Helping parents,protecting children: ideas from Germany

This paper focuses on the help‐seeking process in the field of child welfare and, with a view to identifying some of the key conditions which facilitate the process, it examines the ways in which the German system responds to parental requests for help. It is based on recent comparative studies between English users of child welfare and protection services and a similar group in Germany and on discussions with German and English social workers. It is suggested we can usefully learn from the preventative services available in Germany under the Children and Young Persons Help Act (1990) which make both help seeking and help giving more straightforward. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Responsiveness in Parent‐Adolescent Relationships: Are Influences Conditional? Does the Reporter Matter?

This paper examines conditional and reporter effects of parental responsiveness using survey data from White 8th to 12th graders (N = 440) and their parents (N = 511). Adolescent reports of maternal and paternal responsiveness predicted higher GPAs, fewer delinquent behaviors, and less internal distress. Mothers’ and fathers’ reports of responsiveness were positively associated with adolescent responsibility. Looking within families, the more dissimilar mother and adolescent reports were, the more internal distress daughters reported. Looking across families, mothers’ responsiveness was associated with higher GPAs and fathers’ responsiveness was associated with lower substance use, but only for adolescents who reported less responsiveness than their parents and peers. The findings suggest using a single reporter to describe a relationship property is incomplete.     

Social Relations, Core Values, and the Polyphony of the American Experience

This essay examines social relations and cultural values in the United States, paying special attention to recent characterizations of Americans as increasingly isolated, disconnected, and dangerously individualistic. In this essay, I refute such claims. And building on earlier work ( Cerulo, 2002 ), I show that U.S. social relations and cultural values are more multifaceted than such "new individualism" arguments suggest. Indeed, as Robin M. Williams Jr. discovered 50 years ago, when studied in a systematic way, U.S. values and beliefs present us with a multiplex system—a system in which individualism plays only a supporting role. This is true, I suggest, because Americans'"value focus"—that is, the prioritization of one value over another—shifts in concert with certain social events and structural conditions. In this way, we can think of U.S. values as part of a "cultural toolkit," with actors selecting or foregrounding the values needed to support certain strategies of action.     

成功地衡量绩效：核查表

企业经常大张旗鼓,提供大量培训。一年后, 员工却已忘记大多数指标的含义很少有企业不显耀自己具备某种绩效衡量规划。各种各样的组织跟踪并测评业务单位、部门、经理乃至个体员工的产出。他们对照预先设定的目标比较绩效, 并向达到自身目标的员工或业务单位支付奖金。     

BIOGRAPHY AS PROMOTIONAL DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF MAUD GONNE

This article explores the cultural impact of critical and popular biographies about Maud Gonne. By focusing on Gonne as primarily an object of Yeats's desire, this biographical discourse, I argue, serves political and economic, rather than ‘purely’ literary, purposes: these biographies romanticize Gonne's considerable political contributions and capitalize on a flourishing Yeats industry that reinforces the representation of Gonne as an interesting but minor figure in twentieth-century Irish culture.     

Young Children's Persuasion in Everyday Conversation: Tactics and Attunement to Others' Mental States

Young children's persuasion tactics, and how these reflected attunement to others' mental states, were explored in archived longitudinal samples of transcribed at‐home conversations of four children, three to five years old. Over 87,000 utterances were examined to identify conversation ‘chunks’ involving persuasion; 1,307 chunks were then coded for who initiated the persuasion, the persuader's goal, tactics employed, the presence of cues about others' beliefs and desires, and whether children attended to such information. Analyses suggested that persuasion exchanges were initiated similarly by children and adults, were stable in frequency and length across time, and involved a limited set of persuasion tactics. Children's attempts to change beliefs increased although explicit mental‐state cues were only rarely available. When such cues were available, children more often than not altered their tactics. Implications for our understanding of children's developing social cognition and theory of mind, as well as the limitations of conversational analysis, are discussed.