Paternal Work Characteristics and Father‐Infant Interactions in Low‐Income,Rural Families

To examine the implications of paternal occupational conditions for the quality of father‐infant interactions, home visits, including interviews and videotaped observations of father‐infant interactions, were conducted with 446 fathers living in six low‐income, nonmetropolitan counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. When a variety of individual and demographic characteristics were controlled for, a less supportive work environment was associated with lower levels of fathers’ engaged and sensitive parenting. Significant interactions pointed to the importance of understanding combinations of risk factors. Experiencing high levels of workplace stressors, including low levels of self‐direction and high levels of care work, in the presence of other individual or demographic risk factors was associated with lower levels of father parenting quality.     

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Norms of Cooperation,Public Broadcasting,and the Collective Action Problem*

Objectives. The logic of collective action suggests that public broadcasting stations should not receive the empirically observed level of member support they do. Why do people contribute to public television when they can view it without contributing? Methods. The hypothesis tested is that “norms of cooperation” govern the behavior of individuals in collective action situations. This article tests the hypothesis with an original survey of public television viewers in three large communities. Results. The survey data provide support for the “norms of cooperation” hypothesis. The higher the level of characteristics of an individual that measure cooperation, the more likely the individual is to give to public broadcasting, all other factors being equal. Conclusions. Norms of cooperation—an important part of social capital—help overcome the logic of collective action where it concerns public television contributions.     

Men's Self-Perceived Adequacy as the Family Breadwinner: Implications for Their Psychological, Marital, and Work-Family Weil-Being

Researchers note a link between men's changing role as the family breadwinner and declines in their personal and marital well-being. To explore this link more fully, two aspects of the breadwinner role, earner status (single- [n = 50], main-[n = 46], dual-earner [n = 43]) and self-perceived adequacy as the family breadwinner, were examined. Using analysis of variance, 139 family men are compared in terms of measures of psychological, marital, and work-family well-being. Self-perceived inadequate breadwinners (n = 51) report more depression and marital conflict than adequate breadwinners (n = 88). Men in single-earner families report less work-family stress than either main- or dual-earner men. If they perceive themselves as inadequate breadwinners, time conflicts between work and family responsibilities are a concern for men in main-earner families. If they view themselves as adequate breadwinners, dual-earner men report a greater sense of work-family role overload than if they view themselves as inadequate breadwinners.     

Infants' Sensitivity to the Depth Cue of Height‐in‐the‐Picture‐Plane

Five‐ and 7‐month‐old infants' sensitivity to the pictorial depth cue of height‐in‐the‐picture‐plane was assessed. Infants were presented with 2 objects, 1 higher than the other, and their reaching was recorded under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. The results showed that both age groups reached significantly more to the lower, apparently closer object under monocular view and that they reached equally to the 2 objects under binocular view. The results suggest that both 5‐ and 7‐month‐old infants are sensitive to the depth information provided by height‐in‐the‐picture‐plane. Demonstration of pictorial depth sensitivity at 5 months has implications for the mechanism underlying the onset of sensitivity to this type of depth information.     

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Library

Serials Review visits the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Library in Cooperstown, NY, which opened in 1939 with two shelves of donated books. The museum is now home to the largest collection of baseball information in the world.     

Mechanisms of Visual Object Recognition in Infancy: Five‐Month‐Olds Generalize Beyond the Interpolation of Familiar Views

This work examined predictions of the interpolation of familiar views (IFV) account of object recognition performance in 5‐month‐olds. Infants were familiarized to an object either from a single viewpoint or from multiple viewpoints varying in rotation around a single axis. Object recognition was then tested in both conditions with the same object rotated around a novel axis. Infants in the multiple‐views condition recognized the object, whereas infants in the single‐view condition provided no evidence for recognition. Under the same 2 familiarization conditions, infants in a 2nd experiment treated as novel an object that differed in only 1 component from the familiar object. Infants' object recognition is enhanced by experience with multiple views, even when that experience is around an orthogonal axis of rotation, and infants are sensitive to even subtle shape differences between components of similar objects. In general, infants' performance does not accord with the predictions of the IFV model of object recognition. These findings motivate the extension of future research and theory beyond the limits of strictly interpolative mechanisms.     

Child outcome measures in the study of child care quality

This article assesses whether there are methodological problems with child outcome measures that may contribute to the small associations between child care quality and child outcomes found in the literature. Outcome measures used in 65 studies of child care quality published between 1979 and December 2005 were examined, taking the previous review by Vandell and Wolfe (2000) as the starting point. Serious methodological problems were not pervasive for child outcome measures. However, methodological concerns were most prevalent among measures of socioemotional development. Furthermore, psychometric information on outcome measures was often missing from published reports, and health outcomes and approaches to learning were infrequently studied. Future research should address alignment issues between aspects of quality and the specific child outcomes chosen for study.     

Drag kings "down under": an archive and introspective of a few Aussie blokes

The mid 1990s saw an explosion of Drag Kings in many major and smaller cities throughout the world. While documentation of this has largely occurred through publications in the USA and UK, the Internet and smaller publications have demonstrated a phenomenon that has arguably re-ignited feminist debate. In Adelaide, Australia, Ben Dover and His Beautiful Boys set the annual lesbian and gay festival alight. This chapter describes this performance to set the stage for exploration of some of the workings of 'race' and ethnicity in the creation of persona, choice of name and naming that is brought to Drag King performance. Drawing on interview material the chapter suggests that just as Drag Kings and kinging has been a useful and provocative site for closer and deeper understandings of genders, bodies and sexualities, Drag Kings and Kinging may also provide a useful site for unraveling some of the minefield that is race and racism.     

Understanding Organizational Safety Using Value-Focused Thinking

Decision analysis is recognized as the right way to make risk management decisions, using probabilistic techniques to assess the accident risk. It is also accepted that the decisions that individuals in the organization make affect the likelihood of an accident and thus managerial and organizational factors should be included in the risk modeling process. However, decision analytic techniques have not been used to understand the decisions that are made by these individuals. The initial domain for this research is marine transportation. We use the framework of value-focused thinking in order to understand safety decisions made within our research partner organization, a major domestic oil tanker operator. We describe the results of interviews held with managers and employees from this organization. Through these interviews, we sought to understand the values these experts apply in their roles within the organization and the objectives they seek to achieve to contribute to its overall safety performance. The end result is a framework that not only portrays the fundamental objectives of safe operations for various roles in the organization, but also interconnects these different decision contexts. We believe that this approach is fundamentally different from those used in previous work and that this is an interesting application of value-focused thinking.