Description of a Teenage Pregnancy Program

The authors describe a teenage pregnancy program with three major components—medical care, education, and counseling. The services, particularly the counseling program, are discussed.     

A TEST OF THE PATH-GOAL THEORY OF LEADERSHIP AND SOME SUGGESTED DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Several hypotheses on the moderating effect of task structure from Path-Goal leadership theory were tested in a large public utility. No support was found for the moderating effect of task structure, despite multiple analyses and large and statistically significant differences in moderator variables: instrumental leadership obtained few significant correlations with criteria regardless of task structure, and supportive leadership was strongly related to criteria at all levels of task structure. Based on these results and theoretical considerations, suggestions are made for modification of the manner in which the theory has generally been tested, and for attention to specific testing of several assumptions upon which the theory is based.     

GENERALIZING ABOUT MESSAGES: SUGGESTIONS FOR DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS

Current research practices in communication create problems for both internal and external validity. One serious design flaw, which involves use of a single message to represent a category of messages, occurs in nearly all of the experimental research on communication effects. The problem with such a design is that an observed difference between categories may reflect only differences between individual, idiosyncratic cases. A related error, the “language-as-fixed-effect fallacy,” involves use of several replications of each category, but analysis of the cases as fixed effects. The consequence is that findings cannot be generalized beyond the sample used. Future research should use multiple cases within each message category studied and treat cases as nested random effects. Since the cases cannot be true random samples from message populations, care must be taken to avoid known sources of bias or other barriers to generalization.     

SITUATIONS THAT LEAD TO DISQUALIFICATION

Disqualification is nonstraighforward communication—messages that are ambiguous, indirect, or evasive to some degree. A previous paper defined and measured disqualification as deviations from the direct “I am saying this to you in this situation”—that is, as relative ambiguity in sender, content, receiver, or context. The present article addresses the question of what causes such messages. An interpersonal, situational theory is proposed and tested in a series of five experiments, using a forced-choice among written messages in systematically varied, hypothetical situations. Subjects chose the most disqualified messages overwhelmingly when placed in a “bind.” They did so significantly more than when in a non-bind or a merely unpleasant situation. The last two experiments defined a “bind” as an avoidance-avoidance conflict and showed that disqualified messages were chosen only in these, and not in approach-approach conflicts. The conclusion is that disqualification is not a failure of the communicator, nor even a changeworthy behavior, but a reasonable response to an impossible situation, one that permits the sender to leave the field communicationally.     

New Evidence for the Social Embeddedness of Infants' Early Triangular Capacities

Infants appear to be active participants in complex interactional sequences with their parents far earlier than previously theorized. In this report, we document the capacity of 3‐month‐old infants to share attention with two partners (mothers and fathers) simultaneously, and trace links between this capacity and early family group‐level dynamics. During comprehensive evaluations of the family's emergent coparenting alliance completed in 113 homes, we charted infants' eye gaze patterns during two different mother‐father‐infant assessment paradigms. Triangular capacities (operationalized as the frequency of rapid multishift gaze transitions between parents during interactions) were stable across interaction context. Infants exhibiting more advanced triangular capacities belonged to families showing evidence of better coparental adjustment. Theoretical and practice implications of these findings are discussed.