Moving European research on work and ageing forward: Overview and agenda

This longitudinal retrospective study shows that when the results of an organizational development intervention are fed back properly and action plans are made, factors associated with leadership and commitments to organization are enhanced. The study compared the effects of survey feedback, including the making of action plans and survey feedback without action plans, to the effects of no feedback at all on several psychosocial factors and sick leave over a 3-year period. The data were derived from 1236 individuals for whom baseline data were available and who completed a 3-year follow-up. Applied statistics revealed that the feedback action plan group reported greater improvements regarding leadership factors and commitment to the organization. The results reveal no differences between the feedback groups in regard to sick leave. There is a need for further studies, preferably with a randomized control design, on how to enhance both the psychosocial work environment and employee health and also how to reduce sick leave in the workplace.     

Liking Violence and Action: An Examination of Gender Differences in Children's Processing of Animated Content

It is widely assumed that children like violence in cartoons, but this assumption has not been supported in existing studies that show nonviolent programs are liked just as much or more than violent programs. The present experiment extended enjoyment of media violence research by testing whether violence and action (independently manipulated) influenced children's liking of slapstick cartoons. We also proposed a path model to test potential indirect effects of violence and action on liking. Using animation software, four versions of a slapstick cartoon were created that varied in terms of violence (present, absent) and action (high, low). A total of 128 elementary school children watched one of the four versions of the program. Violence had no direct effect on the liking of the cartoon, but did indirectly decrease liking for males by decreasing boys' wishful identification with the anthropomorphized characters. Action increased liking for males but not for females.     

The Relationship Between Parents' Attitudes Toward Child Rearing and the Sociometric Status of Their Preschool Children

A sociometric evaluation of 120 (60 male, 60 female) preschool children was made, using the Parent Attitude Research Instrument (PARI; Shaefer & Bell, 1958). Questionnaires were completed by the parents of a sample of children who had been sociometrically identified as belonging in one of four categories: popular, amiable, isolated, and rejected. Discriminant function analysis revealed that children who were identified by their peers as rejected or isolated had parents that reported child-rearing attitudes reflecting patriarchal family structure, low self-confidence, low preference for young children, infrequent use of praise, lack of promotion of independence, low use of disciplining (mothers) coupled with the view that child rearing is a mother's duty, definite expectations about child behavior, a feeling of responsibility for child-rearing activities, low child orientation, infrequent use of threat, and negative reaction to children's intrusive behavior (fathers). The four sociometric categories accounted for 42% of mothers and 62% of fathers variance in reported child-rearing attitudes. The mothers' function correctly classified 49% and the fathers' correctly classified 44% of the children into the correct sociometric category. These data suggest a potentially important relationship between parents' perception of their child-rearing role and peer relations during early childhood.     

Goal-directedness and personal identity as correlates of life outcomes

Although much research has been conducted on goal setting, researchers have not examined goal-directedness or propensity to set goals as a stable human characteristic in adults. In this study, a survey was developed and distributed to 104 adult participants to assess their goal-directedness, personal identity, and various life outcomes. A theoretical model was developed and tested using structural equation modeling that proposed that both goal-directedness and personal identity should positivcly influence important life outcomes. Analysis showed that goal-directedness and personal identity are positively related to personal well-being, salary, and marital satisfaction. Further, personal identity was positively related to job satisfaction but, contrary to related research, goal-directedness did not predict job satisfaction.     

Response to commentary on the multimodal treatment study of ADHD (MTA): mining the meaning of the MTA

In the December 2000 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, we published a set of papers presenting secondary analyses of the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD (MTA), and R. A. Barkley (2000) provided a commentary. A critique of the design of the study (MTA Cooperative Group, 1999) was presented based on a theoretical perspective of a behavioral inhibition deficit that has been hypothesized as the core deficit of ADHD (R. A. Barkley, 1997). The commentary questioned the design and analysis of the MTA in terms of (1) the empirical criteria for selection of components of behavioral (Beh) intervention, (2) the effectiveness of the Beh intervention, (3) the methods for analyses at the group and individual level, (4) implications of the MTA findings for clinical practice, (5) the role of genetics in response to treatment, and (6) the lack of a nontreatment control group. In this response, we relate the content of the papers to the commentary, (1) by reviewing the selection criteria for the Beh treatment, as outlined by K. C. Wells, W. E. Pelham, et al. (2000), (2) by addressing the myth that the MTA Beh treatment was ineffective (Pelham, 1999), (3) by describing the use of analyses at the level of the individual participant, as presented by J. S. March et al. (2000) and W. E. Pelham et al. (2000) as well as elsewhere by J. M. Swanson et al. (2001) and C. K. Conners et al. (2001), (4) by relating some of the suggestions from the secondary analyses about clinically relevant factors such as comorbidity (as presented by J. S. March et al., 2000) and family and parental characteristics (as presented by B. Hoza et al., 2000, S. P. Hinshaw et al., 2000, and K. C. Wells, J. N. Epstein, et al., 2000), (5) by discussing the statistical concept of heritability and the lack of a significant difference in the presence of ADHD symptoms in parents of the MTA families compared to parents in the classmate-control families (as presented by J. N. Epstein, et al., 2000), and (6) by acknowledging that an ethically necessary weakness of the MTA design is that it did not include a no-treatment control group. We discuss the use of secondary analyses to suggest how, when, and for what subgroups effectiveness of the Beh treatment may have been manifested. Finally, we invite others to use the large and rich data set that will soon be available in the public domain, to perform secondary analyses to mine the meaning of the MTA and to evaluate theories of ADHD and response to treatments.