SENIORITY: A REVIEW OF ITS LEGAL AND SCIENTIFIC STANDING

Though an important and widespread industrial relations concept, seniority has been a neglected subject of study by behavioral scientists. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of the topic by reviewing seniority's legal status in the management of human resources. Further, while there is little research on seniority per se, conjecture and empirical study on the concept's salient behavioral dimensions, viz., tenure and reward, were reviewed. Suggestions were offered for the methodological and theoretical aspects of future research on seniority.     

Live Supervision as Context,Treatment, and Training

This paper describes the live supervision context and elucidates its advantages for training and treatment, particularly in structural and strategic therapy. In addition, a predictable progression of trainee reactions to live supervision is presented, as is a sequence of supervisory methods designed to meet the changing needs of trainees.     

Stability and change in parental attitudes following an infant's birth into traditional and nontraditional Swedish families

Fifty-one Swedish couples were interviewed in the last trimester of their first pregnancy and again when their infants were 5 months old. Twenty-five of the couples indicated that the mothers would be primary caretakers throughout the first year (traditional families) whereas the other 26 couples said that the fathers would be primary caretakers for between 1 and 6.5 months during the year (nontraditional families). Analyses showed that the value of parenthood and the value of work were stable from the first (prenatal) to the second (postnatal) interview, although prenatally-anticipated paternal involvement was only marginally correlated with actual paternal involvement. Subjects agreed with their spouses when asked about the same issues, suggesting that the constructs had some validity. Parenthood and work were more highly valued by nontraditional parents than by traditional parents. Degree of paternal caretaking was positively correlated with the fathers satisfaction with and value of parenthood and negatively correlated with their resentment of the infant. Correlations differed somewhat among traditional and nontraditional mothers and fathers. Fathers were more involved with "difficult" sons and "easy" daughters than with "easy" sons and "difficult" daughters.     

Practice and Training in Family Therapy: A Known Group Study

The present study reports on a comparative survey of the belief and action systems of graduates who had been intensively trained in one of three of the major models of family therapy: Bowenian, communications, and strategic. An analysis of the factor-analyzed assumptions (belief system) and style (action system) items showed consistently greater divergence among the three models than convergence, as well as a remarkable synchronicity between the respective literature on these three models and their implementation, as represented by family therapists intensively trained in each model. A comparison of the present study's findings with previous research strongly supports the potency of formal and intensive training for developing adherents of a particular model and suggests that the distinctiveness of each model needs to be more fully developed in preference to premature attempts to develop generic or inclusive models that may become internally inconsistent and therefore difficult to operationalize in practice.     

PERSONNEL SELECTION FOR PHYSICALLY DEMANDING JOBS: REVIEW AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Improvement in personnel selection systems for physically demanding jobs is needed due to equal employment opportunity (EEO) considerations, concern for worker physical well-being, and the lack of alternative procedures. After addressing the special EEO sensitivities of physical abilities selection, the literature is reviewed from a variety of disciplines on: (1) the physiological background underlying the selection strategies, (2) the assessment of human physical abilities, (3) the measurement of physical requirements of jobs, and (4) the physical abilities personnel selection studies reported in the literature. Conclusions are provided in the form of recommendations for future research.     

THE JOB COMPONENTS INVENTORY AND THE ANALYSIS OF JOBS REQUIRING LIMITED SKILL

The Job Components Inventory, a new job analysis technique examining the use of tools and equipment, physical and perceptual requirements, mathematical requirements, communication requirements, and decision-making and responsibility requirements, is introduced. Results of a study of 100 job holders demonstrate a high reliability of the technique in terms of supervisor-job holder agreement, and the method is shown by analysis of variance and cluster analysis successfully to discriminate between and within job titles. The technique is proving to be a practical instrument for use in curriculum development, careers guidance and broad-based training, and recommendations for its further use and evaluations are made.     

Nonverbal Interactional Behavior in the Families of Persons with Schizophrenic and Bipolar Disorders

Whereas verbal interactional behaviors have been repeatedly found to distinguish the families of persons with and without major psychiatric disorders, there has been comparatively little examination of the discriminative value of nonverbal interactional behaviors. We developed the Nonverbal Interactional Coding System to measure “affiliative” and “distancing” nonverbal behaviors in 18 schizophrenic and 18 bipolar patients and their parents during 10-minute interactions conducted during a posthospital period. Bipolar patients and their parents displayed affiliative nonverbal behaviors (“illustrator gestures” or “prosocial behaviors”) for longer durations than schizophrenic patients and their parents. In contrast, parents of schizophrenic patients displayed distancing nonverbal behaviors (looking away) for longer durations than those of bipolar patients. The nonverbal interactional data added to the statistical strength of patients’ and parents’ verbal interactional data in distinguishing between these diagnostic groups. Nonverbal interactional behaviors are important variables to consider in interventions aimed at improving the communication skills of families coping with psychiatric disorders.     

A developmental model of decisions to withhold relational irritations in romantic relationships

Intimacy in romantic relationships is argued to influence both the outcomes of decisions about whether to withhold relational irritations from partners and the role of various conflict avoidance motives in these decisions. A study of college students involved in dating relationships revealed a curvilinear association between perceptions of intimacy and the frequency of decisions to withhold irritations. Specifically, intimacy was negatively correlated with the proportion of Unexpressed irritations across low and average levels of intimacy; however, intimacy was unrelated to decisions to withhold irritations across higher levels of intimacy. Length of involvement in a relationship was negatively correlated with the proportion of unexpressed irritations within relatively non intimate relationships only. Finally, the effect of three conflict avoidance motives on decisions to withhold irritations varied with the perceived intimacy of relationships. In particular, reporting a lack of intimacy in the relationship as a reason for withholding irritations was positively correlated with the proportion of unexpressed irritations when intimacy was low, but negatively correlated with the proportion of unexpressed irritations when level of emotional commitment was high. In contrast, reporting either fear of consequences or the lack of importance of the problem as motives for withholding irritations was unrelated to the proportion of unexpressed irritations when intimacy was low, but was positively Correlated with withholding when intimacy was high. These results suggest that the phenomenological experience of conflict management decisions changes in substance throughout the life of the romantic relationship.     

Evaluating Therapist Competency and Adherence to Behavioral Family Management with Bipolar Patients

The present study assessed fidelity to the behavioral family management (BFM) model for treating bipolar disorder patients and their families. The BFM Therapist Competency/Adherence Scale (BFM-TCAS) was developed to evaluate clinicians' competency and adherence to BFM, as outlined by Miklowitz' (1989) BFM Manual for use with bipolar patients. Therapist competency and treatment adherence was also evaluated with regard to two family characteristics: overall level of family difficulty and family expressed emotion (EE) status. The BFM-TCAS was used to code 78 videotaped sessions of 26 families with a bipolar member, selected from a larger treatment study of bipolar disorder patients. The findings suggest that, overall, clinicians adhered closely to the BFM manual. Specific areas in which there was high competency and treatment adherence were (a) skill in conveying factual information about bipolar illness, (b) establishment of a therapeutic environment, and (c) ability to take command of therapy sessions. The one area in which there was less compotency and relatively weak adherence to the manual was the use of between-session homework assignments to assist families in mastering the BFM exercises. Results of this study also suggest that, for the most part, therapist competency and adherence ratings were not related to overall level of difficulty or to family EE status.