness among people with profound multiple disabilities and conducted a component analysis of the program. The program involved presentation and contingent withdrawal of stimuli that had been identified as preferred based on preference assessments and staff opinion. The program was implemented with 3 adult students and was accompanied by increased happiness indices for each student. Subsequent implementation of the two types of stimuli indicated that preferred stimuli based on preference assessments were more consistently accompanied by increased happiness indices than were preferred stimuli based on staff opinion. Social validity measures supported the definition of happiness, in that raters' subjective opinions of the students' happiness coincided with the observed happiness indices. Results are discussed regarding the importance and practical implications of using preference assessments for determining stimuli for increasing happiness indices. Future research areas are suggested, focusing on increasing happiness and other quality-of-life indicators during the daily routines of people with profound disabilities.     

The predictable instability of psychological distress in college students: A comment on Flett,Vredenburg, and Krames

Flett, Vredenburg, and Krames (1995) claim that their data support the view that the apparent instability in distress among college students is artifactual. However, they have merely demonstrated that distress among college students is an unstable phenomena. Their argument that changes in distress scores have statistical rather than substantive explanations erroneously assumes that instability in distress scores is equivalent to error of measurement.     

An analysis of factors affecting traditional family expectations and perceptions of ideal fertility

This study examines: 1) the conditions giving rise to variation in sex-role orientation and the perceived cost of having children; and 2) the role these variables play as mechanisms linking antecedent variables to perceptions of ideal fertility. Data are drawn from a metropolitan area (Oklahoma City) sampling of 401 adults. Antecedent variables of sex, employment status, age, education, exposure to metropolitan living, and religious traditionalism--though correlated with ideal fertility--have no direct effects on that variable. Rather, the effects of these variables on fertility are mediated through sex-role orientation and the perceived cost of having children. The study confirms that there is a great deal of variation in the perception of a woman's place in comtemporary society and much of this variation is predictable. Education and exposure to metropolitan living both have influences which result in more egalitarian sex-role orientations, while traditional beliefs reinforce traditional sex-role orientations. Younger people also are more likely than older ones to be egalitarian. On the average, women are less traditional in their sex-role orientations than men and employed women are less traditional than unemployed women. Thus, the 2 strongest predictors of sex-role orientation are age and education. Sex role orientation and the perceived cost of having children both exert strong influences on the number of children thought to be ideal.     

Psychophysical scaling of stimulus similarity in 3-month-old infants and adults

The ability of 3-month-old infants to discriminate novel components of a prefamiliarized stimulus was assessed using an operant paradigm. Subjects were familiarized with the standard stimulus (five-component mobile) in three daily conditioning sessions and then were exposed to a comparison mobile containing from zero to four novel components substituted for familiar elements at the outset of a fourth daily session. Although a reliable reduction in mean number of footkicks was found only when an extreme number of components was substituted, log-log plots of infant response as a function of degree of novelty indicated that discriminability was described by a power function. Adult judgments of the similarity between the standard mobile and each degree of novelty were also described by a power function, suggesting a common basis may underlie the perception of similarity in the two groups. The finding of a power function for infant response to visual novelty is consistent with reports of similar discriminability functions in infant olfaction and audition. However, duration of visual fixation increased nondifferentially to all test stimuli, irrespective of degree of novelty. The latter finding is inconsistent with predictions arising from the visual attention literature.     

A reliability coefficient for maximum likelihood factor analysis

Maximum likelihood factor analysis provides an effective method for estimation of factor matrices and a useful test statistic in the likelihood ratio for rejection of overly simple factor models. A reliability coefficient is proposed to indicate quality of representation of interrelations among attributes in a battery by a maximum likelihood factor analysis. Usually, for a large sample of individuals or objects, the likelihood ratio statistic could indicate that an otherwise acceptable factor model does not exactly represent the interrelations among the attributes for a population. The reliability coefficient could indicate a very close representation in this case and be a better indication as to whether to accept or reject the factor solution. This research was supported by the Personnel and Training Research Programs Office of the Office of Naval Research under contract US NAVY/00014-67-A-0305-0003. Critical review of the development and suggestions by Richard Montanelli were most helpful.