Caring for day care: a pilot project

Day care in Israel is not always of high quality, and the current forecast for upgrading the standards of the existing centers is bleak, due to economic and social factors that do not place high priority on quality infant care in group settings. The agency attempted, therefore, to develop a low-cost, efficient method of early intervention, wherein skilled social workers were hired, given special training, and worked alongside the caregivers of day care centers to help children and parents defined as at risk. This article describes the observations that were made and the interventions that were chosen.     

Ethnic Discrimination in Recruitment and Decision Makers’ Features: Evidence from Laboratory Experiment and Survey Data using a Student Sample

This article examines which individual-level factors are related to people’s likelihood of discriminating against ethnic minority job applicants. It moves beyond describing to what extent discrimination occurs by examining the role of individuals’ interethnic contacts, education and religion in shaping their behavior towards ethnic minority job applicants. We derive expectations from theories from the interethnic attitudes literature. Data are collected via (1) a laboratory experiment in which student participants (n = 272) reviewed résumés of fictitious applicants who varied regarding ethnicity, gender, education and work experience and (2) a survey amongst the same participants. During the experiment, participants assess applicants’ suitability for a job and select applicants for an interview. Additionally, participants complete a questionnaire including questions on several personal and background features. Results show that individuals who have more positive interethnic contacts, higher educational levels and higher educated parents are less likely to discriminate against ethnic minority applicants. Individuals whose parents are church members are more likely to discriminate, as are males. We find interesting differences regarding the role of decision makers’ features between different stages of the recruitment process. First assessments of applicants’ suitability for a job are predominantly affected by applicants’ features. Differences between decision makers here are relatively small. Eventual choices about which applicants to invite for a job interview, however, are affected by both applicants’ and decision makers’ features; here differences between decision makers are more pronounced. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Simultaneous Confidence Tubes in Multivariate Linear Regression

Simultaneous confidence bands have been shown in the statistical literature as powerful inferential tools in univariate linear regression. While the methodology of simultaneous confidence bands for univariate linear regression has been extensively researched and well developed, no published work seems available for multivariate linear regression. This paper fills this gap by studying one particular simultaneous confidence band for multivariate linear regression. Because of the shape of the band, the word ‘tube’ is more pertinent and so will be used to replace the word ‘band’. It is shown that the construction of the tube is related to the distribution of the largest eigenvalue. A simulation‐based method is proposed to compute the 1 ? α quantile of this eigenvalue. With the computation power of modern computers, the simultaneous confidence tube can be computed fast and accurately. A real‐data example is used to illustrate the method, and many potential research problems have been pointed out.     

Toward an “Awareness” of the Relationship between Task Performance and Own Verbal Accounts of that Performance

The existence of learning without awareness has been debated for many years. Learning without awareness is said to occur when an individual''s behavior has been affected without that individual being aware of the conditions affecting the behavior, of the relationship between those conditions and the behavior, or of the fact that the behavior has changed. This paper describes a series of experiments investigating this phenomenon. The findings support the existence of “learning without awareness.” However, it is argued that the term “awareness” should be discarded as it is misleading. Instead, the results of the experiments are discussed in terms of behavior for which the individual does not provide a complete verbal account.     

Sociotechnology and the Environment

The founders of the sociotechnical modelperceived its relevance at the macro level of thecommunity, at the meso level of whole organizations, aswell as at the micro level of the primary work systems, but it is at the primary work system that mostapplications have been carried out. An efficient microlevel sociotechnical solution may still cause thetechnology to have a harmful impact on the environment. An increasing popular awareness ofenvironmental damage due to certain technologies leadsone to consider an extension of the important jointoptimization concept to a systemic heuristic devicecalled the socioecotechnical model in which the intra-and extra-organizational factors can be jointly assessedand optimized.