Literature as the Guide to History

The author presents a content integration that focuses on social studies and science knowledge and skills. The idea of using folk crafts to help elementary students learn social studies extends from John Dewey's laboratory school to the twenty-first century. Meaningful content is applied to skills, such as blacksmithing, found in the community, and students make connections between school knowledge and their lives outside of school. In this activity, blacksmithing helped students integrate ideas from multiple academic subjects, incorporating content from the social sciences and humanities. The guest content expert with a specialized knowledge base played a large role in making this experience occur for the students and teachers.     

A Conceptual Base for ‘Second-Generation’ Programs in Gerontological Social Work

A framework developed by Vance promises better understanding of the mechanisms by which various kinds of severely deprived environments produce high rates of cognitive, emotional, and personality disabilities. Effort is focused on assessing how Vance's concepts may aid in reconceptualizing and reorganizing much Human Behavior and Social Environment content to facilitate the integration of seemingly unrelated findings and conflicting theories on the relationship between disability, poverty, and alienation. The potential for enhancing teaching and development of interventive strategies is explored.     

Social Problems,by Amitai Etzioni. Foundations of Modern Sociology Series. Prentice Hall,Englewood Cliffs,New Jersey, 1976. $3.95, Paper. 182 Pp.

Abstract

Publication productivity has received increasing attention in the social work literature. A major shortcoming of the social work literature on productivity is the paucity of attention given specifically to the publication efforts of ethnic minority social work educators. This article presents findings from the first national survey to specifically focus on publication productivity among African-American social work faculty. The data generated from the survey reveal that productivity is associated more with individual-level factors than structural factors, a minority of African-American faculty are producing most of the publications, and African-American social work faculty are producing slightly fewer publications than the broader population of social work faculty.     

Tall claims? Sense and nonsense about the importance of height of US presidents

According to both the scientific literature and popular media, all one needs to win a US presidential election is to be taller than one's opponent. Yet, such claims are often based on an arbitrary selection of elections, and inadequate statistical analysis. Using data on all presidential elections, we show that height is indeed an important factor in the US presidential elections. Candidates that were taller than their opponents received more popular votes, although they were not significantly more likely to win the actual election. Taller presidents were also more likely to be reelected. In addition, presidents were, on average, much taller than men from the same birth cohort. The advantage of taller candidates is potentially explained by perceptions associated with height: taller presidents are rated by experts as ‘greater’, and having more leadership and communication skills. We conclude that height is an important characteristic in choosing and evaluating political leaders.     

Variables Associated with Resilience in Divorced Families

The present study focuses on the salutogenicproperties of post-divorce families andattempts to identify factors that promoteresilience and family well-being. Within thesalutogenic paradigm the focus is on positivecharacteristics and strengths that contributetowards the growth and development of a system.Family coherence is used as an indication ofthe level of recovery after the crisis, and isused as the dependent measure with regard tothe present well-being of the family. Across-sectional survey research design wasused. The 98 participating families wereidentified on the grounds of the nature of thecrisis (divorce) and the developmental phase ofthe family. An open-ended question and thefollowing self-report questionnaires werecompleted by the parent and a child: abiographical questionnaire, the Relative andFriend Support Index, the Social Support Index,Family Crises Oriented Personal EvaluationScales, Family Sense of Coherence Scale, andthe Family Hardiness Index. Results show thatintra-family support, support of the extendedfamily, support of friends, religion, opencommunication amongst family members, and workand financial security were factors promotingresilience in these families.     

Estimation of General Stationary Processes by Variable Length Markov Chains

We develop new results about a sieve methodology for the estimation of minimal state spaces and probability laws in the class of stationary processes defined on finite categorical spaces. Using a sieve approximation with variable length Markov chains of increasing order, we show that an adapted version of the Context algorithm yields asymptotically correct estimates for the minimal state space and for the underlying probability distribution. As a side product, the method of sieves yields a nice graphical tree representation for the potentially infinite dimensional minimal state space of the data generating process, which is very useful for exploration of the memory.     

A statistic to check model adequacy in time series

A simple statistic is suggested to examine if the assumptions on variances in a fitted time series model is valid or not. The properties of the statistic are discussed and examples are considered.