A Four-Day Diagnostic-Therapeutic Home Visit in Turkey

The author has presented his experiences during a four-day home visit in Istanbul, where he was invited for the purpose of making a diagnosis and recommendations for the care of a 20-year-old English-speaking Turkish patient.
His preparations are described, as are the details of his conduct of the evaluation. His findings and recommendations have been presented. Emphasis is placed throughout on the importance of the examiner acquainting himself in detail with his patient's cultural, social, and ethnic milieu. The way in which such information contributed to a clearer understanding of the patient's psychological difficulties is demonstrated.
A Greek and a Turkish psychiatrists' comments on the article are published together with a final note by the author.     

FORMAL AND INFORMAL MENTORSHIPS: A COMPARISON ON MENTORING FUNCTIONS AND CONTRAST WITH NONMENTORED COUNTERPARTS

Research on mentorships has suffered from fragmentation of key issues; specifically, type of mentoring relationship, functions served by the mentor, and outcomes of the mentoring relationship. A field study was conducted comparing 212 protégés who were involved in informally developed mentorships, 53 protégés involved in formal mentor-ship programs, and 284 individuals who did not have mentors. Individuals in informal and formal mentorships were compared along two mentoring dimensions: psychosocial and career-related functions. All groups were compared on three outcome measures: organizational socialization, job satisfaction, and salary. Results indicated protégés in informal mentorships reported more career-related support from their mentors and higher salaries than protégés in formal mentorships. For all outcome variables, protégés in informal mentorships also reported more favorable outcomes than nonmentored individuals. However, outcomes from protégés in formal mentorships were generally not significant from the other two groups. Implications for mentorship practices and research are discussed.     

A SIMPLE AND RELIABLE METHOD OF SCORING THE THURSTONE ATTITUDE SCALES

A simple method of scoring the Thurstone Attitude Scales is presented, which does not involve the use of a judging group and yet is found in several samples to be consistently more reliable than the original method of scoring. The scores obtained by the two methods correlate highly (median r = .88), indicating that they are measuring essentially the same thing.     

PERCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION SEQUENCING IN RELATIONSHIP DEVELOPMENT1

Randomly selected adult residents (N = 204) of a Chicago suburb sorted 150 statements along a time continuum according to their estimate of when each statement would first be made during a two-hour conversation between two strangers. Analyses were conducted on the items employing the following variables: self-esteem, birth order, number of close friends, economic status, desired number of friends, age, sex, and education. Only the latter four variables produced significant differences.