Attitudes Towards Disabled Staff and the Effect of the National Minimum Wage: a Delphi survey of employers and disability employment advisors

This Delphi study drew on the expertise of a national sample of 100 employers of disabled people, and a similar number of Disability Employment Advisors (DEAs). It presents their existing attitudes towards disabled employees before analysing the effect of the NMW on these views. Differences between employers and DEAs were found in relation to the perceived costs and obstacles to employers of taking or retaining disabled staff, the problems presented by specific disabilities and the motivation shown by disabled staff. There was general agreement that the NMW has benefited disabled people by making low paid jobs better paid. A minority of respondents thought it had created additional obstacles to employment for disabled people. Some disabled employees appear to have been adversely affected by the interaction of the NMW with the Supported Placement Scheme (SPS, now Workstep) and the benefits system. Understanding employers' perspectives may facilitate the promotion of work opportunities for disabled people.     

Rhythmic organization of social interaction and observer ratings of positive affect and involvement

Many investigators have speculated that a high degree of rhythmic patterning of social interaction and close coupling between the activity rhythms of partners are associated with positive affect, attachment, and interpersonal attraction. Others suggest that predictable or rhythmic patterning is an indication of inflexibility, and that close linkages between the physiological arousal of partners are associated with negative affect. In the present study, spectral and cross spectral analyses were applied to vocal activity and heart rates recorded during 12 conversations. Indexes of rhythmicity and strength of coupling were derived and used as predictors of observer ratings of pleasantness of affect and degree of involvement. There was a curvilinear relationship between affect and rhythmicity of vocal activity, such that moderately rhythmic social interactions were evaluated most positively. This relationship remained statistically significant even when other variables (such as mean and standard deviation of amount of vocal activity) were statistically controlled. Strength of coupling between partner vocal activity patterns and strength of coupling between the vocal activity and heart rate within speaker were not statistically significant predictors of ratings of pleasantness. Results suggest that there may be an optimum degree of rhythmicity in social interaction, with moderately rhythmic interactions evaluated most positively.We gratefully acknowledge support from the Central University Research Fund and from the Office of the Dean of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. Thanks to Kim Mooney, Charles Dufour, Mark Henn and Jay Goober for their contribution in developing the coding system.     

Correction to: Persuasion under ambiguity

Theory and Decision - In Proposition 4, lines 3, 4 and 8, 9 were scrambled by mistake during the pagination process of the online published article.     

Index of Authors Volume 59, 2002

Authors Index

Index of Authors Volume 59, 2002     

Putting the Logos to Work: A Reply to Meyer

Abstract

Journalist Janet Malcolm recently published several articles and a book in which she accused her own profession of manipulation and deceit in its listening and interviewing practices. Specifically, she focused on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, on which Joe McGinniss' book, Fatal Vision, was based. McGinniss, she claimed, fostered a close and seemingly empathic relationship with the accused in order to betray him later—and in this event Malcolm saw the prototypical journalist-interviewee relationship. Her accusations about the role of journalism raised intense professional scrutiny. This essay examines the case from the standpoint of journalistic listening. Are the temptations for deceptive or “slanted” empathy inherent in the journalistic interview? Does the journalist have a responsibility not only to listen to the person being interviewed, but to “listen” equally well to the demands of a developing story—as if it, too, were a living entity? Do ethical standards within journalism demand that an interviewer's listening style, especially as it is seen in empathic behavior, be congruent with his or her unexpressed conclusions?     

Reconsidering the impact of behavior prediction questions on illegal drug use: The importance of using proper analytic methods

Social scientists often habitually employ ANOVA methods when analyzing data from experiments when other analytic approaches are required instead. This paper illustrates how traditional analytic approaches can lead to incorrect research conclusions by reanalyzing data from a recent study by Williams, Block, and Fitzsimons (2006a Williams, P., Block, L. G. and Fitzsimons, G. J. 2006a. Simply asking questions about health behaviors increases both healthy and unhealthy behaviors.. Social Influence, 1(2): 117–127. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Because the non‐negative dependent variable (illegal drug use) was super skewed and had a large majority of zero values, the use of improper statistical tests and the presence of just a few extreme, outlying observations produced the illusion that asking people to predict their likelihood of drug use increased that behavior significantly, when in fact it did not. The effect of behavior prediction questions on frequency of exercise also turns out to be non‐significant when analyzed properly. As this example illustrates, experimental researchers should choose and implement appropriate analytic approaches carefully.     

The irreversibility effect and agency conflicts

This paper studies the influence of agency conflicts on the irreversibility effect. Using a dynamic variant of the static Baron and Myerson (Econometrica 50(4):911–930, 1982) adverse selection model, we characterize under which circumstances the irreversibility effect arises in the presence and absence of an agency conflict. In particular, we find that in the presence of an agency conflict the irreversibility effect arises in more circumstances than in the standard first-best analysis that abstracts from agency problems.