Preference for modes of dispute resolution as a function of process and decision control

Research on procedural justice has suggested that the distribution of control among participants can be used to classify dispute-resolution procedures and may be an important determinant of preference for such procedures. This experiment demonstrates that control can be meaningfully divided into two components: control over the presentation of evidence and control over the final decision. The experiment placed subjects (law students and undergraduates) in a situation of conflict and varied two between-subjects factors: (1) Role, whether subjects expected to role-play third parties (law students) or litigants (undergraduates), and (2) Orientation, whether individuals focused on equity claims (appeals to a norm of fairness) or legal claims (appeals to a strict, legal interpretation of events). As a control, a third-party neutral-orientation condition was included. In addition, subjects were presented with four dispute-resolution procedures which varied in third-party control over the presentation of evidence (Process Control) and third-party control over the final decision (Decision Control) as within-subjects factors. Results revealed that both litigants and third parties preferred high rather than low third-party decision control. Litigants with an equity orientation preferred low third-party control over the presentation of evidence, particularly when third parties had high rather than low decision control. Third parties and litigants with a legal orientation preferred low rather than high third-party process control only when there was high third-party decision control. Litigant preferences were more affected by variation in process control than variation in decision control while third-party preferences were more affected by variation in decision control than in process control. As a check on external validity, military judges given a neutral orientation were asked to evaluate and express preferences for the four dispute-resolution procedures. Their results were not detectably different from those of the law students who role-played third parties in the main portion of the study.     

Concurrent validity of Holland's theory for non-college-degreed working women

This study, using the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) and the Self-Directed Search (SDS), explored the concurrent validity of Holland's theory for employed non-college-degreed women. The VPI and SDS were administered to 114 women workers in occupational environments consistent with Holland's vocational environments. The results revealed that three scales of the VPI and five scales of the SDS successfully differentiated the occupational groups consistent with Holland's theoretical notions. In general, the findings lend some support to the concurrent validity of Holland's theory for employed non-college-degreed women.     

A case study approach to delivering and evaluating services by a school psychologist

Two interrelated problems in delivering school psychological services by one school psychologist acted as a motivating force behind this study: the problem of how to plan and render services to a school system where the ratio of students to school psychologists is high, and the problem of how to determine the degree of effectiveness of these services. This study describes an approach which consisted of three distinct services rendered by a school psychologist. Evaluative measurements of the services were made in two areas: the effect of the services on the ongoing operations of the system, and the evaluation of the services by school personnel exposed to the services directly or indirectly. The relative merits and the limitations of such an approach are discussed.     

Third party instigated aggression as a function of attack pattern and a nonaggressive response option

In the present study, subjects suggested what shock intensity a confederate should set for her opponent in a reaction time competition. Opponents displayed one of three attack patterns: increasing, decreasing, or minimal provocation. Also, for half the subjects a “no shock” option was available. A control group who had the nonaggressive option and for whom the opponent was nonaggressive (always chose “no shock”) was included. Results revealed that subjects' responses were governed by the norm of reciprocity; also the option reduced instigative aggression for subjects encountering increasing and decreasing provocation, while elevating aggressive response when the opponent was minimally provocative. Results are discussed in terms of attribution and locus of control.     

Interpersonal attraction and person perception: Two tests of three balance models

Two experiments tested the adequacy of three balance models (equal-weights tetrahedron model, unequal-weights tetrahedron model, Feather model) for the p?o?x triad. In the first experiment, involving a variation of Byrne's anonymous-stranger technique, a PDP-11 computer was used to provide feedback on five attitude issues for each of the cells of a design created by five levels of the p?x variable (?2, ?1, 0, +1, +2) and five levels of the o?x variable (?2, ?1, 0, +1, +2). The dependent variable was p?o, interpersonal attraction. In the second experiment there were five-level manipulations of both p?x and o?p with an o-x (person perception) dependent variable. The correlations between obtained results and the predicted values for each of the three models were quite high (.64, .65, .61, respectively, in the first experiment and .60, .59, and .58, respectively, in the second), but the Feather model was judged least adequate. The data in the first experiment were best described by the unequal-weights tetrahedron model, and the data in the second experiment were best described by the equal-weights tetrahedron model. It was argued that avoidance of mutual dislike was responsible for the relatively greater support for the unequal-weights than equal-weights tetrahedron model in the first experiment.     

Intelligence and teachers' ratings as predictors of abstract and concrete learning

This study concerned the prediction of children's learning with an individual measure of intelligence and teachers' evaluations. Eight abstract and eight concrete nouns were paired with nonsense geometric figures and presented to 60 elementary school children in a three-trial paired-associate (PA) learning task. Subjects' IQ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised and teachers' ratings of learning proficiency were used to predict children's performance on the PA task. Multiple correlations favored abstract learning with verbal scale intelligence, accounting for the majority of the variability. Teachers' ratings provided a surprising degree of predictive efficiency for abstract recall which was redundant with verbal intelligence.     

The modification of intelligence through early experience

Infants judged to be at risk for subnormal intellectual growth were randomly assigned to an Experimental (N = 27) or a Control (N = 25) group. Infants in both groups received medical care and dietary supplements; their families received social work services on a request basis. Experimental children participated in an educational daycare program beginning before the third month of life. The daycare program was composed, in part, of curriculum activities designed to stimulate intellectual growth. Between 6 and 36 months of age, Experimental children maintained normal intellectual growth; Control children declined in IQ beginning between 12 and 18 months of age and remained significantly lower than Experimental children at 24 and 36 months. The mother-child IQ correlation for Control dyads was 43; for Experimental dyads the correlation was ?.05. These two types of evidence are interpreted as support for the importance of early environments in the development of intelligence.     

Testing for developmental continuity or discontinuity: Class inclusion and reversal shifts

Often the data in cognitive development consist of continuous cross-sectional increases in the proportion of children who respond in one of two ways to a diagnostic task. Such developmental trends are, however, ambiguous with reference to the course of individual, longitudinal development because they could be the result of either saltatory or gradual ontogenetic change. The present research tested a nonlongitudinal procedure for discriminating between these two alternatives. This procedure involves the administration of several equivalent versions of the diagnostic task at weekly intervals to children within a given age level in order to obtain a frequency distribution of the number of “successes” produced by each child. A bimodal distribution is interpreted as indicating saltatory ontogenetic change, while a unimodal distribution is taken to indicate gradual change. This method was applied to Piaget's class-inclusion problem and to the optional-shift task by administering four versions of each task to a range of different age-level samples. The optional-shift task produced clearly unimodal, bell-shaped distributions at all tested age levels, results which were interpreted to indicate a gradual ontogenetic increase in the probability of making reversal shifts. On the other hand, the frequency distributions for the class-inclusion task, at the appropriate age levels, were distinctly bimodal, and therefore consistent with a discontinuous ontogenetic transition. The capacity of the repeated-measures method to produce reliable within-task results and to differentiate between tasks was thus demonstrated.