Reliability of self-reported service use: Test-retest consistency of children's responses to the Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA)

This paper reports on the reliability of children's responses on the Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA) — a self-report instrument for use with 8– to 18-year-olds that gathers information about services used to address mental health problems. Findings were based on interviews completed by 77 children at a one week test-retest interval. Results showed that reports of lifetime service use were as reliable as were reports of service use in the preceding three months. Children reported restrictive and intrusive services more reliably than services that were provided in their natural environment. Reliability appeared to be associated more strongly with characteristics of the type of service than with characteristics of the child. Children also could report reliably on some details about their encounters with service providers (e.g., length of stay, number of visits, and onset of service use).     

Sensorimotor synchronization: Motor responses to pseudoregular auditory patterns

Musically trained and untrained subjects (N=30) were asked to synchronize their finger tapping with stimuli in auditory patterns. Each pattern comprised six successive tonal stimuli of the same duration, the first of which was accented by a different frequency. The duration of interstimulus onset intervals (ISIs) gradually increased or decreased in constant steps toward the end of the patterns. Four values of such steps were used in different trials: 20, 30, 45, and 60 msec. Various time-control mechanisms are hypothesized as being simultaneously responsible for subjects’ incorrect reproduction of the internal temporal ratios of the stimulus patterns. The mechanism of assimilation (of a central tendency) led subjects to enforce a regular (isochronous) structure on the patterns. The influence of other time-control mechanisms (distinction, subjective expression of an accent, sequential transfer) was expressed mainly in differences between intertap onset intervals (ITIs) and the corresponding ISIs at the beginning of the patterns. The duration of the first two ITIs was in the majority of the trials in an inverse ratio to the ratio of the respective ISIs. The distortions resulting from the timing mechanisms concerned were more pronounced in the performance of nonmusicians than in that of musicians.     

An Empirical Examination of Same- and Other-Gender Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This study examines sexual harassment (SH) whichinvolves members of the same gender, either male orfemale. Data are taken from the 1988 Department ofDefense Survey of Sex Roles in the Active Duty Military. Separate comparisons for male (38% White, 31%Black, and 31% ‘other’) and female (48%White, 27% Black, and 25% ‘other’) targetsare made between sameand other-gender SH related to fourmajor components of a conceptual model proposed by Fitzgerald,Drasgow, Hulin, Gelfand, & Magley (1997). Thesecomponents include sexual harassment behaviors, personalvulnerability, target response styles, and consequences of the SH for the target. The sexualorientation of targets and perpetrators is notconsidered because data were unavailable. Results reveala number of meaningful differences between sameandother-gender SH. The most striking result is that maletargets of same-gender SH experience consequences thatare significantly more pervasive and severe than thoseexperienced by male targets of other-gender SH.Organizational implications are discussed.     

The effects of life crisis on psychological adjustment

In this survey study the question was asked how "life crisis," social conditions, and ratings of quality of life are related to psychological adjustment. The survey included 454 residents, and data were collected on five social conditions: income, education, age, marital status, and religious participation; four ratings of life quality: family, personal life, income, and overall quality of life; the number of recent changes in the lives of the respondents; and two indicators of psychological adjustment. These data were analyzed with multivariate analyses of variance and stepwise regression. Life crisis was associated directly with psychological adjustment. Social conditions and life quality ratings also had significant effects. People with high life-crisis scores reported more psychological distress, and poor social conditions appeared to further exacerbate their adjustment problems. Regardless of the magnitude of the crisis, quality of life ratings had sizable effects on reports of psychological adjustment.     

Geometric and semantic similarity in visual masking

Semantic and geometric or physical similarity were manipulated separately in a backward-masking situation. When the target was a word to be read aloud, formal similarity between the letters of target and mask facilitated target recognition, as did associative similarity. Masking a target word by its own anagram also facilitated whole word report. In contrast, formal similarity was inhibitory rather than facilitatory of report when the target was spelled letter-by-letter, rather than read whole. This was true even for the same target words whose whole report was facilitated by formal similarity. A model to account for this reversal in the broader context of the neural substrate of reading is advanced. It is proposed that letter and word processing are fundamentally different in that letters are recognized by hierarchical feature analysis while words are stored and recognized wholistically by diffuse and redundant networks. Implications of the results for the study of reading are discussed.