Confession of prior knowledge about experimental procedures as a function of evaluation apprehension and commitment

Subjects' evaluation apprehension (anxiety about being judged by the experimenter) and commitment to (involvement in) the experiment were manipulated in an experimental study of subjects' honesty in postexperimental interviews. Previous studies have shown that subjects are typically dishonest in postexperimental interviews by refusing to admit prior knowledge of the experiment imparted to them by a confederate. It was found that both high apprehension and low commitment lead to greater subject honesty. Other features of the experimental design were successful in inducing subjects to be generally more honest than their counterparts in previous confederate tip-off studies.     

Chaos: A Challenge to Refine Systems Theory

Chaos theory may have relevance to marital and family therapy. Some connections are tentatively explored.     

Perceived importance of “social goals” in business organizations

Business organizations operate within a complex socio-technical environment. Interactions between these socio-technical dimensions and the managers' personal value systems are thought to influence managerial role patterns and decisions. This paper investigates shifts in perceived importance of “social goals” from a set of organizational goals. The research concludes that there has been no significant changes occurring in either the ordering or the clustering of organizational goals.     

Fear of people with mental illnesses: the role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm

Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the "behavior hypothesis" in the general population. We reason that, if this hypothesis is correct, contact with people with mental illnesses should be associated with more perceived danger, and exposure to threat or harm should mediate this association. On the contrary, respondents with more personal and impersonal contact perceive people with mental illness to be less dangerous. Exposure to threat is more common among people with more contact, but this exposure explains very little of the variance in perceived danger. These findings do not support the conclusion that public fear of people with mental illness is due to the observation of violent behavior.     

Civil Society Research Funding from a Global Perspective: A Case for Redressing Bias,Asymmetry, and Bifurcation

This paper adopts a global perspective to review the current situation with respect to the systematic study of civil society. It locates the analysis in a geohistorical framework, arguing that, as a distinct area of scholarship, contemporary civil society research is a two-track post-Cold War phenomenon exhibiting major shortcomings. A new type of dedicated research financing and process of allocation could redress today's research limitations in ways that will beneficially cross-fertilize parallel approaches and epistemological traditions while increasing the spread of centers dedicated to such knowledge generation. The analysis leads to suggestions for a civil society research agenda and investment principles.     

The production of understanding

While there is little doubt that sociological theory and research has had an important impact on the way people think about health and health care, mental health and medical sociologists are often confronted with challenges concerning the utility of the work that they do. Among the doubters are deans, funding agencies and family members. We are challenged by the ascendency of biological interpretations of human behaviors, by the incompatibility between the contextual view we prefer and the very strong individualistic orientation of our culture, and by the fact that we do not have an applied arm that trains the professionals who treat health and mental-health conditions. How do we respond to this challenge? The title of this paper gives a short answer: "The Production of Understanding." I propose that a powerful but under-recognized value of our work is the generation of explanations about health and mental health matters that help people understand the other side of an "us"/"them" divide. We produce understanding in a context in which misunderstanding is regularly constructed by powerful people who offer victim-blaming explanations for the circumstances experienced by people with less power. The production of understanding serves as an important counterbalance to this tendency. Our work shapes the way people think about problems related to health and mental health, limits the power of inaccurate victim-blaming accounts and provides understanding about why health and mental health are mal-distributed among people from different social circumstances.     

An International Pooled Analysis for Obtaining a Benchmark Dose for Environmental Lead Exposure in Children

Lead is a recognized neurotoxicant, but estimating effects at the lowest measurable levels is difficult. An international pooled analysis of data from seven cohort studies reported an inverse and supra‐linear relationship between blood lead concentrations and IQ scores in children. The lack of a clear threshold presents a challenge to the identification of an acceptable level of exposure. The benchmark dose (BMD) is defined as the dose that leads to a specific known loss. As an alternative to elusive thresholds, the BMD is being used increasingly by regulatory authorities. Using the pooled data, this article presents BMD results and applies different statistical techniques in the analysis of multistudy data. The calculations showed only a limited variation between studies in the steepness of the dose‐response functions. BMD results were quite robust to modeling assumptions with the best fitting models yielding lower confidence limits (BMDLs) of about 0.1–1.0 μ g/dL for the dose leading to a loss of one IQ point. We conclude that current allowable blood lead concentrations need to be lowered and further prevention efforts are needed to protect children from lead toxicity.