Pulling together: building a community debriefing team.

1. Research shows that many emergency workers are affected physically and emotionally by critical incident stress. 2. Debriefings conducted by trained team members are an effective method to mitigate the impact of critical incident stress. A debriefing is a structured, time-limited group intervention. 3. Cooperation among community agencies is essential for the development and effective functioning of a critical incident stress debriefing team. 4. Several teams in Illinois have organized to form a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing Network. The Illinois network is part of an international organization composed of critical incident stress debriefing providers.     

Effects of Category Order on Answers in Mail and Telephone Surveys1

Abstract Past research suggests that mail surveys encourage a primacy effect, which is a tendency to choose the first answers from a list, whereas telephone surveys encourage a recency effect, a tendency to choose the last answers from a list. This paper summarizes results from 82 new experiments conducted in 12 separate surveys in seven states. Only four of 33 mail survey comparisons exhibited significant primacy effects, while five of 26 experiments in telephone surveys exhibited recency effects. In addition, only three of 23 cross-method comparisons produced a significant primacy/recency effect in the expected manner. The conclusion is that the prevalence of primacy and recency effects has been over-estimated by past research and a new theoretical approach that takes into account multiple causation is needed for examining these effects.     

Problem gambling and policy advice: The mutability and relative effects of structural,associational and attitudinal variables

Research on gambling has the double mandate of public service and the advancement of science. This paper is meant to carry forward that mandate. Latent in research on the causes of problem gambling is the policy insight that these causes represent different types of phenomena and are unequally mutable to practitioners' efforts to prevent and/or treat problem gambling. By making the issue of mutability manifest in research, findings from research would have more policy relevance and practical import. Data from a 1989 Iowa survey on lottery play and problem gambling are analyzed to illustrate this point. 1,226 respondents were contacted by phone and phone interviews were completed with 1,011 of these 1,226 eligible respondents. With multiple regression, we assessed the contributions of mutable and immutable variables to the explained variance in problem gambling. The results show mutable correlates explain enough variance in problem gambling to recommend their consideration in treatment/prevention. The results also suggest a social as well as a psychological etiology to problem gambling. Future research should, however, do a more complete comparison of social and psychological causes of problem gambling.This research was partially supported by the Iowa Department of Human Services and the National Institute of Mental Health (1 R01 MH50369-01A1). The authors wish to thank Willis Goudy, anonymous readers and the editor of this journal for helpful comments.     

The availability of personal and external coping resources: Thier impact on job stress and employee attitudes during organizational restructuring

This study examines the relationships among personal coping resources, social support, external coping resources, job stressors and job strains in a sample of 110 American Telephone and Telegraph employees undergoing a major organizational restructuring. The study expanded on a model suggested by Ashford (1988) by defining another category of coping resources that employees may draw upon to deal with the stressors and strains which occur during major organizational changes. External coping resources were defined as those which provided employees with a sense of 'vicarious control' in stressful situations. Results indicated that personal coping resources, social support and external coping resources had a direct effect upon job stressor and strain levels. No 'buffering' effect of these coplng resources was found. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that external coping resources added to the prediction of job stressors and strains even when pertonal coping resources and social support were entered first into the prediction questions.     

log-logistic survival estimation based on failure-censored data

Approximations of the Bayesian estimators of the survival function based on the censored data of the log-logistic distribution are obtained under squared-error and log-odds squared-error loss functions. A numerical example is presented. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, the behavior of the approximations found by Tierney & Kadane and Lindley are compared with a method suggested by Weiss & Howlader.     

Socialization of emotion: Pathway to preschoolers' emotional and social competence

Aspects of 47 preschoolers'emotional competence—their patterns of emotional expressiveness and reactions to others' emotion displays—were observed in two settings, with mother and with peers, and their general social competence was rated by their preschool teachers. Intrapersonal and interpersonal (i.e., socialization correlates of children's emotional competence were identified, and a causal model incorporating direct and indirect influences on social competence was evaluated. Maternal patterns of expressiveness, reactions to children's emotion displays, and self-reported affective environment were associated with children's emotional competence in the preschool. Children's emotional competence with mother predicted their emotional competence in the preschool somewhat less strongly, suggesting that emotional competence may differ according to the interpersonal relationship studied. Taken as a whole, findings reassert the importance of the domain of emotional expression to the development of social competence.Reprint requests can be sent to the author, Department of Psychology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030. Grateful acknowledgment goes to the mothers and children who so clearly expressed and reacted to emotions; thanks also are due to Christine Alban, Joanne Ayyash, Michael Casey, Elizabeth Couchoud, Huynh Dung, Merlina Hemingway, Soueang Lay, Vanna Nguyen, Emilianne Slayden and Kimberly Sproul, as well as the director and teachers of the Project for the Study of Young Children. An earlier version of this material was presented at the 1991 Biennial Meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, WA. University support from Grants #2-10150, 2-10176 and 2-10073 also made the research possible.