Sexual Misconduct Within the Christian Church: Who Are the Perpetrators and Those They Victimize?

Reported incidence of clergy sexual misconduct is on the rise in the Christian church. This article reviews the literature describing those individuals involved in such misconduct. Included in this review are the characteristics of clergy, mostly men, who perpetrate the sexual abuse of others and an overview of the individuals, mostly women, who are victimized. An examination of the repercussions of this type of power abuse is included. Finally, a brief review describes what is being done by two Christian churches faced with clergy who have committed sexual misconduct.     

A Survey of Job Attitudes of Federal Prison Employees

Turner and Johnson attempted to determine the attitudes of federal prison employees regarding job satisfaction and personal safety. They designed a questionnaire to measure these factors and sent it to 147 workers in 19 federal correctional institutions. The results of the questionnaire, which had a return rate of 80%, generally indicate a high level of job satisfaction and relatively little concern about safety among employees who completed the questionnaire.     

Marital satisfaction and topographical assessment of marital interaction: A longitudinal analysis of newlywed couples

Despite numerous tests of social learning hypotheses relating to marriage, important questions remain concerning how best to quantify behavior displayed in marital interaction. In the present study, 60 newlywed couples reported their marital satisfaction, engaged in a 15-minute problem-solving discussion, and reported their marital satisfaction again 6 and 12 months later. The interactions were microanalytically coded, the codes were assigned a numeric value, and each spouse's cumulative point totals were plotted as a function of time in the interaction. This was done separately for all 60 couples. Graphs were divided into groups based on the topography of the graphically represented interactions. These groups differed cross-sectionally and longitudinally in their level of marital satisfaction. Couples tended to have lower satisfaction scores when their initial interactions were characterized with behavioral parity between the spouses at the beginning of a discussion, changing to asymmetrical patterns of behavior later in the conversation. This method was found to be more predictive of marital satisfaction than were standard methods of assessing dyadic interaction (i.e., base rates of behavior and sequential analysis). Implications of these data for understanding how interactions relate to the course of newlywed marriage are discussed.