Postconflict Reconciliation: Intergroup Forgiveness and Implicit Biases in Northern Ireland

Even after a conflict has formally ended, there is still a need for postconflict reconciliation and the building of mutual forgiveness and trust between communities. This article addresses psychological processes crucial to moving beyond a history of violent sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. We investigated the predictors of intergroup forgiveness, in terms of intergroup emotions, infrahumanization, empathy, and intergroup contact. Intergroup trust and measures of implicit intergroup bias were also explored in this area of real intergroup conflict. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for postconflict reconciliation in Northern Ireland and other conflict areas.     

Bayesian binary segmentation procedure for detecting streakiness in sports

Summary.  When an individual player or team enjoys periods of good form, and when these occur, is a widely observed phenomenon typically called 'streakiness'. It is interesting to assess which team is a streaky team, or who is a streaky player in sports. Such competitors might have a large number of successes during some periods and few or no successes during other periods. Thus, their success rate is not constant over time. We provide a Bayesian binary segmentation procedure for locating changepoints and the associated success rates simultaneously for these competitors. The procedure is based on a series of nested hypothesis tests each using the Bayes factor or the Bayesian information criterion. At each stage, we only need to compare a model with one changepoint with a model based on a constant success rate. Thus, the method circumvents the computational complexity that we would normally face in problems with an unknown number of changepoints. We apply the procedure to data corresponding to sports teams and players from basketball, golf and baseball.     

Family policy in Korea

In Korea, family policy as a public policy gained interest in the 1980s, when the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (since January 1995 the Ministry of Health and Welfare) renamed the Maternal and Child Bureau the Family Welfare Bureau. This paper first presents a brief overview of the traditional family system and values in Korea and examines changes in economic and social indicators, changes in family functions and roles, and changes in attitudes toward family that have occurred following industrialization and urbanization. The paper then briefly explains some of the problems Korean families face today. It next examines the Family Planning Program and its results. Finally, it turns to an examination and critique of the policies and programs administered by the Family Welfare Bureau.Yeonoak Baik is a Family Advocacy Therapist for the 8th U.S. Army c/o Commander, 43rd Surgical Hospital (MA), ATTN: EAMC-SH-FAP, Room D-108, Unit #15190, APO AP, 96271-0126. She works in Korea with U.S. military soldiers and their dependents. Her research interests include child welfare, single-parent families, and domestic violence. Her MSW was received from the School of Social Work, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Her research interests include children of divorced families, social welfare policy, and social work administration in Korea. She received her Ph.D. in Social Welfare at Seoul National University in Korea.     

Perceptions of drinking among Hispanic college students: how qualitative research can inform the development of collegiate alcohol abuse prevention programs

Alcohol abuse on college campuses continues to be a significant public health issue and health promotion strategies are being directed at changing the culture of collegiate drinking. From a qualitative research perspective such efforts remain uniformed since this area of research is currently dominated by large-scale surveys that illuminate little regarding undergraduate perceptions of alcohol use. This study describes results conducted on perceptions of drinking among college students, and discusses the implications these results may have for developing collegiate alcohol abuse prevention programs.     

The Divergent Meanings of Life Satisfaction: Item Response Modeling of the Satisfaction with Life Scale in Greenland and Norway

Cultural differences in response to the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) items is investigated. Data were fit to a mixed Rasch model in order to identify latent classes of participants in a combined sample of Norwegians (N = 461) and Greenlanders (N = 180). Initial analyses showed no mean difference in life satisfaction between the two subsamples. After transforming the ordinal raw scores into interval scales while simultaneously controlling for response bias, different results appeared. First, approximately 80% of the participants in the Greenlandic subsample fit a latent class with a large degree of random responding to the SWLS. Second, relative to the Norwegians, more Greenlanders were using extreme categories in responding to the SWLS. After statistically controlling for this tendency, Norwegians were in general more satisfied with their lives than Greenlanders. Third, Greenlanders who belonged to one specific latent class were more satisfied than their Norwegian counterparts. A salient feature of this class was the relative unwillingness of respondents to change the circumstances of their lives if they were given such an opportunity. The above results are a reminder of the care that must be used in analyzing survey data across cultures. The analytical strategy applied in the article offers an improved approach to handling such data.     

EDITING A LARGE-SCALE DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY–THE EXPERIENCE OF THE MELBOURNE FAMILY SURVEY1

This paper discusses the editing procedures for a survey on family formation conducted in Melbourne during 1971. Examples are given of the incidence and types of inconsistencies revealed during the editing stage in the mainly quantitative variables concerning childbearing, numbers of children, and the demographic characteristics of the children. The principal point emphasized is the need for automatic detection and manual correction of coding deficiencies in a survey of this type, i.e. an intensive, “once-off” survey, with a sample size of a few thousand, from which detailed and complex analyses are planned.