The stability of status orientations among young,white, rural women from three southern states

This paper reports the results of a panel study of young, white, rural women from Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas (N = 138). The study was primarily concerned with how social origin variables affected early educational and occupational orientations and how early states of these orientations affected the orientations themselves at a later point in time. The results indicated that mother's education had a greater effect than father's education, but in either case the effect is mediated by intervening influences such as early aspirations and expectations. These young women held very traditional status orientations (with 60% projecting the occupations of beautician, nurse, stenographer, or school teacher), and their orientations were quite stable between their sophomore and senior years in high school. Since there has been so little work reported on the status attainment process for women, and rural women in particular, this study does offer a limited insight into this phenomenon.     

The life course as a theoretical orientation: Sequences of person-situation interaction1

The life course is proposed as a theoretical orientation concerned with the problems of describing, understanding, generalizing about, predicting, and intentionally changing the course of lives. A life course orientation provides a framework for analyzing the causal and probabilistic structure of the course of experience in individual lives, groups of lives, and lives in general. The life course can be conceptualized as a sequence of person-situation interactions, or as a sequence of behavior-determining, person-determining, and situation-determining processes. This perspective is illustrated through an analysis of the careers of heroin users, and through a critical examination of several common strategies for predicting behavior. The study of lives is distinguished from the study of personality, and the historical and theoretical background for a life course orientation is briefly reviewed.     

THE BEHAVIOR OBSERVATION INSTRUMENT: A METHOD OF DIRECT OBSERVATION FOR PROGRAM EVALUATION1

The background and development of a multicategory direct observation system, the Behavior Observation Instrument (BOI), is described. This time-sampling procedure for recording the behavior of persons is demonstrated in several treatment settings and the results applied to issues of program evaluation. Elements that have prevented direct observation from being widely adopted, such as costs, manpower, and training requirements, are systematically analyzed. A basic psychometric analysis of the instrument is used to determine optimum frequency and duration of observation intervals as well as observer agreement. The results imply that direct observation methods, once assumed by some to belong to the special province of the single-subject design, can be used to assess the effects of programs on groups of psychiatric clients in an efficient and economic manner.     

Involuntary memory and the development of retrieval skills in young children

An incidental memory paradigm was used to study involuntary encoding processes and voluntary retrieval strategies in children's memory. Preschool (mean age: 4 years, 4 months) and kindergarten (mean age: 5 years, 10 months) children sorted pictures according to their color or category membership, and then received either a recall test (Experiment 1) or a recognition test (Experiment 2). Better retention of category- than color-sorted items was observed for kindergarten children in free recall, preschool and kindergarten children in cued recall, and neither group in recognition. These results were interpreted in terms of the retrieval strategies used by children in each of the memory tasks. The importance of distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary memory processes, and between acquisition and retrieval, in studies of depth-of-processing was emphasized. Developmental differences in performance appear to derive primarily from the role of voluntary search strategies in retrieval, rather than from age differences in involuntary encoding processes.     

Evaluation and recall of evidence: Authoritarianism and the Patty Hearst case

By using the Patricia Hearst case as the stimulus material, two experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between authoritarianism and recall of evidence. In Experiment I it was found that high authoritarians recall more prosecution evidence than defense evidence. This was not the case for the low authoritarians. Results concerning the hypothesis that high authoritarians would recall more character information than low authoritarians were equivocal. In Experiment II a trend indicating that high authoritarians draw more direct inferences from incriminating evidence than do low authoritarians or an attorney was obtained. The results are discussed in terms of previous findings, authoritarian theory, and characteristics of the Patricia Hearst case.