Researching Children: Methods and Ethics

The appropriateness and desirability of researching children have been issues of some debate. Children may be perceived as non-competent or vulnerable, and proxies have been used as children's representatives. Increasingly researchers are speaking to children directly. Why is this so and what are the methodological and ethical implications of researching children's views? In this paper the authors draw on their own experiences of researching children in the fields of child carers and the impact of the Child Support Act 1991. A number of social, political and legal trends are identified which form a background to the growing interest in children as potential and actual participants in the research process. The theoretical, methodological, ethical and practical issues involved are then identified and described, using examples from two separate studies conducted by the authors.     

MORNING AND NIGHT COUPLES: THE EFFECT OF WAKE AND SLEEP PATTERNS ON MARITAL ADJUSTMENT*

This study explored the effects of spouses' wake and sleep patterns on marital adjustment. A total of 150 couples from three states completed questions on wake/sleep patterns, marital interaction, marital adjustment, and problem solving. Couples whose wake and sleep patterns were mismatched (e.g., an evening person married to a morning person) reported significantly less marital adjustment, more marital conflict, less time spent in serious conversation, less time spent in shared activities and less frequent sexual intercourse than matched couples. Contrary to expectations for matched couples, night couples did not report more involvement in extra-familial social activities than morning couples. Morning couples engaged in sexual intercourse more frequently in the morning than night couples; night couples had sex more often in the evening than morning couples. There were no significant differences in the intercourse rates for morning couples and night couples. Compared to matched couples, mismatched couples with high marital adjustment reported more flexibility and adaptability in their marital problem solving. The implications of these findings for premarital counseling and marital therapy are discussed.     

Women as home caregivers: gender portrayal in OTC drug commercials.

Concern has long been expressed over possible adverse effects of television advertising of over-the-counter (OTC) medicines. This study investigated a sample of prime time network television ads to determine how gender portrayals differed in drug and non-drug commercials. Findings indicated that women were significantly more likely than men to appear as characters in drug ads than in ads for other products, and that they are frequently portrayed in these commercials as experts on home medical care, often as mothers caring for ill children. This supports the hypothesis that drug advertisers take advantage of stereotypical images of women as home medical caregivers. It also raises the question of whether female consumers are being encouraged by these ads to overuse OTC medications as a way of gaining the family's love and respect.     

Muscle-power quality: does sex or race affect movement velocity in older adults?

To determine sex and race differences in muscle power per unit of muscle contraction, knee-extensor muscle power normalized for knee-extensor muscle volume was measured in 79 middle-aged and older adults (30 men and 49 women, age range 50-85 years). Results revealed that women displayed a 38% faster peak movement velocity than men and African Americans had a 14% lower peak movement velocity than Whites of a similar age when expressed per unit of involved muscle (p < .001). As expected, men exhibited greater knee-extensor strength and peak power per unit of muscle than women, but women had a faster knee- extension movement velocity per unit of muscle than men at the same relative strength level. Moreover, African Americans had greater knee-extensor muscle volume than Whites but exhibited lower knee-extensor strength and lower movement velocity per unit of muscle when tested at the same relative strength levels.     

Reduced-Variance Methods for Detectability Correction of Population Abundance

Detectability issues create uncertainty in field surveys of animal and plant populations. Detectability correction is one method employed to deal with this problem when there is reasonable certainty that detectability is roughly constant with time or in different areas. Two new reduced-variance estimators of detectability are introduced and evaluated for the case of using a detectability correction for new areas that are surveyed only once. The new estimates are unbiased or nearly unbiased and produce population estimates with smaller variance than the Lincoln–Petersen estimate.     

Consolidation and fragmentation in environmental scanning: A review and research agenda

Environmental scanning is a broadly defined concept, having first received attention from scholars in the late 1960s. Over the years a number of similar and overlapping constructs have emerged in management literature. The aim of this study, via a systematic review and thematic analysis of relevant empirical research, is to consolidate foundation environmental scanning knowledge, demonstrate how scanning research has developed and fragmented over time, and propose an agenda for future research. The first contribution of our review is a new typology of environmental scanning research made up of five discrete research views, which provides a more comprehensive and contemporary overview of the field than previous studies. The second is a proposed agenda for future research that explicitly acknowledges the role of technology, an area that is presently underdeveloped in foundation scanning literature. The third contribution is to signpost future directions for research on scanning and organisational performance using a number of theoretical perspectives. The overall outcome of our review is to move scanning research on from increasingly incremental contributions concerned with context to a place where the changing role of technology and the mechanisms through which environmental scanning contributes to competitive advantage can be more thoroughly understood.