Coming to Terms With Parental Divorce: Associations With Marital Outcomes and the Role of Gender and Religiosity

In this article we examine the current marriage relationship outcomes for children of divorce compared to children from intact families. The sample is 997 matched married couples. Those from families with married parents were more likely to come to terms with issues in their family of origin, and had higher religiosity, less negative communication, and more positive relationship satisfaction than those with divorced parents. Religiosity was effective in helping those with married parents come to terms with family of origin. The variable coming to terms with family of origin predicted positive marital outcomes to some extent for all couples, although for couples where both partners' parents had divorced coming to terms predicted fewer positive outcomes. Coming to terms for females was associated more profoundly with decreases in negative communication for both males and the females, and also predicted satisfaction and stability in more cases than did coming to terms for males.     

Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles Revisited: a Replication and a Reassessment*

The Komarovsky-Wallin thesis of women's pretending inferiority in dating situations was replicated (287 women) and is challenged. Questions are raised as to the appropriate collapsing of categories of responses and the incidence of pretended inferiority in relation to number of dates. Data from a comparison sample of men (318 men) are also presented. Evidence does not sustain the belief of women's pretensions of inferiority.     

Robert K. Merton as postwar prophet

Within the context of a discussion of Robert K. Merton’s ideas on leadership in postwar America, the article examines the nature and impact of Merton’s “sociological parables.” This term refers to short tales from social life from which sociological lessons with moral implications can be drawn. These parables, such as the bank insolvency story told in “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” illustrate the manner in which Merton merged moral and sociological messages in his writings. Suggestions are made along the lines that these parables, or at least the moral messages they contain, contributed to Merton’s postwar fame. His most recent publications are “Simmel’s Contribution to Parsons’ Action Theory and Its Fate,” in Michael Kaern, ed.Georg Simmel and Contempory Sociology (Kluwer, 1990); and “Robert K. Merton’s Extension of Simmel’sUbersehbar” inSociological Theory, Spring 1990.     

BETTER PRIORS FOR BAYESIAN BETTORS

Consider the game where a Bayesian investor places a series of bets on the outcomes of a sequence of tosses of a coin with odds set by a Bayesian bookie. It is shown that at each toss the investor can have non-negative expected winnings even though after many tosses the two posterior distributions are nearly equivalent.     

The role of empathy in supervision

Empathy plays an important role in clinical supervision. It is the link between the client whose treatment is being supervised, the clinician/supervisee, and the supervisor. The supervisor uses an empathic capacity as well as theoretical knowledge to understand the clinical work and build the supervisory relationship. Often the progress of a case can be traced through the development of empathic understanding in the supervision. The transmission of empathy requires creativity and openness and is one of the major challenges in supervision. By analyzing the different uses of empathy in clinical supervision we can increase our understanding of the supervisory process.     

KEEPING SYMBOLIC INTERACTION SAFE FROM SEMIOTICS: A RESPONSE TO HARMAN

This article provides a critique of the particular way in which Lesley D. Harman has proposed to accommodate Symbolic Interaction to semiotic theory and method. Harman's argument rests on a belief in the reality of the nature/culture dimension as prior to semiotic or sociological theory. According to Harman's view, nature is the realm of determinism, culture is the realm of freedom, and social theory ought to align itself with freedom and culture. A semiotic alternative based on Peirce's concept of the sign is suggested. The alternative socio-semiotic approach opens the possibility of studying both cultural determinism and creative processes in nature.