Decision-making patterns and postdecision adjustment of childfree husbands and wives

The processes by which married couples come to the decision to have no children and the mechanisms they employ in reaction to pronatalist pressures were explored in interviews with 44 childfree husbands and wives. Two characteristic paths of decision-making were identified, Independent and Negotiated, and further categorization on the basis of degree of influence exerted by each spouse was proposed. Several mechanisms employed to counter pronatalist pressures were identified, including defense of the childfree lifestyle, devaluation of the parenthood status and denigration of parents, and avoidance of pronatalist company. Implications of these findings for the study of childfree marriages are discussed.     

Unfeeling knowledge: Emotion and objectivity in the history of sociology

The theoretical concern of this paper is with the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to the social construction of sicentific knowledge. I examine this question through biographical research into the life and work of William Fielding Ogburn (1886–1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology. Ogburn believed that emotion was inimical to science and that statistics could help control what he considered to be its distorting effects. My analysis suggests that there was a personal component, reflecting Ogburn's search for masculinity, to the development of his ideas about how scientific sociology should be defined and practiced. I also suggest that Ogburn's ideas were favorably received by his mostly male audience because they spoke to broad cultural and historical currents. My analysis shows the need for a view of scientific knowledge that takes into account the effects of gender relations and emotion on intellectual activity.     

TOWARD THE IDENTIFICATION OF VARIABLES FOR EVALUATING FAMILY THERAPY WORKSHOPS*

If the field of family therapy is to improve the quality of its continuing education, a useful measurement of workshop quality must be developed. In a preliminary step towards this goal, 14 expert subjects from the field of family therapy were interviewed to identify variables and relationships that can be hypothesized to influence the quality–as assessed by participants–of family therapy workshops. This paper reports the opinions of the subjects, using counts and quotations to convey as much of the raw information as space allows, and presents the methods through which the information was organized by the authors into four categories and 58 (assumed to be interdependent) variables.     

Disparate voices: The magic show of sociology

C. Wright Mills directed sociologists to use sociological imaginations to understand the happenings in the world at large and to understand people through points where history and biographies intersect. Using this approach as it applies to sociology as a discipline, I examine its intersection of history and biography with regard to silencing voices that are not the status quo, i.e. white, male, and middle class. I do this using the metaphor of a magic show with three magic acts: Pulling a White Rabbit out of a Black Hat, Levitation, and The Vanishing Woman. These acts refer to the history of sociology of repressing the voices of the nonwhite, non-middle class and of women.     

Corporate financial performance and occupational stress

Although a great deal of research has been carried out in the occupational stress field, little work has focused on the link between corporate financial performance and corporate culture on individual stress. The sample comprised senior marketing managers working in 14 electronics companies selected on the basis of their recent profit/loss performance. It was found that corporate financial performance and culture variables were more strongly associated with many of the felt stresses than were the individual and role-related predictors.     

Intimacy-mediators of the proximity-gaze compensation effect: Movement,conversational role,acquaintance, and gender

Reduction of interpersonal gaze in response to close proximity was hypothesized to be affected by four intimacy-related variables: movement (active relocation vs. static location), conversational role (listener vs. speaker), acquaintance (strangers vs. friends), and gender (males vs. females). Hypotheses were tested in a factorial experiment with 72 university students as subjects. In general, the effects of the four variables on compensatory gaze were interactive. Gaze reduction in response to a same-sex confederate's presence in a subject's personal-intimate (vs. social) distance zone was more likely for subjects with less intimate histories—males (vs. females) and strangers to the confederate (vs. friends). Furthermore, these effects were more likely when the close distance was the result of movement by the confederate from an established farther distance than when a consistently close distance condition was compared to a consistently far distance condition, and also when gaze was assessed during the subject's conversational listening periods in contrast to speaking periods. The identification of limiting conditions under which the compensatory response occurs supports a more refined conception of the intimacy-equilibrium and proxemics models of interpersonal behavior.The research reported herein and preparation of this article were supported in part by NIMH postdoctoral grant #PHS T32 MH 14588-04, held by author Breck, and by Biomedical Sciences Support Grant 40827118, to author Rosenfeld. Preliminary results were reported at the 1981 annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago. The authors wish to thank Katherine Wu and Sonya Clark for their assistance in data analysis.     

Termination in Family Therapy: At Last a Beginning

Termination is a neglected area in family therapy. This paper examines termination from the point of view of non-specific, strategic and psycho-dynamic approaches. Completion of the therapy contract; completion of individual meetings; unsatisfactory progress; and symptom removal are considered under the heading of general approaches, while strategic approaches Includes a discussion of provocative, paradoxical and metaphorical interventions.     

The Spokane Tribe''s Multipathway Subsistence Exposure Scenario and Screening Level RME

Exposure scenarios are a critical part of risk assessment; however, representative scenarios are not generally available for tribal communities where a traditional subsistence lifestyle and diet are relevant and actively encouraged. This article presents portions of a multipathway exposure scenario developed by AESE, Inc. in conjunction with the Spokane Tribal Cultural Resources Program. The scenario serves as the basis for a screening-level reasonable maximum exposure (RME) developed for the Midnite Uranium Mine Superfund site. The process used in developing this scenario balances the need to characterize exposures without revealing proprietary information. The scenario and resulting RME reflect the subsistence use of original and existing natural resources by a hypothetical but representative family living on the reservation at or near the mine site. The representative family lives in a house in a sparsely populated conifer forest, tends a home garden, partakes in a high rate of subsistence activities (hunting, gathering, fishing), uses a sweat lodge daily, has a regular schedule of other cultural activities, and has members employed in outdoor monitoring of natural and cultural resources. The scenario includes two largely subsistence diets based on fish or game, both of which include native plants and home-grown produce. Data gaps and sources of uncertainty are identified. Additional information that risk assessors and agencies need to understand before doing any kind of risk assessment or public health assessment in tribal situations is presented.