Central Utah's JTPA Career Guidance and Job Placement Program

This article describes a successful career guidance and job placement model employed by a Utah Job Training Partnership Act program that is distinguished by the unusually synergistic nature of its organizational system.     

COMPUTER APPLICATIONS

The microcomputer can accelerate the display of classroom material and enhance its visual clarity. Recent display methods have permitted viewing by classes of up to 100–150 students, and this size is increasing with improvements in display resolution. An electronic spreadsheet such as Lotus 1–2–3 enables instructors to prepare materials with relative ease and flexibility, and in-class use facilitates the demonstration of interactions among changing economic variables. The preparation time for individual instructors is substantial, however. Computer assisted lectures could become more widespread if publishers were to provide textbook tables, figures, etc. formatted for computer input.     

Piaget's Social Psychology

Piaget's social psychology is not widely discussed among psychologists, partly because much of it is still contained in untranslated French works. In this article I summarize the main lines of Piaget's social psychology and briefly indicate its relation to current theories in social psychology. Rejecting both Durkheim's sociological holism and Tarde's individualism, Piaget advances a sociological relativism (relationalism) in which all social facts are reducible to social relations and these, in turn, are reducible to rules, values and signs. Piaget's theory of social values takes the form of a social exchange theory characterized in an abstract logical way. Piaget claims social exchange requires normative principles of reciprocity and that individual social development results in such an equilibrium because rationality itself is social and based upon social cooperation. These views, in turn, derive from Piaget's orthogenetic views concerning the course of evolution: development can be characterized as an increase in equilibrium manifested both in individual action and in social interaction.     

INFLATION AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRICE CHANGES ACROSS MARKETS: A CAUSAL ANALYSIS

Recent advances in time series methodology are applied to the investigation of causal relationships between monthly changes in the consumer price index and changes in its dispersion across different consumption categories. This dispersion is associated with the degree to which relative prices are changing. Past inflation rates seem useful in forecasting changes in relative prices, but not vice-versa; there is also a significant contemporaneous correlation between these series. Hence, it is concluded that fluctuations in the inflation rate help cause fluctuations in relative prices, but not vice-versa unless the entire effect occurs within a month. The analysis also serves to illustrate a new way to implement the Granger causality concept.     

A survey of ethnographic approaches to the Eastern Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi

Professional ethnographers selected on the basis of extensive field research and publication are described in terms of the duration of their fieldwork, their ethnographic orientation, language competence, and bibliography. While the orientation to fieldwork and to analytical writing has changed since 1908, the change has not led to integrative theoretical work. Some of the basic, hard questions for anthropologists are at stake, and the materials described here are only a beginning.