The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers’ professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in professional development impact studies. She urges us to move away from automatic biases either for or against observation, interviews, or surveys in such studies. She argues that the use of a common conceptual framework would elevate the quality of professional development studies and subsequently the general understanding of how best to shape and implement teacher learning opportunities for the maximum benefit of both teachers and students.

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Improving Impact Studies of Teachers’ Professional Development: Toward Better Conceptualizations and Measures

Much of social life involves interactions between individuals or corporate actors in dyads, groups, organizations or networks that can be viewed as social exchanges. This chapter presents an overview of the main theories of social exchange focusing on the key contributors in sociology, including George Homans, Peter Blau, Richard M. Emerson and those whose work subsequently built on their original formulations. The theories that have been developed in recent decades have focused on the social structures created by repeated exchanges and the ways in which these structures both constrain and enable actors to exercise power and influence. Other related social processes addressed within the exchange tradition include interpersonal commitment, trust, fairness, procedural and distributive justice, coalition formation and collective action. Recent work also focuses on emotions and their role in social exchange. The methodological challenges of studying social exchange in the laboratory and in the world outside the lab are addressed as well as links between exchange theory and topics under study by economic sociologists and network scholars more broadly, including Internet-mediated exchanges and their growing significance.

Social Exchange Theory.

In this study, we developed a typology of deviant workplace behaviors using multidimensional scaling techniques. Results suggest that deviant workplace behaviors vary along two dimensions: minor versus serious, and interpersonal versus organizational. On the basis of these two dimensions, employee deviance appears to fall into four distinct categories: production deviance, property deviance, political deviance, and personal aggression. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed.

A typology of deviant workplace behaviors: a multidimensional scaling study

Satisfaction and comparison income

This paper presents a critical overview of current concepts and analytic practices in stress research and considers how they can be changed to make the research more consistent with core sociological interests. An overarching concern of the paper is the analytic use of basic information about people's social and institutional affiliations and statuses. It is important that such information be treated not simply as data that need to be controlled statistically; we must examine the bearing of these data on each domain of the stress process: the exposure to and meaning of stressors, access to stress mediators, and the psychological, physical, and behavioral manifestations of stress. The conceptualization and measurement of stressors should move away from their focus on particular events or chronic strains and should seek instead to observe and assess over time constellations of stressors made up of both events and strains. Moreover, the effects of the mediators--coping and social support--are evaluated most fruitfully in terms of their effects in limiting the number, severity, and diffusion of stressors in these constellations. Finally, sociological stress researchers should not be bound to outcomes that better serve the intellectual interests of those who work with biomedical and epidemiological models of stress, nor should the research be committed exclusively to a single outcome.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2136956.pdf

The sociological study of stress

What is a Standardized Survey Interview? What is Interviewer-related Error? Standardized Interviewing Techniques Establishing the Context for the Standardized Interview The Role of Question Design in the Standardized Interview Interviewer Selection and Interviewer-Related Error Training Interviewers Interviewer Supervision How to Reduce Interviewer-Related Error in Surveys

Standardized Survey Interviewing: Minimizing Interviewer-Related Error

Introduction The Basics of Question Design Question Design The Advanced Course The Basics of Sampling Pitfalls in Sampling The Basics of Avoiding Nonresponse Errors Additional Ways to Reduce Nonresponse Errors The Benefits of Aesthetics and Good Management Preparing the Data for Analysis A Summary from a Total Survey Design Perspective

Mail Surveys: Improving the Quality

Job satisfaction, counterproductive behavior, and drug use at work.

Standardized Survey Interviewing

Determinants of sex differences in psychological distress are explored through estimating additive and interactive regression models, The absence of employment or marriage is associated with depression for both men and women. Also, for this measure of distress, an additive model of social-role effects accounts for the observed sex difference, suggesting a structural interpretation of the genderldepression relationship. For the measure of psychophysiologic complaints, the pattern of influences differs. Here, gender and being a parent jointly influence level of symptomatology. Further analysis reveals this effect to be due primarily to sex differences among parents having young children. The pattern offindings for this variable is understood to support formulations pertaining to the stress of family roles for women.

Thomas W. Mangione

Papers

Standardized Survey Interviewing: Minimizing Interviewer-Related Error

Mail Surveys: Improving the Quality

Job satisfaction, counterproductive behavior, and drug use at work.

Standardized Survey Interviewing

Social roles, sex roles and psychological distress: additive and interactive models of sex differences.