Development and validation of adolescent-perceived microsystem scales: Social support,daily hassles,and involvement

Developed and validated instruments for urban and culturally diverse adolescents to assess their self-reported transactions with family, peer, school, and neighborhood microsystems for the constructs of social support, daily hassles, and involvement. The sample of 998 youth were from schools in three Eastern cities with high percentages of economically disadvantaged youth. Data were collected before and after the transition to junior high school or to senior high school. Blacks constituted 26%, whites 26%, and Latinos 37% of the sample. Factor analyses confirmed and enhanced the hypothesized four-factor microsystem factor structure for support, hassles, and involvement; internal consistency and stability coefficients were consistent with these structures. In general, the microsystem factors were common across gender, ethnicity, and age. However, when group differences did occur on these demographic variables, they tended to validate the salience of microsystem specificity. In contrast to the total scores, the microsystem-specific factors yielded more meaningful and differential information with regard to demographic differences and the mediating processes across a school transition.     

Empowerment praxis in community coalitions

Community coalitions address a wide variety of community problems, espousing a community development processes that promotes individual and collective self-determination. They offer a promising venue for the study of empowerment of individuals and organizations. This study utilizes data from members of 35 community coalitions organized for the prevention of alcohol and other drug problems to address the following questions: What individual characteristics are related to the psychological empowerment of coalition members? What organizational characteristics are related to the collective empowering of members? What organization characteristics are related to a coalition being organizationally empowered to succeed in achieving its objectives? At the individual level, psychological empowerment was most strongly related to individuals' participation levels, sense of community, and perceptions of a positive organizational climate. At the group level, the strongest predictors of collective empowering (our operationalization of the empowering organization) were net benefits of participation, commitment, and positive organization climate. Psychological empowerment and positive organizational climate were the two predictors of organizational effectiveness (the empowered organization). Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.     

The Structure of Problem and Positive Behavior Among American Indian Adolescents: Gender and Community Differences

Using Problem-Behavior Theory as a framework, the latent structure of problem and positive behaviors was examined within a sample of 1,894 American Indian adolescents. Support was found for a two-factor second-order structure in which problem behaviors (antisocial behavior, alcohol use, drug use, and risky sexual behavior) and positive behaviors (school success, cultural activities, competencies, and community-mindedness) represented two relatively uncorrelated aspects of behavior. Hierarchical multiple regressions demonstrated that the positive behaviors construct contributed significant incremental construct validity in the statistical prediction of psychosocial outcomes, over and above the problem behaviors. In addition, the fit of the structure was examined across gender and the four participating communities. The importance of the inclusion of positive behaviors is discussed from the standpoint of both prevention/promotion activities and the communities' perceptions. Further recommendations are made for deeper understandings of community concerns and strengths in conducting preventive/promotive research efforts.     

Form categorization in 10-month-olds

In five experiments, 10-month-olds were habituated to exemplars of a form category and tested for categorization in paired-comparison trials involving in-category versus out-of-category stimuli. Across these experiments, color was systematically manipulated during habituation and/or test trials. Infants categorized form when color was either held constant or varied during habituation, but failed to categorize form when exposed to color-constant stimuli during habituation and tested for categorization with novel-color form exemplars. Two subsequent experiments traced this failure to the narrow experience of exposure to color-constant exemplars during habituation. These results suggest that (a) infants' internal representation for a category will not include a stimulus dimension not varied in the exemplars from which the category was derived, but (b) if variation in that dimension is experienced, exemplars constructed of novel instances of that dimension will still be regarded as belonging to the category.     

The use of categorial organization: Not an all-or-none situation

Second and fifth graders memorized each of two lists of words that differed in category representativeness. In addition, they received one of three memory instructions: standard free recall, repetition, or categorial processing. Recall performance was about equal for standard vs repetition, and both were lower than category processing, especially with the highly representative items. Age did not enter this interaction, so it is concluded that at both age levels, the accessibility of categorial information influences children's use of it. This suggests multiple types of possible production deficiencies.     

Some social contexts of self-destructive behavior

This study investigated the social context of self-injurious behavior in autistic, schizophrenic, and mentally retarded children residing in a state hospital. Social interactions between subjects and staff were recorded along with subjects' self-destructive behavior. The results showed a substantial increase in self-destructive behavior following the staff's presentation of demands, denials, and punishments in 19 of the 20 subjects. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that self-injurious behavior is a social behavior, which is determined by persons in the environment. In addition, the self-destructive behavior of one subject may have been largely self-stimulatory in nature.     

Visual temporal integration for threshold,signal detectability,and reaction time measures

A comparison was made of temporal integration for three different response measures in a visual detection task: (1) response frequency, (2) signal detectability as measured for rating ROC curves. (3) simple reaction times (RTs). These measures were obtained on the same trials, to the same stimuli-orange (581 rim) light pulses of 50 min of visual angle fixated foveally and presented to dark-adapted Os in a monocular Maxwellian view. All three response measures showed a period of luminance-duration reciprocity (Bloch’s law), followed by a period of partial integration. The end points of luminance-duration reciprocity (critical duration) and partial integration (utilization time) were shorter for RTs than for the response frequency and signal detectability measures. Neurophysiological.implications of differences in time constants of integration for RT and psychophysical measures are discussed.