TESTING THE DURABILITY OF JOB CHARACTERISTICS AS PREDICTORS OF ABSENTEEISM OVER A SIX-YEAR PERIOD

The purpose of this study was to test the relationships between job characteristics and absence over a 6-year period. Civilian employees from a large military organization participated. The results indicated that job characteristics continued to correlate significantly with a measure of absence frequency up to 6 years after the job characteristics had been assessed. The job characteristics measures also correlated significantly with a measure of time-lost absenteeism. Regression analyses revealed that job characteristics predicted absence frequency significantly over a 6-year period and time-lost absence for up to 4 years after job characteristics were assessed. The magnitudes of these relationships remained fairly constant across time. Results from regression analyses controlling for demographic variables indicated that job characteristics predicted time-lost and absence frequency for most years. Competence and need for achievement failed to moderate the job characteristics-absence relationships.     

Intergenerational Visiting Patterns: Variation in Boundary Maintenance as an Explanation

SOCIOLOGISTS can now quite fairly be said to have recognized the importance of kinship in a modern industrial society. Beginning with Sussman's study of intergenerational helping patterns in the middle class ( 22 ), an increasing number of investigators have documented the importance of kindred to the city dweller's existence. These findings are contrary to the Simmel-Wirth picture of the urbanite as an isolated individual cut off from extended family contacts ( 19, 24 ). The trend in the literature is now so firmly against this thesis that a scholarly textbook in the area of family sociology has recently appeared in which the theoretical focus is on intergenerational ties ( 8 ). The present article is in the same vein. The first section is devoted to developing a theoretical rationale concerning factors influencing frequency of kinship contacts based on the phenomenon of boundary setting and maintenance that characterizes primary groups. The second section concerns an examination of hypotheses derived from the rationale using data from a sample of three generation lineages.     

ASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL COMPETENCE IN AN EVALUATION-INTERACTION ANALOGUE1

Forty men were selected from a larger pool of 235 college students who had completed three questionnaires designed to measure social competence. Twenty high socially competent and 20 low socially competent college men were given either positive or negative feedback by a woman confederate in a five-minute dyadic interaction. The confederate made either four all-positive or all-negative statements on the impression she was forming about the men during the interaction. Measures were taken of the amount of time the men spoke, the latency of their response to the confederate's statements, and the number of topics and topic changes used during the interaction. Judgements were also made on the men's physical attractiveness and social skill. Finally, the men's verbal reactions to the confederate statements were content analyzed for direction (self, confederate, or other) and valence (positive, negative, or neutral). A 2-by-2-by-4 (competence by feedback by statements) ANOVA indicated that subjects differed over trials (statements) in their reaction latencies as a function of their competence level and feedback: low competent men took considerably longer to react to the confederate's negative feedback than did men in other conditions. There were no differences among groups on the amount of conversation time or number of topics and topic changes. High competent men were judged to be more attractive and more socially skilled than low competent men. Content analysis revealed that high competent and low competent men did not differ in their verbal responses when receiving positive feedback. During negative feedback, however, high competent men employed a wider range of responses than low competent men. These findings suggest that high and low socially competent men may differ in their responses to evaluative feedback such that high competent men are both quicker to respond and have a broader repertoire of response than do low competent men.     

Measurement and Effects of Attention to Media News

Survey measures of attention, in addition to the usual measures of exposure to media use, are explored in detail. Using data from a two-year longitudinal study of adolescents and their parents, the reliability and validity of self-report questions about attention to newspaper and television news are examined. Attention measures proved to be highly stable across three waves of interviews; repeated items were summed to form reliable indices of attention to each medium's news, and to general news topics without specific mention of medium. Changes in knowledge about public affairs and politics were assessed to test the effects of both exposure and attention to media news. These tests showed significant increments of knowledge gain associated with media attention, even after exposure to the medium was controlled in hierarchical regression analysis. Addition of the attention measures was especially important in evaluating television news, which contributes much more to public knowledge than has been suggested by previous studies that use only measures of TV exposure.