Clinical Assessment of Adult Abuse and Trauma

This article examines several measures used in the assessment of adult abuse and trauma. These measures include structured clinical interviews, self report measures, screening inventories, symptom checklists, and some measures that include decision-making properties. Specific conditions in the assessment of adult victims of psychological trauma and implications for clinical practice are explored.     

Students' ratings of occupational dimensions of traditionally male and traditionally female occupations

The purpose of the present study was to investigate four traditionally male occupations and four traditionally female occupations on a number of dimensions which people use to judge the prestige or importance of a job. Workers were pictured on one form in their traditional roles and on a second form in nontraditional roles. Results indicated a tendency for subjects to give lower ratings to workers in nontraditional jobs. More importantly, for the two “objective” dimensions, money and education, boys and girls agreed on job ratings; however, on the two more “subjective” dimensions, respect and importance to the community, boys gave higher ratings to the male jobs, while girls gave higher ratings to the female jobs.     

Sexism: A tri-dimensional phenomenon

A review of the existing sex-role scales indicated the need for a relatively short multidimensional scale with established validity and reliability. The scale reported herein, consisting of 20 self-administered items in Likert format with Guttman scoring option, measures attitudes toward sex roles in three broad areas: internal familial division of labor, external (economic) division of labor, and perceived sex differences. One hundred and ninety-seven carefully selected and worded items were pretested by administration to a diverse group of 154 respondents. The results were submitted to factor analytic procedures leading to one dimension comprising two sets of items — those measuring attitudes toward internal division of labor, and those measuring attitudes toward external division of labor — and another dimension comprising items measuring attitudes toward perceived sex differences. These sets of items were treated as three subscales and submitted to Guttman procedures. The coefficients of reproducibility and scalability for each subscale were deemed satisfactory. Furthermore, 17 of the 20 items on the scale were able to distinguish females' responses from those of males. The alpha coefficient of reliability for the 20 items was .94.Social Science Verification SystemsAdapted from a paper presented at the meeting of the Southwestern Sociological Association, Houston, Texas, April 12–15, 1978. The authors wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of their colleagues, Professor Raymond A. Eve, of the Department of Sociology, and Professor Richard Gorsuch, of the Graduate School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Arlington. The authors take full responsibility for the results and interpretations of the analyses.     

Judgment Processes and Interpersonal Conflict Related to Societal Problem Solutions1

An application of multidimensional scaling to judgments about potential solutions to the overpopulation problem yielded two dimensions: Voluntary versus involuntary and economic versus noneconomic. The location of the “solutions” in this two dimensional space was closely related to their judged acceptability, for both original and cross-validation samples. The two-dimensional coordinates of the “solutions” were then used as implicit cue values in a “lens model” analysis of potential conflict among the subjects. This analysis indicated that judgmental inconsistency was likely to be the major source of conflict for these subjects.     

The limits of systems therapy: The problem of intimacy

By placing so much emphasis on systemic thinking, marriage and family therapists have lost sight of the individual within the system. One of the limits of a systemic therapy is its capacity to deal with problems in intimacy, a central problem in marital therapy. A knowledge of individual development is crucial for family therapists. The two themes dealt with in this paper are 1) some concepts of self psychology which can be useful in understanding the fear of intimacy, and 2) at what point, in couples' therapy, it is advisable to shift to individual therapy for one or both partners.     

Age Expectations of Behavioural Autonomy in Hong Kong,Australian and American Youth: The Influence of Family Variables and Adolescents' Values

Tenth and 11th grade students from Hong Kong (N = 141), Australia (N = 155), and the United States (N = 155) completed questionnaires about the age at which they expected to achieve behavioural autonomy and about their family environments and values. In general, Hong Kong youth had later expectations for autonomy; described their families as less accepting-engaged and less structured; placed less value on individualism, outward success, and individual competence, and more value on tradition, prosocial, and well socialised outcomes. However, in all three cultures, age expectations for behavioural autonomy showed similar patterns of association with family environments and values as revealed by parallelism of regression planes. Expectations for later autonomy were associated with perceptions of parental monitoring, a demanding family environment, low levels of autocratic parenting, and with youths' de-emphasis of individualism, individual competence and outward success. In regression analyses the family environment and values scores reduced by 62% the influence attributed to culture.     

The role of duration in memory and metamemory of enacted instructions (SPTs)

Summary Subjects enacted two series of tasks as instructed (subject-performed tasks, or SPTs). The enactions were of either short (5-s) or long (30-s) duration. The long en actions were either repetitive (e.g.,bounce a ball several times) or else nonrepetitive (e. g.,stand up, walk round the room, open the door, look out, close the door, sit down). During presentation, subjects were to rate the probability of recall of each SPT in a subsequent free-recall test. The long SPTs were given higher recall ratings than the short SPTs, but the subjects did not differentiate between the repetitive and the nonrepetitive items. Recall mirrored the ratings; the long SPTs were recalled more frequently than the short ones, with no difference between the repetitive and the nonrepetitive items. The metamemory results are discussed in relation to the notion that the memory-monitoring system is sensitive to quantitative, but not to qualitative, differences in encoding.     

Parental enabling attitudes and locus of control of at-risk and honors students

Parental enabling attitudes and behavior interfere with the child's ability to take responsibility for his or her behavior. Enabling is expressed in overprotectiveness and manipulation in which parents insulate their children from unpleasant circumstances and from making mistakes. Unfortunately, these are the very situations in which most children learn self-control, independence, and strategies to correct aberrant behavior. Children of enabling parents often fail to learn that their actions have consequences. The Lynch Enabling Survey for Parents (LESP), a forty-item questionnaire designed to assess the enabling behavior of parents, was evaluated to establish its psychometric properties. In Experiment 1, 416 parents responded to the LESP. The instrument was determined to be reliable (rs = .84 and .92 for split-half and test-retest reliability, respectively) and valid. Factor analysis established four factors, assessing Direct Enabling Parent Involvement, Indirect Nonenabling Parent Involvement, Direct Nonenabling Parent Involvement, and Indirect Enabling Parent Involvement. In Experiment 2, the LESP and the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale were used to assess the differences between ninth-grade at-risk and honors students and their parents. The responses of parents of at-risk students on the LESP were significantly more enabling than were the responses of the parents of honors students. At-risk and honors students were also significantly different in their locus of control. Lastly, there was a significant relationship between parents' LESP scores and their children's locus of control scores.