Rational Suggestions for Pre-Marital Counseling

Pre-marital counseling purports to help clients discover and challenge unrealistic expectations they may have for themselves and for one another. Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) is ideally suited to locating and correcting irrational thoughts that precipitate personal and interpersonal conflict. In order to demonstrate the utility of RET pre-marital counseling, this article presents examples of specific irrational beliefs which clinicians can use to help couples develop and maintain intimacy with minimal conflict. Mental health practitioners are encouraged to apply these principles to other specific irrationalities they may discover in their own work experience.     

The state intervenes in the battle of the sexes: Causal effects of paternity leave

Do family policies influence attitudes and behavior or are they merely reflections of pre-existing attitudes? We consider the implementation of the Norwegian daddy quota, 4 weeks of parental leave reserved for the father, as a natural experiment, and examine the long-run causal effects on attitudes toward gender equality, on conflicts and sharing of household labor, and on support for public childcare. We find that respondents who had their last born child just after the reform report an 11% lower level of conflicts over household division of labor and that they are 50% more likely to equally divide the task of washing clothes than respondents who had their last child just before the reform.     

Denial of the child's right to counsel, voice, and participation in juvenile delinquency proceedings

Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly recognizes the importance of the child's voice in judicial proceedings that affect him or her. Nowhere is the child's voice more important than in delinquency proceedings where decisions will be made about the child's liberty, rehabilitative prospects, and other important constitutional rights. This article examines the role of the child's voice in improving fairness and accuracy in adjudicatory and dispositional decisions and enhancing therapeutic outcomes for youth in juvenile court.     

Domination and total domination in complementary prisms

Let G be a graph and be the complement of G. The complementary prism of G is the graph formed from the disjoint union of G and by adding the edges of a perfect matching between the corresponding vertices of G and . For example, if G is a 5-cycle, then is the Petersen graph. In this paper we consider domination and total domination numbers of complementary prisms. For any graph G, and , where γ(G) and γ _t (G) denote the domination and total domination numbers of G, respectively. Among other results, we characterize the graphs G attaining these lower bounds. Research supported in part by the South African National Research Foundation and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.     

Die Low-Cost-Hypothese

The Low-Cost-Hypothesis (LCH) postulates that the effect of attitudes on behavior varies with the costs at stake in the situation. The effect is deemed to be higher in low-cost-situations, compared to high-cost-situations. We argue that a closer look at the literature reveals two distinct versions of the LCH, which have not been disentangled so far. We reconstruct both versions ?C the ??simple?? and the ??specific?? version of the LCH ?C and discuss their theoretical foundations and empirical implications. The ??simple?? version can be derived from a simple expected utility model. In this model, attitudes and (tangible) behavioral costs exert independent effects on the net utility of the action alternatives. A conditional effect of the attitudes that depends on the behavioral costs only exists with respect to the probability of choosing an action alternative. However, this dependence of marginal effects on the actor??s initial level of utility or probability holds for any independent variable or utility argument. A second, ??specific?? version of the LCH postulates a variable-specific interaction effect between attitudes and costs. We point to the problems of previous approaches to deriving such a specific hypothesis and identify dual-process-theories as an alternative theoretical foundation that allows understanding the limited scope conditions of the specific LCH. The article carries important conclusions for empirical applications and tests of the LCH in diverse fields of sociological research and, more generally, for the decision-theoretic analysis of social action.     

The silence of numbers: A split-sample experiment concerning respondents' linguistic sensitivity in Danish survey studies

This article presents, for the first time in English, findings from a Danish research project on language comprehension and memory as generators of measurement problems in sociological and other social-science survey studies. Utilizing survey questionnaires as instruments of measurements, the article deals with the linguistic sensitivity of Danish adults and the measurement problems it entails. The article uncovers the nature and extent of statistically significant response differences due to moderate linguistic changes. The article problematizes the trustworthiness of Danish social-science survey studies and provides evidence that respondents' answers to survey questions depend to a marked extent on the latter's wording. The empirical basis is a split-sample experiment in which 1900 respondents completed two versions of the 'same' questionnaire.     

Restricted domination parameters in graphs

In a graph G, a vertex dominates itself and its neighbors. A subset S ⊂eqV(G) is an m-tuple dominating set if S dominates every vertex of G at least m times, and an m-dominating set if S dominates every vertex of G−S at least m times. The minimum cardinality of a dominating set is γ, of an m-dominating set is γ _m , and of an m-tuple dominating set is mtupledom. For a property π of subsets of V(G), with associated parameter f_π, the k-restricted π-number r _k (G,f_π) is the smallest integer r such that given any subset K of (at most) k vertices of G, there exists a π set containing K of (at most) cardinality r. We show that for 1< k < n where n is the order of G: (a) if G has minimum degree m, then r _k (G,γ _m ) < (mn+k)/(m+1); (b) if G has minimum degree 3, then r _k (G,γ) < (3n+5k)/8; and (c) if G is connected with minimum degree at least 2, then r _k (G,ddom) < 3n/4 + 2k/7. These bounds are sharp. Research supported in part by the South African National Research Foundation and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.     

When near means related: evidence from three web survey experiments on inter-item correlations in grid questions

In this article, we present the results of three question design experiments on inter-item correlations, which tested a grid design against a single-item design. The first and second experiments examined the inter-item correlations of a set with five and seven items, respectively, and the third experiment examined the impact of the question design on inter-item correlations of follow-up questions. We found that the inter-item correlations in grid designs were higher for both the set of five and seven items than for questions in a single-item design. Additionally, the inter-item correlations of the set of follow-up questions were higher if the preceding set of questions was presented in a grid. According to the findings of the present research, respondents seem to apply the interpretative near means related heuristic when answering grid questions, and also when answering follow-up questions preceeded by grid questions.     

The impact of attitudes and behavioral costs on environmental behavior: A natural experiment on household waste recycling

Numerous studies have shown the importance of incentives as well as of attitudes in explaining pro-environmental behavior. Reported attitude effects, however, are generally rather small and exhibit considerable variation among studies. Different theoretical perspectives can account for this finding: whereas theories of rational action suggest additive effects of costs and attitudes, the low-cost hypothesis and dual-process theories imply interaction effects - in different directions, resulting from different mechanisms. The present study tries to overcome the shortcomings of past research by using advanced statistical methods to test competitive hypotheses in the context of post-consumer waste recycling. We utilize data from a natural experiment on recycling participation in Cologne/Germany (n = 1882) in which the incentive structure for recycling changed due to the conversion of the recycling scheme from a drop-off system to curbside collection. In order to avoid self-selection bias, we conducted pre- and post-treatment surveys and applied conditional fixed-effects regression models. We found that curbside collection had a strong impact on recycling participation and attitudes had a moderate effect. The interaction is negative but statistically insignificant. Our findings contradict the low-cost hypothesis and provide some evidence that environmental concerns moderate the effect of the recycling scheme. We cannot, however, reject the rational choice proposition of mere additive effects.