Showing papers on "Situational ethics published in 1981"

Predicting Violent Behavior: An Assessment of Clinical Techniques

Abstract: '...essential reading for those confronted with the ethical and professional dilemmas involved in predicting violent behavior. Lawyers are destined to become familiar with Monahan's book, and mental health professionals will surely want to keep a step ahead.' -- Contemporary Psychology, Vol 27 No 2 '...In summary, Monahan's book is a very readable and succinct one. Often the reader finds himself saying "...well of course, what could be more obvious?" only to reflect for a minute and realize that many clinicians do not give many obvious relevant factors adequate weight in their assessments of dangerousness. Monahan's text is a very positive one which as he puts it, outlines for the clinician: "How to do it (predict violent behavior) and when to do it". Violent behavior must be viewed as the product of a dynamic interaction between an individual and situational/environmental variables.' -- Canadian Journal of Criminology, Vol 24 No 3, July 1982 'Monahan's is an important and well-documented book that deserves to be read by all concerned with the practice and politics of predicting violent behavior.' -- Contemporary Sociology, Vol 12 No 2, March 1983 'Monahan has taken a positive approach to a difficult area. He has delineated what can be done, and how, rather than wringing his hands about the problem.' -- Journal of Security Administration, Vol.9,No. 2, December 1986@Q

Apologia in team sport

Abstract: Team sport apologia are rooted in the ethic of the sport world. Sport figures defend their characters when their conduct appears to the fans to be inconsistent with that ethic. Sport personalities not only attempt to “repair” their public image, but they also reassure fans that they are committed to their teams and the ethic of their sport. They express sorrow for offending others, assert a desire to play the game, and ignore situational detail that could undermine their apologies.

Persuasion: Theory and Context

Abstract: Reardon views persuasion as not only the means for selling goods or political parties -- something that one person or group does to another. She also sees it as an exchange, a way of defining our self identity, our personal opinions and our shared ideals. She applies a fresh sensitivity towards the situational complexity of persuasion in her study of interpersonal, organizational, and mass media persuasion. '...choose this volume for a class or seminar on communication theory because it is a thoughtful and useful explication and polemic for a rules perspective on communication, with particular reference to persuasion...whether you choose it for one class or another or none at all, do not miss choosing to read it.' -- Quarterly Journal of Speech, May 1982 '...Reardon's Persuasion is an outstanding, perhaps landmark contribution to the contemporary persuasion literature. Her rules-based theoretical model is a coherent, systematic, and thoroughly exciting new direction in persuasion theory and research. I expect Reardon's ideas to have a significant impact on the thinking of all serious scholars of persuasion in the 1980s and beyond.' -- The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol 47, 1983

Social and situational factors affecting the communicative strategy of dialect code-switching

Abstract: Studying the communicative competence of native speakers is a vast undertaking which involves examining the form and content of spoken discourse (e.g., the structure and message of speech acts and speech events) and relating them to a situational context (e.g., physical/temporal setting, psychological/ cultural scene and active/passive participants, as in Hymes, 1974). Understanding the communicative competence of second-language learners is even more complicated because it involves additional factors. With all speakers we must distinguish between performance errors and variable rules; but with nonnative learners, we have the additional problems of: (1) establishing what has been 'acquired'; (2) accounting for higher levels of performance error; (3) distinguishing fossilized errors from not yet fully learned target structures (a problem in cross-sectional studies); and (4) understanding the role of communicative strategies. This paper presents evidence that dialect code-switching is a consistent and statistically significant communicative strategy used among bilingual children in their second language and that it is therefore a part of their communicative competence. The paper does not attempt to measure communicative competence as a whole or to survey the communicative strategies employed but is rather a discussion of just one strategy (dialect code-switching), in one aspect of language use (pronunciation of vowels), by one group (Chinese-Thai bilingual fourth-grade children), in one type of situational context (an interview). The context was controlled as much as possible for topic, time, place and social characteristics of the listener such as age and socioeconomic status. The major variable examined here for its relation to dialect code-switching is the ethnic identity of the listener.

Situational Variation in the Use of Internal State Words. Technical Report No. 212.

Abstract: This paper presents data on situational variation in the use of words of internal report. The research involved the analysis of conversations produced by 39 children between the ages of 41⁄2 to 5 years from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Data from two different situations-dinnertime at home and teacher-directed activity at preschool--were used. It is argued that the use of internal state words is crucially linked to cognitive strategies in three related areas: The acquisition and organization of internal state concepts; the understanding of stories and discussion of stories in the classroom; and metacognitive skills. Thus, certain types of internal state word usage will correlate with skill in metacognitive processes, and hence with the child's degree of readiness for, and success in, school. The current research tested some specific hypotheses about situational and social variation in internal state word usage, which fall under the general heading of the "mismatch hypothesis," This hypothesis postulates that educational difficulties experienced by children from minority or non-mainstream backgrounds are caused by the fact that for these children, there is a discontinuity between the home and school environments--that is, a discrepancy between the expectations, strategies, and schemata that work at home and the cognitive and motivational demands of the classroom. For children of the mainstream culture, on the other hand, there is a fair degree of continuity between home and school in terms of culture, patterns Situational Variation 2 of language use and behavior, and types of strategies for interacting with adults. A complex picture emerged concerning the use of internal state words. Although very few effects of race or socioeconomic status were found in the internal state word use of the adults in the target children's environment, the internal state word use of the black children gave some evidence that these children did experience a mismatch between the home and school environments. However, the mismatch was not in the internal state word use of the adults, but rather, appeared to involve a discrepancy between the patterns of adult-child interaction and communication in the home and school environments of the black children. Situational Variation

Type of information, familiarity and the reduction of crowding stress.

Abstract: University of ConnecticutSusan K. SolomonWellesley CollegeTwo studies focused on the effectiveness of various types of information in dif-ferent contexts. Two informational foci (i.e., external and internal) were em-ployed, and subjects were either familiar or unfamiliar with a potentially stressfulsetting. It was assumed that one's degree of familiarity with the context wouldrender different types of concerns more salient and that these would more ef-fectively be met by one type of information than by the other. In the first ex-periment, it was hypothesized and found that situational information was moreeffective than emotional information for unfamiliar subjects, whose primary con-cerns in the setting were external. In contrast, emotional information was effectivein reducing stress and facilitating performance for familiar subjects, whose con-cerns were primarily internal; but situational information was also effective forthese individuals. Study 2 was done to explore why situational information waseffective in reducing stress for both familiar and unfamiliar individuals. Theresults indicated that situational information, if accurate, not only can serve areinforcing "consensual validation" function that addresses people's general con-cerns about the "reasonableness" of their responses but can also reduce distress.Studies of the effects of information onreactions to threatening or painful situationshave indicated that in a variety of contexts,having accurate expectations of what onewill feel or what will happen can reduce dis-tress. Preoperative information has beenshown to improve recovery from surgery(e.g., Egbert, Battit, Welch, & Bartlett,1964; Langer, Janis, & Wolfer, 1975; Me-lamed & Siegel, 1975), and preparatory in-formation has reduced distress caused byaversive or painful medical procedures

Towards situational classification

Abstract: Studied the dimensionality of judgments made by groups of persons evaluating described face-to-face social interactions. In these interactions, three situational elements are varied systematically, to wit: topic of conversation, partner status, and purpose of interaction. Twenty female and 20 male British social studies students compared the similarity of 12 such descriptions of dyadic interaction. A Principal Component Factor Analyses indicates that two dimensions (‘constraint’, ‘involvement’) are significant, by providing a two-subset partition of the set of adjective pairs used by the judging groups. Furthermore, a Multiple Regression Analysis identifies the situational elements which account most for the two dimensions (partner's status for ‘constraint’, topic of conversation for ‘involvement’). The results are discussed in terms of social categorization and social order rheories. Conclusions are drawn as 10 further research on the relationship between perception of social situations and patterns of behaviour.

Qualifications to Generalized Absolutes: “Approval of Hitting” Questions on the GSS

Abstract: An analysis of "approval of hitting" questions on the General Social Surveys finds evidence of correlated error. Respondents frequently ignore the absolute phrasing of questions. As a result, they often contradict themselves by approving of speciflc uses of hitting after having rejected any use of such force. These contradictors tend to have lower education and less support for punitive responses on other items. Tom W. Smith is a Senior Study Director, National Opinion Research Center. This research was done for the General Social Survey project directed by James A. Davis. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. SOC77-03279. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 45:224-230 ? 1981 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/81/0045-224/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:48:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms QUALIFICATIONS TO GENERALIZED ABSOLUTES 225 It would seem that if respondents said "no" to the possibility of "any situation you can imagine" in which hitting was approved, they should say "no" to each of the specific situations. However, when we cross-tabulate the general and the situational questions, we find that the vast majority of disapprovers on the general questions actually approved of hitting on one or more of the situational questions. On police hitting, 86 percent of those who disapproved of hitting on the general question approved of hitting in one or more of the four specific situations. On average, they approved of 1.52 specific situations. On man hitting, 83.7 percent of the absolute disapprovers approved of hitting in one or more of the five situations and they averaged 1.82 approvals. These results suggest that many respondents are not 'taking the general questions literally. Rather than responding to the absolute phrase "are there any situations you can imagine," many respondents are answering the question as if it were "in most situations you can think of' or "in general."' This pattern is illustrated by a Guttman scaling experiment. When we ran the general and four situational police items in a Guttman scale and allowed SPSS to order the items according to the best Guttman fit, the general item did not appear as the hardest item (i.e., the item for which it was most difficult to say "no") but appeared as the middle item in the scale. Likewise, on adult male hitting it was the fourth hardest of the six items. This is, of course, just where we would expect a middling question on "in general' or "more often than not" to appear compared to situational questions with more or less difficult reasons for approval. This divergence between what the general questions ask and what many people are answering may come from a literal failure of imagination. When asked about "any situation you can imagine," many people simply may not think of a situation where they would approve of hitting. When presented with a specific situation that is widely regarded as a legitimate use of hitting (e.g., self-defense), they indicate approval, thereby contradicting their response to the general 1 Of course, not all cases having a "no" to the general question and a "yes" to a specific question indicate a respondent did not mean his "no" response. It is possible that the respondent did not mean what he said on the specific situation rather than the general question. This is undoubtedly true in some cases, but we doubt that this is the common pattern. In a majority of cases a respondent contradicts his general response on two or more specific situations. It is unlikely that the respondent managed to contradict himself twice without meaning to. In addition, the level of "don't knows" indicates that respondents have greater difficulty with the general questions rather than the specific. Finally, there are, of course, a number of random transference errors, but these should be minuscule. In sum, we expect the majority of contradictions to represent cases where the respondent's response to the general question did not accurately reflect his true attitude. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:48:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Toward an interactional psychology: Models from achievement motivation research1

Abstract: Motivated by calls from interactional psychology for theories and studies involving both personality and situation variables, two achievement motivation theories of personality-by-situation interaction illustrated by data are presented. It is shown how a pure personological or situational approach can lead us astray, how differences in behavior from situation to situation or over time can be predicted from personality and situation variables incorporated in achievement motivation theory, and how achievement motivation research bears on issues of interactional psychology like situation analysis, the consistency issue, situations as activators of motivational forces, and stored/situational information in the mediating process. The mechanistic/dynamic interaction distinction is discussed, and it is asserted that there is not necessarily a contradiction between these conceptualizations.

Personal Characteristics of Teachers, Situational Variables and Deliberations in the Process of Planning Instruction

Abstract: Until recently the edueational scene was dominated by studies that investigated relationships among these independent variables, regarded as inputs and teaching behaviours as dependent variables, regarded as outputs. Intervening processes such as planning, decision making, deliberations were not studied. An analogous situation occurred in a vast amount of studies that investigated relationships among variables such as pupil characteristics and background regarded as inputs and achievement, regarded as output. The process of teaching itself remained a black box.

Schools Versus Linking Agents as Contributors to the Change Process

Abstract: not. While it may be necessary to control for situational variables to eliminate spurious relationships, they argue that policy research questions should examine the relationships between policy variables and outcome variables (Coleman, 1972). Although the emphasis on policy variables makes such research more interesting and perhaps useful to policy makers, it can be misleading when situational variables severely limit the effects of policy variables or when the situation is especially intractable and poorly understood. In the field of educational change policy, initiatives are often blunted by the realities of the school situation. A considerable body of research testifies to the difficulty in promoting constructive change in schools. These studies have identified a variety of situational factors including the quality of local leadership, the collegiality of a staff, and the nature of the motivation to change which can affect the success of a change effort (Berman & McLaughlin, 1977). Because schools have been especially resistant to the curriculum development and diffusion strategy for producing change at a distance (Welch, 1979), interest is growing in change strategies that put a human "linking agent" in direct contact with a school or district. There has been

Emotional experience — a review

Abstract: A case is made that it is both important and feasible to investigate the subjective experience of emotion within a loosely conceived framework of conventional science. Those studies in which this attempt has been made are reviewed according to the emphases which have guided them: methodological, the situational approach, and the individual approach, concentrating either on the person or the experience. Guidelines are suggested for future research in this area.

Cognitive moral development and legal socialization

Abstract: The article presents an investigation of the effect of situational mitigators on moral evaluations of and advocated sanctions for hypothetical behaviors involving criminal, civil, and constitutional law issues and the relationship between cognitive moral development and the impact of the situational mitigators. We found that situational mitigators did have an impact on moral evaluations, particularly for the civil and constitutional law items. Respondents operating at the Principled Level of cognitive moral development consistently were the least likely to have their moral evaluations and advocated sanctions changed by the situational mitigators. Respondents operating at the Preconventional and Conventional Level were not markedly different in the propensity to alter their moral evaluations but the Conventional Respondents were more likely to change their advocated sanctions.

Social Structure and Situations: The effects of Roles, Actions, and Situations on Interpersonal Perception*

Abstract: This study examines the structural and situational approaches to social action by analyzing the effects of roles, action, and situations on people's perceptions of others. College students were given questionnaires containing short descriptions of interaction between an adult and an adolescent boy. These questionnaires were designed to examine the effects of roles (malefemale and employer-parent), actions, and several concrete situations on two dependent variables: (1) behavior predictions for the adult in each hypothetical situation. and (2) ratings of the adults on expressive and instrumental attributes. The results support both structural and situational approaches. The parent role has a strong effect on how the adults are predicted to behave and the situation has little effect. But the respondents' rating of the adults is determined primarily by actions not roles.

Personality Source Traits as Predictors of Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract: What makes a teacher effective? The answer to this seemingly simple question is likely to be a long list of factors contributory to effective teaching. Some factors are environmental (in the school as an organization) or situational (in the classroom), for example, the degree of teacher autonomy in curricular matters or the availability of resources. It is readily appreciated that such factors are largely beyond the control of the teacher; he will have to do his best to benefit from them when they are likely to enhance teaching effectiveness and to counteract their ill effects when these are expected. Nevertheless, there is still one key factor – the teacher both as a pedagogue and a person who serves as a catalyst in promoting the interaction between the pupil and the learning task.