FAIRY SALES: THE BUDAPEST INTERNATIONAL FAIRS AS VIRTUAL SHOPPING TOURS

Shopping tourism has been a widespread phenomenon since the emergence of the modern consumer culture. It has played a crucial role in the formation and transformation of the structures of wants by constructing and displaying tangible instantiations of cultural otherness. By centring our paper around the concept of ‘virtual shopping tours’ we would like to make sense of the historical and theoretical momentum of shopping tourism in the context of the socialist shortage economies. In post-war Central and Eastern Europe travelling to the West was few people's privilege; nevertheless, almost everybody was interested in, fantasized about, and imitated Western trends. Our attempt is to understand how people sought information and tried to keep up with the Western world in their lifestyles. By ‘virtual shopping’, we mean a sort of quasi-consumption where the choice of goods is shown but not or not immediately available. Visiting international commercial fairs – just as discussing the inaccessible goods seen in Western movies or in expired catalogues of Western department stores – was among the chief occasions for virtual shopping tours. The Budapest International Fairs have been the greatest and most significant fairs in Hungary since the 1890s. Focusing on the post-war period, our paper describes the changing selection of goods, explores the hidden political and cultural functions of the different forms of display, and analyses the attitudes of the various groups of visitors and the meanings they attached to certain products and practices.     

Financial Attitudes and Inter vivos Resource Transfers from Older Parents to Adult Children

This exploratory study combines economic, family, and decision-making conceptual models to investigate the factors influencing resource transfers as reported by older adults. Pilot data on 61 adult children was obtained during face-to-face interviews with 18 older parents. Hierarchical multiple regressions were conducted to predict time (emotional support) and financial (cash and gifts) inter vivos transfers from demands, resources, values, and relationships. Positive health ratings, strong affection for the adult child, and money retention attitudes were associated with frequent emotional support. Small household size predicted frequent financial transfers. Results indicate the importance of values, resources, demands, and relationships in predicting resource transfers from older parent to adult child.     

Playing safe: Media coverage of child sexual abuse prevention strategies

This paper examines the media coverage of preventing child sexual abuse. It draws on a content analysis of all press and TV news coverage about child sexual abuse that appeared in the UK during a complete 12-month period. The findings demonstrate that the bulk of the coverage was case-based, for example focusing on the Orkney case. There was very little opportunity for broader discussion of general issues of concern, including how sexual assaults against children might be prevented. The coverage of ‘prevention’ which did exist drew on a very narrow range of debates and was disproportionately concerned with abuse outside the home (abductions by strangers, or abuse within institutions such as schools or children's homes). Discussions about prevention were dominated by reactive news stories generated by particular ‘scandals’. The coverage was also largely drawn from a small constituency of official source agencies (such as government officials, court proceedings and police statements). There were few attempts to address the broader social conditions which might facilitate or inhibit sexual violence or to examine explicitly political analyses of the problem. The paper argues for a more diverse discussion about ways of preventing sexual violence against children, especially assaults by fathers, uncles, brothers and friends of the family. This demands close attention to the ways in which the mass media operate, as well as the priorities of source agencies. The paper points to factors within news production practices which both obstruct and facilitate debate about prevention and concludes by suggesting strategies to promote this issue as a vital part of the public agenda.     

To Share or Not to Share: When Do Toddlers Respond to Another's Needs?

The developmental origins of sharing remain little understood. Using procedures adapted from research on prosocial behavior in chimpanzees, we presented 18- and 25-month-old children with a sharing task in which they could choose to deliver food to themselves only, or to both themselves and another person, thereby making it possible for them to share without personal sacrifice. The potential recipient, a friendly adult, was either silent about her needs and wants or made them explicit. Both younger and older toddlers chose randomly when the recipient was silent. However, when the recipient vocalized her desires 25-month-olds shared whereas younger children did not. Thus, we demonstrate that children voluntarily share valued resources with others by the end of the second year of life, but that this depends on explicit communicative cues about another's need or desire.     

LOPSIDED REASONING ON LOPSIDED TESTS AND MULTIPLE COMPARISONS

For those who have not recognized the disparate natures of tests of statistical hypotheses and tests of scientific hypotheses, one‐tailed statistical tests of null hypotheses such as ?≤ 0 or ?≥ 0 have often seemed a reasonable procedure. We earlier reviewed the many grounds for not regarding them as such. To have at least some power for detection of effects in the unpredicted direction, several authors have independently proposed the use of lopsided (also termed split‐tailed, directed or one‐and‐a‐half‐tailed) tests, two‐tailed tests with α partitioned unequally between the two tails of the test statistic distribution. We review the history of these proposals and conclude that lopsided tests are never justified. They are based on the same misunderstandings that have led to massive misuse of one‐tailed tests as well as to much needless worry, for more than half a century, over the various so‐called ‘multiplicity problems’. We discuss from a neo‐Fisherian point of view the undesirable properties of multiple comparison procedures based on either (i) maximum potential set‐wise (or family‐wise) type I error rates (SWERs), or (ii) the increasingly fashionable, maximum potential false discovery rates (FDRs). Neither the classical nor the newer multiple comparison procedures based on fixed maximum potential set‐wise error rates are helpful to the cogent analysis and interpretation of scientific data.     

‘It's Just Something that Happens’: the Invisibility of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This paper critically examines the construction and definition of sexual harassment — both in policy documents and in everyday life experiences — in order to consider why it is often invisible in the workplace. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, it explores, in particular, the ways in which accounts of experiences of sexual harassment effectively minimize both its incidence and its importance. Finally, it considers the implications of this in order more effectively to combat sexual harassment in the workplace.