Socioeconomic Status and Early Adolescent Self-Esteem*

This study is a replication of a recent assessment of the relationship between social class and self-esteem, and the variables that intervene on this relationship. The purpose is to replicate the methods used to explore further this relationship by attempting to replicate the findings reported by Demo and Savin-Williams (1983) in another population. Only one of the four hypotheses tested received support thereby indirectly supporting the null relationship theory of no relationship between socioeconomic status and self-esteem. Implications of the findings also are addressed.     

TESTAMENTARY BEHAVIOR:

Content analysis and qualitative analysis of all 319 last wills that were filed in Providence Probate Court, 1985, revealed that about ten percent of the testators used testamentary material, disinheritance or altruism to express their individuality. About 42 percent of the wills were personalized directly in other ways. Forty-eight percent displayed indirect influences of family, friends and community. Less that ten percent displayed primary influences of attorneys, banks, nursing homes, governments, religions or other organizations. In the light of these findings, while none of the three major theoretical positions on testamentary behavior prevails, the individualist position is manifested more often than is the family-community position. Both of these positions are manifested much more often than is the legalist position.
These findings are related to the work of Emile Durkheim and to contemporary sociological theories of the family, community and law.     

Job Loss as Career Growth: Responses to Involuntary Career Transitions

The Latack-Dozier (1986) model of career growth through job loss was examined using a sample of 515 involuntarily displaced professionals. Results supported the model and identified variables most predictive of career growth for men and women. The results also partially supported the hypothesis that men and women rely on different forms of social support after job loss. The Latack-Dozier model is discussed in light of the findings. In addition, implications for dismissed workers, for career development specialists, and for practitioners are discussed.     

Assessing reoffense risk with juvenile sexual offenders

This article summarizes a two-year study of juvenile sexual offenders in Washington. Both community-based and institution-based treatment programs were evaluated. A typical profile of the juvenile sexual offender is offered, as well as recidivism data from a mean 20-month follow-up period.     

Reactions to Job Content Plateaus: Examining Role Ambiguity and Hierarchical Plateaus as Moderators

Plateauing research often reveals a negative relationship between job content plateauing (i.e., lacking challenge in one's job) and work attitudes. This study explores situations where job content plateauing is associated with fewer negative work attitudes, revealing role ambiguity (i.e., being unclear about job duties and responsibilities) and hierarchical plateauing (i.e., low likelihood of promotions) as moderators of the job content plateau‐work attitude relationship. Specifically, job content plateaued employees reported greater job satisfaction and organizational commitment if they were not also experiencing a hierarchical plateau. Job content plateaued employees also reported greater job satisfaction when role ambiguity was low.     

Reasoning With Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from classical first–order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: Adding premises overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments, and it paves the way toward a complete classical theory.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.