On Masking and Revealing the Culture of the Cross-Culturalist

There is a gulf between the analytic and experiential aspects of cross-culturalists' functioning that is reflected in the split between explicit scientific rules for studying the culture of others, while following an informal oral tradition for considering our own cultural makeup. This article discusses both a possible strategy for correcting this situation and the barriers that are likely to prevent such a correction. Structured cultural self-study procedures are presented as a possible resource in the continuing development of graduate students and professionals, and these have already proven highly effective in teaching cross-cultural psychology to undergraduates. Fostering commitments to standardized self-study and to applications of experiential learning is currently not likely to flourish due to complex academic and epistemic traditions, discussed as six cultural self-masking factors. A specific self-study protocol is offered to provide a beginning point for generating improved reflexive methods and for individual trial use. Through disciplined reflexivity, benefits might emerge in the form of better bias control in research, enhanced external validity, and a new theory about the interplay of investigators' self-knowledge and the conduct of cross-cultural research.     

The Boston Area Diary Study and the Moral Citizenship of Care

This paper describes the theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and practical and philosophical implications of the Boston Area Diary Study (BADS), a study of the caring behavior of 44 participants over one calendar year. In particular, the paper presents an identification theory of care and discusses how it shaped the conceptualization, collection, and analysis of the data in a year-long diary study of daily voluntary assistance. The findings from the BADS (1) theoretically confirm the identification theory of care; (2) methodologically capture how individuals perceive and carry out caring behavior as a unity; and (3rpar; empirically document the existence of a moral citizenship in America that is substantially more vigorous than is implied by the usual indicators of civic and political citizenship.     

Toward the development of an adolescent gambling problem severity scale

The development and initial psychometric properties of an adolescent gambling problem severity measure are described. The scale, based on a revision of the South Oaks Gambling Screen (Lesieur & Blume, 1987), was administered to 1,101 older (ages 15 to 18) Minnesota adolescents as part of a state-wide gambling survey. Study results indicated that the scale had moderate internal consistency reliability and was significantly related to alternate measures of problem severity for male subjects. Because the rate and severity of gambling among females was very low, the psychometric adequacy of the scale for females is not known at this time. The implications of study findings to the conceptual understanding of adolescent gambling problem severity as well as study limitations and future research needs, are discussed.Support for the study was provided by the Minnesota Department of Human Services and the Center for Addiction Studies, University of Minnesota, Duluth. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance from Robert Blum, Linda Harris, Durand Jacobs, J. Laundergan, Alan Mathiason, Brenda Miller, James Schaefer, school officials from the participating high schools, and interviewers who assisted with the telephone survey.     

Enabling a Powerful Marine and Offshore Decision-Support Solution Through Bayesian Network Technique

A powerful practical solution is by far the most desired output when making decisions under the realm of uncertainty on any safety-critical marine or offshore units and their systems. With data and information typically being obtained incrementally, adopting Bayesian network (BN) is shown to realistically deal with the random uncertainties while at the same time making risk assessments easier to build and to check. A well-matched methodology is proposed to formalize the reasoning in which the focal mechanism of inference processing relies on the sound Bayes's rule/theorem that permits the logic. Expanding one or more influencing nodal parameters with decision and utility node(s) also yields an influence diagram (ID). BN and ID feasibility is shown in a marine evacuation scenario and that of authorized vessels to floating, production, storage, and offloading collision, developed via a commercial computer tool. Sensitivity analysis and validation of the produced results are also presented.     

Log-linear modelling of data from matched case-control studies

A log-linear modelling approach is proposed for dealing with polytomous, unordered exposure variables in case-control epidemiological studies with matched pairs. Hypotheses concerning epidemiological parameters are shown to be expressable in terms of log-linear models for the expected frequencies of the case-by-control square concordance table representation of the matched data; relevant maximum likelihood estimates and goodness-of-fit statistics are presented. Possible extensions to account for ordered categorical risk factors and multiple controls are illustrated, and comparisons with previous work are discussed. Finally, the possibility of implementing the proposed method with GLIM is illustrated within the context of a data set already analyzed by other authors.     

Sources of family violence

This paper suggests a direction for the exploration of the causes of family violence. Explanatory models of family violence were considered in this regard, with the recommendation that a multi-determined model should be considered to ensure the most accurate explanation. We suggest that family violence will be best understood and prevented or alleviated, if a model is used that considers the interaction of structural violence and the personality features of all the family members.     

IDENTIFICATION AND SEPARATISM: Religious Involvement and Racial Orientations Among Black Americans

Using data from the 1979–1980 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA), this study investigates the relationships between religious involvement and two sets of racial orientations: identification , or feelings of closeness and commonality of interests among blacks, and separatism , or support for cultural and institutional distance from whites. Both public religious participation and private religious devotion are strong positive predictors of racial identification, net of the effects of sociodemographic factors. However, the positive effects of devotion on identification are diminished sharply among blacks over 60 years of age. In addition, members of tradition black denominations (i.e., Baptists and Methodists) express substantially stronger black identity than do their unaffiliated counterparts. In contrast to models of racial identification, religious involvement bears little consistent relationship to separatism. Relatively strong separatist sentiment is found among (1) frequent churchgoers ages 30–59 and (2) adherents of nontraditional religions (e.g., Muslims). In general, these results cast doubt on the arguments of some critics of the black church, who claim that religion undermines collective identification. Mainstream black religious culture appears to encourage inclusive, but not exclusive, racial solidarity.     

The place of ego building work in psychotherapy with children

Ego building is essentially a name given to a variety of interventions used to support an ego hampered by regression or deviation. The term has its roots in the concept of ego support but evolved specifically as a technical term in contemporary ego psychology closely connected with the developmental theory of separation individuation. Using four vignettes of psychotherapy work with children all of whom suffered from unresolved conflicts and developmental interferences from the separation-individuation process, an attempt is made to illustrate the technical place of ego building in psychotherapy with children. It is suggested that the use of ego building, particularly verbalizing adaptive aims facilitates an alliance, supports a safety feeling and positive self-esteem. This contributes to providing a treatment experience that reduces over-stimulation and anxiety and frees the expression and understanding of aggression which ultimately promotes separation-individuation.in private practice.This paper was presented at the Conference on the Continuing Evolution of Psychoanalytic Thought: Infancy to Adulthood, N.Y.C., Nov. 1990., sponsored by the Committee on Psychoanalysis of the National Federation of Societies for Clinical Social Work.     

Membranes, mitochondria and amoebae: shape models

Most real-world shapes and images are characterized by high variability- they are not rigid, like crystals, for example—but they are strongly structured. Therefore, a fundamental task in the understanding and analysis of such image ensembles is the construction of models that incorporate both variability and structure in a mathematically precise way. The global shape models introduced in Grenander's general pattern theory are intended to do this. In this paper, we describe the representation of two-dimensional mitochondria and membranes in electron microscope photographs, and three-dimensional amoebae in optical sectioning microscopy. There are three kinds of variability to all of these patterns, which these representations accommodate. The first is the variability in shape and viewing orientation. For this, the typical structure is represented via linear, circular and spherical templates, with the variability accomodated via the application of transformations applied to the templates. The transformations form groups: scale, rotation and translation. They are locally applied throughout the continuum and of high dimension. The second is the textural variability; the inside and outside of these basic shapes are subject to random variation, as well as sensor noise. For this, statistical sensor models and Markov random field texture models are used to connect the constituent structures of the shapes to the measured data. The third variability type is associated with the fact that each scene is made up of a variable number of shapes; this number is not assumed to be known a priori. Each scene has a variable number of parameters encoding the transformations of the templates appropriate for that scene. For this, a single posterior distribution is defined over the countable union of spaces representing models of varying numbers of shapes. Bayesian inference is performed via computation of the conditional expectation of the parametrically defined shapes under the posterior. These conditional mean estimates are generated using jump-diffusion processes. Results for membranes, mitochondria and amoebae are shown.     

INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND: Does Gender Make a Difference?

This article compares in regression models the effects of occupational status of both fathers and mothers simultaneously upon the attainment of men and women in the Irish Republic. The sample matches male respondents from the 1973/1974 Irish Mobility Study with the labour active female sibling next closest in age. Since the analysis compares working siblings and each 'matched pair' shares the same family origin characteristics, the problems attendant upon using a sample originally of men only are partially avoided. The results advance beyond previous research since, rather than separate models by gender, models include parents and children of both genders, allowing direct rather than indirect evaluation of gender-based determinants of occupational attainment. Both fathers and mothers significantly affect children's attainment, in ways that vary by the child's gender. The results highlight the salience of mothers' attainment for their children and question the 'mainstream' model of equivalent mechanisms of occupational attainment for both genders. Models of social mobility that consider men and women as special instances of a general perspective provide the most fruitful approach for further development.