The Relationship Between Parenting Style and Children's Adjustment: The Parents' Perspective

We examined the relationship between authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles and socio-emotional adjustment in elementary school children as reported from the parents' perspective. Mothers of first through fifth graders provided information about parenting style as well as children's competencies and problem behaviors. Teachers provided ratings of children's adjustment for a subset of the participants. Results indicated that authoritative parenting was associated negatively with parent- and teacher-rated maladaptive behavior, and positively with indicators of healthy adjustment. Correlations between authoritarian parenting and adjustment were either small or non-significant. Regression analyses indicated that authoritative parenting was more predictive of children's competence than maladaptation (22% versus 10% of variance). The effects of parenting style on adjustment were not moderated by demographic variables, such as the child's gender, grade level, ethnicity, and family income.     

Adjusting the Religious Autobiography Course for the Postmodern Classroom

Religious autobiography as an introductory course is popular yet problematic. Often, it lacks methodological breadth and functions to ensconce Western notions of subjectivity which elide difference, locatedness, and the reality of multiple or shifting identifications. These problems can be addressed by incorporating into the course a community‐based learning exercise in which each student is paired with a local senior citizen, conducts a series of interviews with the elder, and then writes an (auto‐)biography based on the interviews. Students are thus given a real‐life situation in which to test the applicability of theories and definitions of religion, as well as a relationship to a subject whose locatedness and relatively unprivileged “I” allow for the problematization of autobiography as a genre as well as an appreciation for the contextual nature of religiosity. This exercise transforms the religious autobiography course into a pedagogically fruitful, intellectually defensible, and institutionally savvy introductory course.     

Applying a longitudinal tracer methodology to evaluate complex interventions in complex settings

Long-running multi-faceted intervention studies are particularly problematic in large complex organizations where traditional methods prove too resource intensive and can yield inaccurate and incomplete findings. This paper describes the first use of, longitudinal tracer methodology (LTM), a realist approach to evaluation, to examine the links between multiple complex intervention activities (processes) and their outcomes on a construction megaproject. LTM is especially useful when the researcher has little control over intervention delivery but has evidence drawn from multiple sources to evaluate the intervention activities effects over time. This methodology has rarely been deployed in complex organizational settings and not on a construction megaproject. This paper presents a case study of its use over a period of three years, on 24 construction sites forming London’s Thames Tideway Tunnel (Tideway) megaproject. The study examines the “transformational” power of occupational safety and health (OSH) interventions across the multiple organizations and supply chains in the megaproject. The study shows how the method can be adapted in-flight to accommodate shifting lines of inquiry as the intervention activities progress and change. This feature along with its resource-efficient operation, make it an attractive option where interventions are likely to have differential effects across multiple sites of enactment.     

Narrative Therapy to Prevent Illness‐Related Stress Disorder

More than 94% of cancer patients described the experience as the most traumatic event they have ever faced and 13% have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath. Empirical evidence demonstrates that certain behaviors lead to more positive health outcomes. Although many patients automatically engage in these behaviors, many others do not. Treatments typically focus on short‐term, symptom‐focused strategies. Narrative‐Expressive Therapy is an intervention designed to address the long‐term, underlying stress and to prevent PTSD in patients with serious illness.     

Measuring social influence of a senior midwife on decision‐making in maternity care: an experimental study

The document Changing Childbirth produced by the Department of Health (1993) requests provision of more choice, continuity and control for women during pregnancy and childbirth. In this context this study considers whether midwives'decisions are influenced by a senior midwife. A simple, valid and reliable scale—the Social Influence Scale for Midwifery (SIS‐M)—was devised to measure and score midwives' private anonymous responses to 10 clinical decisions. The SIS‐M was initially administered as a self‐completed postal survey by 209 midwives. Following a 9‐month time gap, a stratified sample of 60 (20 E, F, G grade midwives) were invited for interview in which a senior midwife attempted to influence SIS‐M responses in a conformist direction. Overall, a 3 × 2 (E, F, G grade midwives x private and interview SIS‐M scores) analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed midwives were significantly more conformist when influenced by a senior midwife, in comparison to private anonymous responses. No significant interaction between groups was found. These findings indicate that there is influence of a senior midwife on clinical decisions that should be woman‐centred, according to Changing Childbirth (1993). The implication is that this influence may remove choice from women. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky)

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals' communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.'s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky's conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility.     

Career aspirations of youth: Untangling race/ethnicity, SES, and gender

This study examined the influence of gender, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity on the career aspirations of over 22,000 8th and 10th grade youth. The top five occupations identified by youth as aspirations included artist, lawyer, musician, FBI agent, and actor/actress. Top occupations were also reported for each gender × socioeconomic status × race/ethnicity group. Aspirations were coded by social prestige level, minimum education requirements, and median salary. Results revealed significant main effects for socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity as well as significant interaction effects. Further, significant gender main effects and a significant gender × ethnicity interaction were found for occupational prestige and educational requirements.     

Goal attribution to schematic animals: do 6‐month‐olds perceive biological motion as animate?

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6‐month‐olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched, infants reacted more to movement towards a new goal than a new location – but only if the square moved non‐rigidly and rhythmically, in a schematic version of bio‐mechanical movement older observers describe as animal‐like ( Michotte, 1963 ). Goal attribution was specific to schematic animal motion: It did not occur if the square moved rigidly with the same rhythm as the animate stimulus, or if the square had the same amount of non‐rigid deformation, but in an inanimate configuration. The data would seem to show that perception of schematic animal motion is linked to a system for psychological reasoning from infancy. This in turn suggests that 6‐month‐olds may already interpret biological motion as animate.