Friendship: Communication and interactional patterns in same-sex dyads

Based on the classic work of Georg Simmel on dyadic intimacy and dependency and more recent work on self-disclosure, this study uses subjective accounts to compare same-sex dyadic friendships. Past research has neglected the important dimension of content. Thus, a major purpose was to specify three content levels of communication — topical, relational, and personal — and to determine sex differences in the range and primacy of these levels. In addition, seven interactional factors were identified: spontaneous communication, trust, nonverbal communication, dependency, shared value systems, conflict, and competition for power. The data reveal that women relate on all three levels, while men relate primarily on the topical level. Overall findings on the seven interactional factors reveal high congruence with traditional gender stereotypes. A serendipitous finding for both male and female dyads is that a particular individual is of less importance than a particular type of friendship. This suggests that friendship in modern society may be more tenuous than Simmel contended.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 74th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1979.Kidder, Peabody, & Co.     

TRAINING FAMILY THERAPISTS: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

This study implemented and evaluated a training program (a written manual, videotaped models, rehearsal, role plays, and performance feedback) designed to teach five subjects the skills to become effective family therapists. The study examined the therapists' use of three target behaviors: instructing, informing, and praising. The therapists, each paired with a parent and a preschool-aged child (2 1/2–4 1/2 yr old), were trained in the clinic to use, and to teach to the parents, several behavioral skills (e.g., praising, planned ignoring, and time-out) relevant to teaching children compliance to parental instructions. A multiple-baseline design across triads (therapist/parent/child) demonstrated that after the training program was instituted, the therapists increased their rates of instructing, praising, and informing the parents; all parents increased attention to compliance, decreased attention to noncompliance, and increased rates of praise to their children; and all children increased their compliance and decreased their noncompliance.     

The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.     

Problems in assessment of vividness and control of imagery.

Difficulties in assessing individual differences in vividness and control of mental imagery hinder understanding of the role of of imagery in various phenomena. This study examined the relationships among the Gordon test of imagery control, the Betts questionnaire on imagery vividness, and a research questionnaire on control of imagery developed for this study. The research questionnaire demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency and scores were more widely distributed than were those on the Gordon test. Correlations among the instruments ranged from .47 to .57, suggesting that vividness and control of imagery are not clearly differentiated in practice. Discussion of these results suggests that further empirical work is needed to establish the differential validity of the two constructs.     

Women's power and authority in the context of war

Within their domestic and marginal domains, women have power but no authority. Through their experiences in these domains, women acquire remarkable skills and ingenuity which partially enable them to quickly integrate new occupational skills demanded by the crisis of war. Women's partial socialization into masculine roles, their continual domination by male authority, and their preferred minority status further prepare women to appropriately exercise authority in concert with power in the context of war. The two related areas of women after war and women as warriors are briefly explored.In am particularly indebted to William Arkin for reading an earlier version of this paper and for his consistently clear and valuable insights. I would also like to thank Jacqueline St. John and Forrest Frank for some of the historical and military examples in the exploration of women as warriors.