Character-Based Determinants of Trust in Leaders

Trust is a prominent determinant of effective interpersonal relationships, group process, and organizational development. However, for leaders and managers, trust building is often problematic. The aim of this article is to contribute to a growing understanding of the way in which individual managers can develop trust in organizations, particularly those defined by medium to high risk. The article presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the nature of trust at work. Building on the results of an earlier study, use is made of the facet-theoretical approach to generate a definitional framework of trust, which focuses on the characteristics of the trusted person that contribute to the development of trust. Using items developed on the basis of a mapping sentence, hypotheses regarding the relations between the definitional framework and empirical observations were tested through smallest space analysis (SSA) of data collected from a sample of 398 bank and hospital employees. The results demonstrate strong support for the definitional system and show a clear association with results of prior research that identify perceptions of ability, integrity, fairness, and openness as key determinants of trust. The empirical structure clearly reflects the attitudinal nature of interpersonal trust at work and the items empirically distinguish distinct character-based components of trust.     

Self-harm among adolescents with developmental disabilities. What are they trying to tell us?

Self-harm behavior exhibited by adolescents with developmental disabilities can be the most challenging behavior for caregivers and health care professionals to address. Past interventions have taken a behavioral approach and focused on functional analysis to guide assessment and treatment. However, self-harm behavior is becoming more recognized as a means of communication. Therefore, it is important for health care professionals and caregivers to listen to adolescents' attempts to communicate and try to understand the meaning of the behavior. Early assessment is crucial to understanding the meaning of the behavior, and early intervention is necessary to prevent escalation or chronicity. Thorough assessment guides interventions and must be implemented in the context of clients' families and social world, and the broader community. Establishment of trusting relationships among adolescents, their families, and health care professionals is imperative. This article discusses self-harm behavior from a psychosocial perspective related to prevalence, onset, purpose, maintenance, and escalation. It also introduces a comprehensive framework to guide assessment and intervention.     

Recursive location and scale estimators

It is shown that a recursive estimator with the same asymptotic properties as the median has convergence properties in finite samples which depend heavily on the scale of the data. A simple modification which adjusts for the scale is suggested and its application illustrated on simulated data. The modified estimator has much improved properties which are similar to those of the sample (non-recursive) median.     

Old Chicago and new France

It is only when theories are located in history, when we view the demands for verification in highly particular contexts of a historical kind that we are freed from either dogmatism or capitulation to scepticism (MacIntyre 1977: 471). The world has problems; the university has disciplines whose boundary lines inhibit our abilities to address those problems. The boundaries acquire such seeming validity that it becomes necessary to defend problem-oriented research as “interdisciplinary,” when the real point is to examine social reality, rather than defer to academic turf (and scientistic scruples). Faced with the contemporary range of global problems, it is helpful to re-assess and re-construct our history. The artificiality of the disciplinary lineages within the U.S. has diminished Old Chicago. Yet the problems which it addressed have remained pertinent not only to the U.S., and not only to France, but throughout the world. Because the French disciplinary lines have been other than ours, and their nation has been confronting a set of social problems akin to those faced by the Chicagoans, some of their social scientists have sought to draw upon that heritage. The abstract and allusive discourses of a Derrida or Lacan tend to distract observers from the engaged character of the best French intellectual discourse. Park was engaged in the best sense, but he had observed too many campaigns of urban reform which simply clothed the attempt of a culturally dominant group to impose its ethos upon a socially subordinated populace. Underlying Park’s disparagement of “do-good” campaigns and “evangelical sociology” was a moral insistence on respecting the varieties of social life. 19 This is manifest in his life trajectory and in his role as teacher. To me he is cast in the heroic figure of Bernard Rieux in Camus’ The Plague. After undergraduate studies (B.S., 1942) at University of Chicago, Murray L. Wax returned there to teach and undertake doctoral studies (Ph.D., 1959)- He has taught at several universities and is now emeritus Professor, Washington University, St. Louis. The author wishes to express his gratitude for their advice and encouragement to Joan Cassell, Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Lawrence T. Nichols, and Paule Verdet.     

Getting Paid in Smiles: The Gendering of Child Care Work

Based on four and a half years of participant‐observation field research and focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author examines the occupational processes of the entry and tenure of workers, paying particular attention to gender as it manifests in the meanings and actions involved in becoming and continuing as a child care worker. As men and women workers go about the business of becoming and being child care workers, they become active agents in the reproduction of child care as low‐wage, low‐status, women's work. Through the construction of particular gendered “accounts” and “vocabularies of motive,” workers play a key role in sustaining the status of child care as a gendered occupation.     

A Trivariate Distribution for the Height,Weight, and Fat of Adult Men*

Using exploratory data analysis, probability plots, scatterplots, and computer animations to rotate and visualize the data, we fit a trivariate Normal distribution to data for the height, the natural logarithm of body weight, and the body fat for 646 men between the ages of 50 and 80 years as reported by the medical staff of the U.S. Veterans Administration's “Normative Aging Study” in Boston, MA. Although these data do not include any children, women, or young men, the measurements represent the best data that we could find through a 4-year search. We believe that these data are well measured and reliable for men in the specified age range and that these data reveal an interesting statistical pattern for use in probabilistic PBPK models.     

Researching community,work and family with an interpreter

Community, work and family have been studied as practice and experience on an international scale. This work has included research with ethnic minority groups, usually practised by 'insiders' who share their participants' ethnicity, culture and first language. Many of these people live and work in extended family networks, part of a relatively small community embedded within a larger one. Generally, researchers do not have the language skills necessary to communicate with a linguistically diverse population. However, there has been a call to give a voice to, and hence empower, minority groups through the research process. It is in this context that a consideration of the use of interpreters in research on community, work and family can be made. Within this paper we present exploratory suggestions, drawn from our own research, for the appropriate use of an interpreter. This includes a discussion of the practical considerations and implications involved in this research activity, as well as more conceptual issues. Finally, the ways in which this research activity should be documented to reflect concerns in current qualitative methodological debates are considered. La communauté, le travail et la famille sont des sujets qui ont été étudiés, tant au niveau de la pratique que de l'expérience, à l'échelon international. Cette étude a envelopéune recherche parmi les groupes éthniques en minorité, dans l'ensemble vécue par des gens qui connaissent les choses de l'intérieur et qui partagent l'identité éthnique, la culture et la langue maternelle. Nombreux, parmi eux, sont des gens qui vivent et travaillent dans le cadre de familles étendues et font partie d'une petite communauté au sein d'une communaute plus grande. Dans l'ensemble, les chercheurs n'ont pas les competences linguistiques nécessaires pour communiquer avec une population de langues diverses. Cependant, il s'est avéré qu'il est plus que nécessaire de donner la parole et, de là, donner le pouvoir, aux groupes minoritaires au travers de la procedure du travail de recherche. C'est dans ce contexte que la considération de l'utilité de faire appel à des interprètes dans le domaine de la recherche qui embrasse la communauté, le travail et la famille, peut etre faite. Dans ce papier, nous soumettons des suggestions exploratoires, tirées de notre propre recherche, pour l'utilisation appropriée d'un interprete. Cela inclue une discussion sur les considerations pratiques et les implications contenues dans l'activite de cette recherche, y compris des activités conceptuelles. Pour finir, nous considérons la manière dans laquelle cette recherche devrait être documentée afin de refléter les débats méthodologiques qualitatifs en cours.     

A note on connectedness in fixed effects manova and gmanova models withmissing cells

Murray and Smith (1985) and Hocking (1985) give a generalized definition and test of connectedness in the case of missing cells using the univariate cell-means model with linear restrictions on the cell-means. The test of connectedness is here extended to multivariate fixed effects models, including the usual MANOVA model with linear restrictions, the MANOVA model with double linear restrictions, and the GMANOVA model.     

THE STRENGTH OF WEAK INDICATORS: A Response to Gilles, Brown, Geletta, and Dalecki

This article responds to Gilles, Brown, Geletta, and Dalecki's (1990) claim that the Legitimate Violence Index (LVX) is invalid because of problems with eight of its twelve indicators and because it is confounded with region and population density.     

Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman: Legitimators of the Sociological Investigation of Human Experience

By originating and developing the sociological investigation of human experience, Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman have shifted social phenomena at the edge of awareness to the center of attention, and have legitimated their study for contemporary sociologists. Both Simmel and Goffman describe these subtle social phenomena by distinguishing their perceptual boundaries and crossover elements, pointing out their common features when their statuses differ, and reversing their traditional location in means-end and cause-effect chains. But Durkheim's influence on Goffman's basic conceptions of interaction, individual, and society differentiated his interpretation of these social phenomena from Simmel's. Moreover, Simmel's and Goffman's explanations of these social phenomena evolve in different directions, revealing the antithetical goals toward which spiritual transcendental Simmelians and cynical reductive Goffmanians would lead sociology.