Vocal determinants of first impressions of young children

Audiotapes of the voices of77 preschool children were prepared. Subjects listened to the tapes, and then provided their impressions of the competence, leadership, dominance, warmth, and honesty of the children. Judgments of the voices' babyishness and attractiveness were also obtained. Perceivers reliably discriminated the children's voices along the dimensions of babyishness and attractiveness. Moreover, analyses revealed that the previously documented impact of these characteristics on first impressions of adults extends to impressions of young children. The similarity of the effects of these characteristics on impressions formed about children to those revealed for adults suggests that vocal qualities may have an impact on personality development via a process of self-fulfilling prophecy.     

Developmental Career Counseling with Teenage Parents

Although teenage parenthood is recognized by many counselors as a developmental identity crisis, it rarely has been viewed as a developmental career crisis. This article suggests developmental career assessment and counseling procedures for use with teenage parents.     

If and When Sociology Becomes a Female Preserve

This article investigates recent data on the prevalence of women in the field of sociology in order to understand whether or not the discipline has become a female preserve. Data on the top sociology departments in the USA were collected in 2007. For each university, we document the number of full time, tenured and tenure-track faculty members and present the gendered makeup of the department. Our data present mixed findings with regard to the question of whether the field is tipping toward female. Women, overall, are underrepresented in the sociology programs sampled, but a larger percentage of women occupy tenured positions within the top liberal arts programs than at the top graduate programs. And, women occupy a slim majority of assistant professor positions but have lower numbers at higher academic ranks. We can say with reasonable certainty that, while the proportion of women doctorates and assistant professors indicate a feminization of sociology, the entire discipline has not yet tipped toward female.     

Expanding the focus of cost–benefit analysis for food safety: a multi-factorial risk prioritization approach

A pressing need in the area of food safety is a tool for making overall, macro-judgments about which risks should be given priority for management. Governments often seek to base this prioritization on public health impacts only to find that other considerations also influence the prioritization process. A multi-factorial approach formally recognizes that public health, market-level impacts, consumer risk preferences and acceptance, and the social sensitivity of particular risks all play a role in prioritization. It also provides decision-makers with a variety of information outputs that allow risk prioritization to be considered along different dimensions. Macro-level prioritization of risks based on multiple factors is an important expanded use of cost–benefit analysis to manage risk.     

Campus–Community Partnerships: The Terms of Engagement

The emergence of service–learning in higher education and the renewed emphasis on community involvement presents colleges and universities with opportunities to develop campus–community partnerships for the common good. These partnerships can leverage both campus and community resources to address critical issues in local communities. Campus–community partnerships are a series of interpersonal relationships between (a) campus administrators, faculty, staff, and students and (b) community leaders, agency personnel, and members of communities. The phases of relationships (i.e., initiation, development, maintenance, dissolution) and the dynamics of relationships (i.e., exchanges, equity, distribution of power) are explored to provide service–learning instructors and campus personnel with a clearer understanding of how to develop healthy campus–community partnerships.     

“How May I Help You?” Improving Telephone Customer Service in a Medical Clinic Setting

The current study was carried out per management request to improve the overall quality of telephone customer service among appointment coordinators in a medical clinic. Exceptional telephone customer service included (a) using a standard greeting, (b) speaking in the appropriate tone of voice throughout the call, and (c) answering every call received by the unit. A preintervention analysis suggested that performance deficiencies resulted from weak antecedents, poor knowledge and skills, and weak performance contingencies. Task clarification, goal setting, feedback, and performance-contingent consequences were combined to improve these customer service behaviors for 20 full-time appointment coordinators at the clinic. The study used an ABÁ reversal design with weekly maintenance and 5-month follow-up observations. Introduction of the multicomponent intervention produced visible improvements in greeting (38% increase) and friendly voice tone (22% increase) behaviors; performance was maintained above baseline levels at 5 months postmaintenance. Abandon rates (the percentage of calls not answered by a live voice) remained fairly stable, on average. Findings support the use of a multicomponent intervention to increase telephone customer service behavior in medical clinic settings.     

Using unlabelled data to update classification rules with applications in food authenticity studies

Summary.  An authentic food is one that is what it purports to be. Food processors and consumers need to be assured that, when they pay for a specific product or ingredient, they are receiving exactly what they pay for. Classification methods are an important tool in food authenticity studies where they are used to assign food samples of unknown type to known types. A classification method is developed where the classification rule is estimated by using both the labelled and the unlabelled data, in contrast with many classical methods which use only the labelled data for estimation. This methodology models the data as arising from a Gaussian mixture model with parsimonious covariance structure, as is done in model-based clustering. A missing data formulation of the mixture model is used and the models are fitted by using the EM and classification EM algorithms. The methods are applied to the analysis of spectra of food-stuffs recorded over the visible and near infra-red wavelength range in food authenticity studies. A comparison of the performance of model-based discriminant analysis and the method of classification proposed is given. The classification method proposed is shown to yield very good misclassification rates. The correct classification rate was observed to be as much as 15% higher than the correct classification rate for model-based discriminant analysis.     

Different worlds of motoring: choice, constraint and risk in household consumption

The article shows how the old economic variable of income can be related to spatial location and used to reinforce recent revisionism in sociology which questions the automatic link between consumption and identity. The diversity of motoring experience is demonstrated through a case study of motoring in inner and outer London which draws on a variety of resources, including interviews from two London boroughs, survey evidence on household expenditure and other official statistics. The analysis shows how income and space variably define household motoring experience as one of choice or constraint and risk. The end result is a cultural economy analysis that shows how motoring sustains multiple, overlapping identities in different worlds of enabling and enforced consumption which connect with production.     

Body Weight and Matching With a Physically Attractive Romantic Partner

Matching and attribute trade are two perspectives used to explain mate selection. We investigated patterns of matching and trade, focusing on obesity, using Add Health Romantic Pair data (N = 1,405 couples). Obese individuals, relative to healthy weight individuals, were less likely to have physically attractive partners, with this disadvantage greater for women than men, and greater for White women than Black women. Additional education, a more attractive personality, and better grooming increased the probability of having a physically attractive partner and offset the disadvantage of obesity for some individuals. Unexpectedly, we found women, like men, trade education for their partners’ physical attractiveness. Despite evidence of attribute trade, matching with respect to physical characteristics was the dominant mate selection pattern.