Ethics,AIDS, and community responsibility

In the discussion of the responsibilities of society to the HIV infected and uninfected, a serious question seems to have been left out of the picture: To what extent are people who are not infected, have no special relationship to the infected and have no professional responsibilities for the care of AIDS patients under an obligation to come to the aid of people with the HIV? In this paper, I shall examine our responsibilities, as members of society, for the welfare of others to whom we may or may not have a special relationship. I shall argue that those responsibilities flow from the conditions that structure our transactions with others; conditions that make such transactions possible.     

On the processing of arguments

This paper is concerned with the processing of informal arguments, that is, arguments involving probable truth. A model of informal argument processing is presented that is based upon Hample's (1977) expansion of Toulmin's (1958) model of argument structure. The model postulates that a claim activates an attitude, the two components forming a complex that in turn activates reasons. Furthermore, the model holds occurrence of the reason, or possibly the claim and the reason, activates values. Three experiments are described that provide support for the model.This research was supported by the Mellon Foundation and by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the Department of Education via an award for the Center for the Study of Learning to the Learning Research and Development Center. The contents of the paper are not necessarily the position of any of these organizations.     

Taking visual disability into account: Explaining failure to experts and non-experts

The present study was designed to investigate visually handicapped students' explanations for failure when the motive to maintain or enhance self-esteem was in conflict with the motive to present a favorable social image. Subjects experienced manipulated failure in a text comprehension task and were subsequently asked to give causal and responsibility attributions in the presence of either a visually handicapped or a non-handicapped experimenter. It was expected that visually disabled participants would claim a handicap-bonus from the non-handicapped experimenter by explicitly presenting non-defensive attributions and accounts as well as handicap-related responses, while defensive explanations should be more pronounced when faced with a blind experimenter. The data provide support for the existence of presumed social expectations as determinants of individuals' verbal self-presentations.     

EFFECTS OF MEMORY AIDS ON THE DYADIC CONVERSATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS WITH DEMENTIA

The effects of a prosthetic memory aid on the conversational content and social skills of dyads with dementia were evaluated. Six individuals with moderate to severe dementia served as either subject or partner in dyads during 5-min conversational probes conducted three times per week in daycare and nursing-home settings. During phases when a memory aid, consisting of personally relevant picture and sentence stimuli, was available, most subjects used their own aid to improve the quality of conversations by increasing the frequency of on-topic statements, diminishing nonproductive utterances, lengthening their conversational turn, and/or increasing the frequency of turns taken. Most partners demonstrated awareness of social discourse conventions by appropriately relinquishing conversational dominance, decreasing both content and nonproductive utterances, and increasing acknowledging or affirmative comments when subjects used memory aids. Naive judges' ratings of aided and unaided conversational samples on seven conversational dimensions reflected differences in perceptions of significant improvement as a function of the conversational discourse style of each dyad.     

Swedish translations of the Suicide Probability Scale, Perceived Social Support from Friends and Family Scales, and the Scale for Interpersonal Behavior: A reliability analysis

The Suicide Probability Scale (SPS), the Perceived Social Support (PSS) from Friends (PSS-Fr) and Family (PSS-Fa) scales, and the Scale for Interpersonal Behavior (SIB) were translated into Swedish and their reliability was estimated in a university student sample. The reliability coefficients indicated that both subscales and the total scales of the SPS, PSS, and SIB possess highly adequate reliabilities. The intercorrelations among the subscales and between the subscales and the total scales were found to be highly significant. The results of the study supported the use of SPS, PSS-Fr and PSS-Fa, and the SIB as reliable methods for assessing suicide risk, perceived social support from friends and family, and assertive behavior.     

Culture wars: American moral divisions across the adult lifespan

Sociologists have argued that the public moral debate in contemporary America is characterized by a “culture war,” pitting “orthodox” and “progressivist” groups against one another (Hunter, 1991). This study addressed whether the culture war is evident in the moral thinking of ordinary Americans, and whether age-related patterns exist. Sixty fundamentalist Baptists (orthodox) and 60 mainline Baptists (progressivist) evaluated and reasoned about moral issues such as divorce and abortion. Each group was divided evenly into three age groups copsisting of young, midlife, and older adults. Moral reasoning was analyzed in terms of Shweder's (1990) ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. Within all three age groups, progressivists used the ethic of, autonomy more than orthodox participants. Orthodox participants used the ethic of divinity more than progressivists. Orthodox and progressivist groups did not differ much in their use of the ethic, of community. Very few age group differences were found within the orthodox and progressivist groups. It is concluded that morality is conceived of in markedly different wasy by orthodox and progressivist groups, and that these conceptions are consistent across age groups.     

Use and misuse of metrics in research evaluation

This paper addresses some critical issues in the applicability of quantitative performance measures (including bibliometric, economic, and co-occurrence measures) to the assessment of basic research. The strengths and weaknesses of metrics applied as research performance measures are examined. It is concluded that metrics have a useful role to play in the evaluation of research. Each metric employed, whether bibliometric, economic, co-occurrence, or others, brings a new dimension of potential insight to the complex problem of research assessment. However, when used in a stand-alone mode, metrics can be easily misinterpreted and result in misleading conclusions. Metrics should be an integral part of a more comprehensive approach to research evaluation, in which the leading role is assumed by expert peer review. Under this structure, the reviewers must be broadly constituted, so that the technical correctness of the research approaches being taken (doing the job right) can be evaluated by technical experts and the correctness of the research target (doing the right job) can be evaluated as well. This comprehensive approach insures quality in the implementation of existing research paradigms and allows the introduction of revolutionary new research paradigms as well. The views contained in this paper are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of the Department of the Navy. Ronald Kostoff received a Ph.D. from Princeton University, performed technical and economic research at Bell Laboratories, managed energy programs at U.S. Department of Energy, was Director of Technical Assessment at the Office of Naval Research for many years and presently manages the Navy’s In-House Laboratory Independent Research Program.     

Mentally retarded persons as parents: Prevalence and the situation of their children

This paper describes a research program on mentally retarded parents and their children. For this nation-wide study, two structured questionnaires were sent to all municipalities in Norway. Both questionnaires were sent to public health nurses and were followed-up by a structured telephone interview based on the questionnaires. The primary aim of the study was to survey the number of children born to mentally retarded parents. In addition, the children's needs and functional abilities were to be assessed. Twenty-three mentally retarded persons had given birth in the course of the past twelve months. A total of 126 children with mentally retarded parents were identified, with an incidence of 27 children per year, and a prevalence of approximately 430 children under 16 years of age in a population of 4 mill. People with a mean of 1.05 child per family. About 43% of the children of mentally retarded parents appeared to have learning difficulties. Forty percent of the children suffered from failures of care. Between 25% and 68% of the children with learning problems had poorly developed motor or language abilities, sense modalities or psycho-social status.