Do “Womanist” Identity Attitudes Influence College Women's Self-Esteem and Perceptions of Environmental Bias?

Helms (1990) proposed a four-stage model of womanist identity in which she hypothesized that development of healthy identity in women involves movement from external standards of gender identity to internal standards. Attitudes derived from her model were used to predict undergraduate women's self-esteem and perceptions of sex bias in the campus environment. Female undergraduates (N = 659), freshmen through seniors, were surveyed in classes at a large eastern university. Results indicated that Encounter (characterized by questioning of previously held stereotypical views about gender and dawning awareness of alternative perspectives) and Immersion-Emersion (characterized by an active rejection of male supremacist values and beliefs and the search for a positive self-affirming definition of womanhood) attitudes were inversely related to perceptions of environmental gender bias and positively related to self-esteem. Implications for counseling and future research are discussed.     

Men Who Make Nontraditional Career Choices

A summary of research findings showed that men who choose female-dominated occupations likely possess many of the same traits and characteristics often attributed to women in the same jobs. Contrary to stereotypes, men generally are comfortable with themselves and their masculine sexuality, although they score lower in Bem's masculine identity than traditional men. A framework for the process of men's nontraditional career choice is presented based on previous career development models for traditional careers plus a review of the empirical research literature. Implications for professional counselors and organizations are discussed.     

Family Structure and Treatment in the Military

This paper elucidates the special stresses and supports experienced by military families and their relation to individual decompensation, which is viewed as an expression of family disequilibrium and is often best treated in the family. Periodic separations, frequent moves, and rigid hierarchy present difficult problems that tax the resourcefulness of the military and its families. Healthy and maladaptive patterns are discussed.     

Some Aspects of Loneliness in Families

Although awareness of the harmful effects of loneliness has increased in recent years, lonely persons continue to be viewed as family outsiders or nonfamily. Beginning with the general-systems concept of loneliness as having a healthy, adaptive function in families, this article explores the family context of different degrees of loneliness. It assumes that prolonged loneliness (in addition to its meaning for the individual system) is a manifestation of certain kinds of family processes. Five such processes involved in the prolonging of loneliness are suggested: unresolved grief, pathological certainty, synchronicity, family expansion, and parental abdication.     

THE EFFECTS OF MESSAGE INTRODUCTION,MESSAGE STRUCTURE,AND VERBAL ORGANIZING ABILITY UPON LEARNING OF MESSAGE INFORMATION

This study focused primarily upon Ausubel's advance organizer concept as a relatively abstract message introduction. Subsumption theory suggests that the advance organizer should be superior in learning effects to an introduction of message main points and that the advance organizer should interact with message structure and verbal organizing ability. This study found no overall advance organizer superiority to other introduction conditions. However, simple interactions, which were analyzed to interpret a significant three-way interaction on one of two dependent variables, provided qualified support for first-order interaction hypotheses. These hypotheses predicted that the superiority of an advance organizer to other introduction conditions would be greater for a low-structure message than for a high-structure message and greater for low-ability subjects than for high-ability subjects. They also included a prediction that the superiority of a high-structure message to a low-structure message would be greater for high-ability subjects than for low-ability subjects. Analysis of serial position effects indicated primacy in recall under high-structure message conditions.