Convergent and Discriminant Validity of FACES-III: Family Adaptability and Cohesion

Research on earlier versions of the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales (FACES) has ostensibly shown that the scales lack discriminant and convergent validity (23). However, these studies have defined convergence as agreement between family members or as agreement between family members and family therapists. Such definitions confound real differences between respondents' perceptions of the family with the notion of convergent validity. In the current study, we take a different approach to construct validity. Multiple measures of family adaptability, cohesion, and talkativeness were administered to two family members (insiders) and two significant others (outsiders). The two insiders' responses were averaged together, as were the two outsiders' responses. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we demonstrated that family adaptability, cohesion, and talkativeness are distinct traits, and that the different sources of information about these traits, including FACES-III (24), have convergent validity.     

Early Childhood Discipline: A Review of the Literature

In this literature review concerning early childhood discipline we particularly highlight American children's discipline with respect to historical perspectives, generational theories, gender issues, parental styles, methods of discipline, and corporal punishment. We also address corporal punishment's history, the debate among experts, beliefs and practices among parents, the controversy in public schools, religious influences, and a conflation of the issues.     

RELATIONAL SCHEMATA

One key task of research in relational communication is to understand how relational knowledge guides communicative processes. A necessary step in that direction is to determine what form of relational knowledge guides the cognitive processes involved in producing and comprehending messages. Based on tests of other forms of social knowledge, the best unobtrusive indicator of relational knowledge was determined to be systematic distortions in memory. Three forms of relational knowledge—general dimensional knowledge, situation-specific knowledge, and behavior-specific knowledge—were contrasted for their ability to account for biases in memory for relational implications of remarks in conversations. Two sets of results were noteworthy. First, very strong effects on both accuracy and direction of memory were found, indicating that some form of relational knowledge guided memory for conversations. Second, when the three forms of relational knowledge were contrasted, only one—behavior-specific knowledge—accounted for a significant proportion of those memory effects (83% for accuracy and 85% for errors). The findings challenge the validity of well-established dimension- and situation-based approaches to relational knowledge and suggest alternative approaches that may be more compatible with the uses to which relational knowledge is put in communication.     

Discrepancy between human resource research and practice: Comparison of industrial/organisational psychologists and human resource practitioners' beliefs

There is a large and growing body of research to show that human resource (HR) practices affect individual performance, organisational productivity and organisational performance. Academic findings about effective HR practices, however, have not readily been adopted by practitioners. A variety of theoretical and practical explanations have been advanced about the research–practice gap. Research by Rynes, Colbert, and Brown (2002) suggested that the research–practice gap is due to a lack of knowledge, but the extent to which these findings apply to the Australian context is unknown. The sample consisted of 102 industrial/organisational (I/O) psychologists and 89 HR practitioners. The main aim of the present study was to replicate and extend the work of Rynes et al. by examining and comparing the knowledge of I/O psychologists and HR practitioners. It was found that overall I/O psychologists were better informed about HR research than HR practitioners; in particular, they were more knowledgeable about management practices and recruitment and selection. In both groups, of the five content areas examined (Management Practices; General Employment Practices; Training and Development; Recruitment and Selection; and Compensation and Benefits), the greatest gaps were in Recruitment and Selection.     

GENERALIZING ABOUT MESSAGES: SUGGESTIONS FOR DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS

Current research practices in communication create problems for both internal and external validity. One serious design flaw, which involves use of a single message to represent a category of messages, occurs in nearly all of the experimental research on communication effects. The problem with such a design is that an observed difference between categories may reflect only differences between individual, idiosyncratic cases. A related error, the “language-as-fixed-effect fallacy,” involves use of several replications of each category, but analysis of the cases as fixed effects. The consequence is that findings cannot be generalized beyond the sample used. Future research should use multiple cases within each message category studied and treat cases as nested random effects. Since the cases cannot be true random samples from message populations, care must be taken to avoid known sources of bias or other barriers to generalization.     

That All Children Should Be Free: Beauvoir,Rousseau, and Childhood

Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau—who was one of her favorite authors—we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom.     

M > 1

Increasingly, communication experiments are incorporating replication/actors for the purpose of controlling confounds and increasing generalizability. If replications are considered to be samples of possible treatment implementations, treating the replication factor as random is more appropriate than treating it as fixed. Study 1 shows that treating sampled replications as a fixed effect leads to potentially serious alpha inflation in the test of the treatment effect while treating sampled replications as random controls alpha at its nominal level. Study 2 addresses a common objection to treating replications as random: the argument that to do so will lead to unacceptably low power in statistical testing. Although experiments with very few replications are likely to be deficient in power, the results of Study 2 establish that power can be improved to an unexpected degree by a relatively modest increase in the number of replications.