ACQUAINTANCE RAPE: EFFECTIVE AVOIDANCE STRATEGIES

To date, research on effective rape avoidance strategies has involved media-recruited, acknowledged rape victims and avoiders, most of whom were assaulted by total strangers. In the present study, rape avoidance research was extended to a sample of acquaintance rape victims and avoiders who were located by a self-report survey that identified women who both do and do not conceptualize their assaults as rape. The study's goal was to determine whether acknowledged rape victims, unacknowledged rape victims, and rape avoiders could be discriminated by situational variables including the response strategies used in the assault. Victims and avoiders were significantly discriminated. Compared to rape victims, avoiders (1) were less likely to have experienced passive or internalizing emotions at the time of the assault, (2) perceived the assault as less violent, and (3) were more likely to have utilized active response strategies (i.e., running away and screaming). The results suggest that the major findings of existing research on stranger rape avoidance are generalizable to acquaintance rape. However, concerns are expressed over methodological limitations of research on rape avoidance from the victim's perspective.     

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:

ABSTRACT

Although printed information on secondary reading has expanded, adequate synthesis across types of publications is lacking. This study suggests and tests the hypothesis that professional textbooks serve a major role in broad synthesis of information for secondary reading. Research results from the bibliometric analysis of five secondary textbooks indicate: (1) no consistent pattern of reference use by authors, (2) wide author variation in the types of publications cited, (3) predominance of monographic over serial, dissertation, report and research literature citation, (4) referencing of older archival rather than more recent sources, (5) relatively few materials cited which appeared within 1 to 4 years of the publication dates of the five texts, and (6) low percentages of citation overlap and minor referral to a common body of literature by the five authors. According to this Investigation, it appears that individual professional texts do not necessarily reflect the extant information base or state‐of‐the‐art in secondary reading. The authors recommend existing information tools be modified to incorporate more effective perpetual literature synthesis or new tools be created by learned societies to fill the information synthesis gap.     

The Altruistic Other Orientation: An Exploration of Female Powerlessness

A construct, the altruistic other orientation (AOO), is introduced and used to examine a life-long attitude of self-sacrifice in women originating in the male-female relationship. Research exploring this construct utilizes the Walstedt Altruistic Other scale and a revision of the Schaefer Parent Attitude Research Instrument on a sample of 106 middle-aged women. The hypothesis that women who do not accept the altruistic other orientation are more likely to be self-supporting in their middle years and attain more academic degrees than those who do was confirmed (p < .001). In addition, father socialization practices were found to be significantly correlated with the daughter's academic achievement, economic independence, and AOO adoption (p < .05 to p < .001).