Family measurement techniques: The family health scales (fhs): Review and critique

Abstract

Kinston, Loader and Miller (1987) have developed the Family Health Scale (FHS), a research instrument designed to assess a family's level of overall functioning based upon the clinical observation of family interaction. The authors state that the FHS is primarily a research tool, allowing its users to test hypotheses about family dysfunction, to examine changes in the family longitudinally, and to categorize families by “degree of disturbance.” While not its principal use, the scale is also thought to have teaching utility.     

Recurrence quantification analysis of eye movements

Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) has been successfully used for describing dynamic systems that are too complex to be characterized adequately by standard methods in time series analysis. More recently, RQA has been used for analyzing the coordination of gaze patterns between cooperating individuals. Here, we extend RQA to the characterization of fixation sequences, and we show that the global and local temporal characteristics of fixation sequences can be captured by a small number of RQA measures that have a clear interpretation in this context. We applied RQA to the analysis of a study in which observers looked at different scenes under natural or gaze-contingent viewing conditions, and we found large differences in the RQA measures between the viewing conditions, indicating that RQA is a powerful new tool for the analysis of the temporal patterns of eye movement behavior.     

ARE FEMINISTS MAN HATERS? FEMINISTS' AND NONFEMINISTS' ATTITUDES TOWARD MEN

Despite the popular belief that feminists dislike men, few studies have actually examined the empirical accuracy of this stereotype. The present study examined self-identified feminists' and nonfeminists' attitudes toward men. An ethnically diverse sample ( N  = 488) of college students responded to statements from the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI; Glick & Fiske, 1999 ). Contrary to popular beliefs, feminists reported lower levels of hostility toward men than did nonfeminists. The persistence of the myth of the man-hating feminist is explored.     

SEXUAL ASSAULT EDUCATION PROGRAMS: A META-ANALYTIC EXAMINATION OF THEIR EFFECTIVENESS

Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of college sexual assault education programs on seven outcome measure categories were conducted using 69 studies that involved 102 treatment interventions and 18,172 participants. Five of the outcome categories had significant average effect sizes (i.e., rape attitudes, rape-related attitudes, rape knowledge, behavioral intent, and incidence of sexual assault), while the outcome areas of rape empathy and rape awareness behaviors did not have average effect sizes that differed from zero. A significant finding of this study is that longer interventions are more effective than brief interventions in altering both rape attitudes and rape-related attitudes. Moderator analyses also suggest that the content of programming, type of presenter, gender of the audience, and type of audience may also be associated with greater program effectiveness. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Fairness Reactions to Personnel Selection Methods: An international comparison between the Netherlands,the United States,France, Spain,Portugal, and Singapore

This paper reports reactions to employee selection methods in the Netherlands and compares these findings internationally against six other previously published samples covering the United States, France, Spain, Portugal, and Singapore. A sample of 167 participants rated 10 popular assessment techniques using a translated version of Steiner and Gilliland's measure. In common with other country samples, we found that the most popular methods among applicants were interviews, work sample tests, and resumes. Least popular methods were graphology, personal contacts, and honesty and integrity tests. Generally, method favorability was found to be highly similar to the US and other published studies internationally. Across the six countries mean process favorability correlated at .87 and mean cross‐national procedural justice correlated .68. Process dimension ratings correlated at between .79 and .97 between the United States and the Netherlands. Only medium effect size differences (Cohen's d) were found between Dutch and US reactions to resumes and personality tests, the former being more favorably rated in the United States (d=.62) and the latter being more positively rated in the Netherlands (d=?.76). Implications for the design of selection procedures are discussed, especially implications for likely similarities and differences in applicant reactions internationally.     

The cultural grounding of personal relationship: the importance of attractiveness in everyday life

Previous research has suggested that physically attractive people experience more positive life outcomes than do unattractive people. However, the importance of physical attractiveness in everyday life may vary depending on the extent to which different cultural worlds afford or require individual choice in the construction and maintenance of personal relationships. The authors hypothesized that attractiveness matters more for life outcomes in settings that promote voluntaristic-independent constructions of relationship as the product of personal choice than it does in settings that promote embedded-interdependent constructions of relationship as an environmental affordance. Study 1 examined self-reported outcomes of attractive and unattractive persons. Study 2 examined expectations about attractive and unattractive targets. Results provide support for the hypothesis along four dimensions: national context, relationship context, rural-urban context, and experimental manipulation of relationship constructions. These patterns suggest that the importance of physical attractiveness documented by psychological research is the product of particular constructions of reality.     

Comments on Wayne Martin, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Theories of Judgment</Emphasis>

Martin offers an intriguing account of nineteenth century challenges to the traditional theory of judgment as a synthesis of subject and predicate (the synthesis theory)—criticisms motivated largely by the problem posed by existential judgments, which need not have two terms at all. Such judgments led to a theory of “thetic” judgments, whose essential feature is to “posit” something, rather than to combine terms (as in synthetic judgment). I argue, however, that Kant’s official definition of judgment already implicitly recognizes the importance of positing, and that its (otherwise confusing) abstract generality actually affords Kant’s own logic an adequate way to accommodate existential judgments within the traditional synthesis theory. Preservation of a synthetic account of judgment is also found to be independently important for Kant’s larger aims in the theory of cognition.