Child Participation in Family Therapy

The full involvement of children, particularly those of younger ages, in family therapy presents a personal and professional challenge to the therapist. Out of his own needs he may favor involvement with one or another generation rather than with the complete three generation family. This issue is discussed and suggestions for therapeutic use of younger children are presented.     

A tutorial on analyzing data from speed‐dating studies with heterosexual dyads

Speed‐dating studies provide a useful venue for studying attraction and other relationship initiation processes. They provide researchers with a unique opportunity to assess how much a dyadic behavior (e.g., attraction) is due to some relationship‐specific adjustment or the dispositional tendencies of the two people interacting. Researchers can also investigate the impact of individual difference variables on relationship initiation outcomes. This article shows researchers how to address such interesting questions by providing an extended treatment of how to apply the social relations model (D. A. Kenny & L. La Voie, 1984) to data from a typical speed‐dating study with heterosexual dyads. The statistical program SPSS is used given its widespread use and accessibility.     

Young Children's Creative Solutions To Realistic and Fanciful Story Problems

This study examined the creative problem solving of young children as evidenced in their responses to realistic and fanciful stories posing similar problems (i.e., key character trapped and in need of rescue). One-hundred young children listened to two stories; one about a puppy trapped in a hole (realistic) and one about a prince caught in a tower (fanciful). The children were asked to complete the stories by thinking of ways to get the puppy or the prince out. The children's responses were scored for fluency (number), elaboration (detail), flexibility (conceptual shifts), originality (novelty), effectiveness, and realism. Overall, the results suggest that the children's performance improved with age and experience, although their solutions tended to remain ineffective and unoriginal. As predicted, the children strongly preferred the puppy to the prince story, although preference did not generally affect their creative performance. The practical and theoretical implications of the study are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.     

TIME-SPENT RESPONSES AS TIME ALLOCATION STRATEGIES: RELATIONS WITH SALES PERFORMANCE IN A STOCKBROKER SAMPLE

Most research on job analysis treats within-job interrater disagreement on structured job analysis surveys as measurement error. The present research conceptualized time-spent responses as expressions of time allocation strategies for the relatively autonomous stockbroker job, and differences between responses as reflecting different strategies. Stockbrokers ( n = 580) in a large financial services firm provided time-spent data on a job analysis survey, and results showed that for relatively inexperienced stockbrokers (with 1-4 years'job experience), and for more experienced stockbrokers with more than 4 years'experience, adjusted RS between sales performance and time spent on activity factors were both .49. Also, there was evidence suggesting that the relatively inexperienced and experienced stockbrokers spend significantly different amounts of time on some activities and that different patterns of relationships between time spent and sales performance exist for the two groups. Discussion focuses on difficulties with interpreting certain time-spent/performance relationships, and research approaches that might better separate differential time allocation strategies from measurement error.