Maternal Distress and Parenting in the Context of Cumulative Disadvantage

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full‐text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ). This article presents an emergent conceptual model of the features and links between cumulative disadvantage, maternal distress, and parenting practices in low‐income families in which parental incarceration has occurred. The model emerged from the integration of extant conceptual and empirical research with grounded theory analysis of longitudinal ethnographic data from Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three‐City Study. Fourteen exemplar family cases were used in the analysis. Results indicated that mothers in these families experienced life in the context of cumulative disadvantage, reporting a cascade of difficulties characterized by neighborhood worries, provider concerns, bureaucratic difficulties, violent intimate relationships, and the inability to meet children's needs. Mothers, however, also had an intense desire to protect their children, and to make up for past mistakes. Although, in response to high levels of maternal distress and disadvantage, most mothers exhibited harsh discipline of their children, some mothers transformed their distress by advocating for their children under difficult circumstances. Women's use of harsh discipline and advocacy was not necessarily an “either/or” phenomenon as half of the mothers included in our analysis exhibited both harsh discipline and care/advocacy behaviors. Maternal distress characterized by substance use, while connected to harsh disciplinary behavior, did not preclude mothers engaging in positive parenting behaviors.     

Antecedents and Consequences of Awkward Silence A Replication Using Revised Lag Sequential Analysis

McLaughlin and Cody's (1982) study of antecedents and consequences of awkward silence is replicated in this study. McLaughlin and Cody concluded that behavioral sequences before silence in dyads with multiple silences were characterized by a pattern of minimal response by one participant. They also concluded that posts/fence sequences were characterized by the presence of question-answer adjacency pairs. Advances made in our understanding of lag sequential analysis (Allison & Liker, 1982; Morley, in press; Sackett, in press) since their study was conducted indicate that statistics other than those employed in their study are more appropriate. A study of the antecedents and consequences of silence for dyads with multiple silences is reported and analyzed using reuised lag sequential analysis. This study found that silences were preceded by minimal responses at lag 1 and followed by questions at lag 1. However, silences were not followed by answers at lag 2. Additionally, the significant dependencies between minimal responses and silence, and silence and questions accounted for only a very small amount of the variance. Thus, although statistically significant, these dependencies are not theoretically meaningful.     

An Analysis of Early vs. Later Responses on a Divergent Production Task Across Three Time Press Conditions

Traditional assessments of divergent production have employed standard time press conditions of three minutes for measures of fluency, flexibility, and originality. Recent studies have provided evidence that the traditional time press condition may impede both fluency and quality of responses and that differences in divergent production responses have been found under a variety of creative prompting conditions. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of three time press and three creative prompt conditions on early vs. later trial originality scores for three divergent production stimuli. The participants were 91 undergraduate students enrolled in Educational Psychology courses who were randomly assigned to one of six experimental groups. The six groups were counterbalanced across the three vignette tasks in time press requirements and creative prompting. Aggregate differences were found in which there was a higher frequency of originality scores for the latter portions of trials as compared with the early portion of trials for all time press and prompting conditions.     

Disability,Respect and Justice

Recent political philosophers have argued that criteria of social justice that defend distributing resources to individuals on the basis of the disadvantages of their natural endowments are disrespectful and disparaging. Clearly influenced by the social model of disability, Elizabeth Anderson and Thomas Pogge have recently defended criteria of social justice that distribute resources to people with disabilities on the basis of eliminating discrimination, not making up for so‐called natural disadvantage. I argue that it is implausible to suggest that just entitlements for people with disability can be secured solely by eliminating discrimination. Resources for people with disabilities must sometimes be justified on the grounds that some natural endowments pose disadvantages even in societies that do not discriminate. I argue further that there need be nothing at all disrespectful about this way of explaining disadvantage; nor have proponents of the social model of disability or political philosophers provided any compelling reasons for supposing that it is disrespectful. There is thus no motivation for Anderson's and Pogge's attempts to secure justice for people with disabilities by appealing solely to the imperative to eliminate discrimination.     

EQUIVOCAL MESSAGES IN ORGANIZATIONS

This study examined the impact of ambiguous messages and organizational level on the processing of equivocality. Using Weick's (1979) model as a theoretical frame, investigators measured the number of rules, the number of people, and the frequencies of message categories generated in two zero-history organizations. Subjects used more rules and more people to process Hi ambiguous messages than they did to process Lo ambiguous messages. Analysis of group interaction revealed that most groups spent their talk time reducing equivocality. Workers and foremen reduced ambiguity by adding interpretations while managers proposed specific action steps. This study suggested that misunderstandings in organizations might evolve from divergent approaches to the management of equivocality. Since some degree of equivocality is present, in all organizational inputs (Weick, 1979), the way individuals interpret and process this ambiguity is a key to understanding how organizations make sense of their activities.     

PRESCHOOL CHILDREN'S VISUAL ATTENTION TO ATTRIBUTES OF TELEVISION

Preschool children's visual attention to nearly three hours of a heterogeneous sample of children's programing was examined in relationship to the presence of 37 simple visual and auditory attributes of television programs. A factor analysis of the attributes indicated that they were largely independent, with the exception of two factors, which were labeled “women and children” and “puppets.” Attributes and factors that were positively related to attention were the puppet factor, women and children factor, auditory changes, peculiar voices, movement, cuts, sound effects, laughter, and applause. Attributes that were negatively related to attention were adult male voices, extended zooms and pans, eye contact, and still shots. Other attributes had both positive and negative effects on attention depending on whether the child was looking at the TV at the time the attribute occurred. It is suggested that attributes are positive or negative to the degree to which they signal informative comprehensible content.