Transforming Dissatisfaction With Services Into Self‐Determination: A Social Psychological Perspective on Community Program Effectiveness1

A field study of supported employment for adults with mental illness provided an experimental test of cognitive dissonance theory. We predicted that most work‐interested individuals randomly assigned to a non‐preferred program would reject services and lower their work aspirations. However, individuals who chose to pursue employment through a non‐preferred program were expected to resolve this dissonance through favorable service evaluations and strong efforts to succeed at work. Significant Work Interest × Service Preference interactions supported these predictions. Over 2 years, participants interested in employment who obtained work through a non‐preferred program stayed employed a median of 362 days vs. 108 days for those assigned to a preferred program; participants who obtained work through a non‐preferred program also had higher service satisfaction.     

Cultural considerations using the structured clinical interview for DSM-III for mood and anxiety disorders assessment

This paper focuses on the impact that culture has upon standardized or structured interviews. It briefly reviews how these interviews evolved from a primary research function, what they can teach us about clinical work, and the multiple ways that culture influences these supposedly objective instruments and the diagnoses which follow from their use. Although the use of structured interviews and standardized diagnostic criteria has been a major advance for the field in terms of reliability, care needs to be exercised when evaluating individuals from disparate cultural backgrounds.     

Disposition-based categories: Structure and salience effects on memory

Two experiments investigated whether disposition-based categories influence the retrieval of behaviors related or unrelated to those categories. In Experiment 1, subjects studied a set of behaviors in order to form an impression of a target person. Impression ratings indicated which category had been activated. In an unexpected recognition test, accuracy was better for category-inconsistent information than for category-consistent behaviors. That result suggested that the structure of disposition-based categories includes qualitatively different representations of consistent and inconsistent acts related to the category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated behaviors with reference to a relevant or irrelevant disposition category. In an unexpected recall test, an advantage for category-inconsistent behaviors was found only when the behaviors had been studied from the perspective of the relevant category. It was concluded that categories are not represented in a form analogous to the representation of category-inconsistent behaviors.     

Confidence regions for INDSCAL using the jackknife and bootstrap techniques

Bootstrap and jackknife techniques are used to estimate ellipsoidal confidence regions of group stimulus points derived from INDSCAL. The validity of these estimates is assessed through Monte Carlo analysis. Asymptotic estimates of confidence regions based on a MULTISCALE solution are also evaluated. Our findings suggest that the bootstrap and jackknife techniques may be used to provide statements regarding the accuracy of the relative locations of points in space. Our findings also suggest that MULTISCALE asymptotic estimates of confidence regions based on small samples provide an optimistic view of the actual statistical reliability of the solution. The authors wish to thank Geert DeSoete, Richard A. Harshman, William Heiser, Jon Kettenring, Joseph B. Kruskal, Jacqueline Meulman, James O. Ramsay, John W. Tukey, Paul A. Tukey, and Mike Wish. Sharon L. Weinberg is a consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974.     

Wishful thinking impairs belief-desire reasoning: a case of decoupling failure in adults?

Subjects were presented with a scenario that described how a certain type of opinion poll can be manipulated by respondents to put one particular political party (the threatened party) at a disadvantage. In a first experiment, people supporting this party but pretending to oppose it were found to be as likely to say that they would manipulate the poll as people who actually opposed it. In a second experiment, the threat embodied in the scenario was made more direct. It was also more salient because the study was carried out at a time of heightened political awareness when supporters of the threatened party were genuinely concerned about its future. People supporting the threatened party but pretending to oppose it were now about half as likely to say that they would manipulate the poll as those who actually opposed it. Two explanations for this breakdown in the belief-desire reasoning subserving pretense are considered.     

Dimensions of the contraceptive attributes questionnaire

This article describes the development and evaluation of the Contraceptive Attributes Questionnaire (CAQ), a research instrument designed to assess the subjective importance of specific contraceptive attributes (Importance) and the perceived characteristics of specific contraceptives (Agreement). Three birth control methods are examined–the sponge, pill, and diaphragm. Factor analyses indicate that the four scales are multidimensional, and as subscales the factors have reasonable internal consistency reliability. The validity of the CAQ was established through comparisons of ratings of women who use different contraceptive methods. The women differed by user status on the ratings of the importance factors and on the ratings of the agreement factors for all three methods rated.