Marital Conflict and Children's Adjustment: The Mediating and Moderating Role of Children's Coping Strategies

This prospective, longitudinal study examined the role of children's coping strategies in the link between interparental conflict and children's psychological adjustment. Using a sample of 100 parents and children aged 11–14 years, this study investigated children's venting of negative emotion, social support seeking, and problem solving strategies as mediators and moderators of the relationship between marital conflict and child adjustment. Venting negative emotion mediated the long‐term effects of marital conflict on children's psychological adjustment. This coping response also moderated the relationship between marital conflict and children's anxiety‐depression. The role of non‐constructive coping strategies as a mechanism through which marital conflict affects children's psychological well‐being is discussed, together with the need for research to identify intervention strategies aimed at improving children's coping efficacy in the context of interparental conflict.     

Creating strategies to deal with problems of teaching controversial issues in social studies education in African schools

The teaching of controversial issues has been widely viewed as preparing students for effective citizenship and, as such, is regarded as inevitable in social studies classrooms if students are to be able to think intelligently and to participate effectively in society. However, the effective implementation of issue‐centered education in African schools, particularly in the area of social studies, is replete with problems. This paper examines those problems and concludes with some suggestions as to how controversial issues could be handled in our classrooms.     

The natural South Florida system I: Climate,geology, and hydrology

Developing hypotheses for sustainability requires an understanding of the natural forces that shaped the historical Everglades prior to extensive engineering of the landscape. The historical Everglades marsh covered 10,000 km² in a 100-km-long basin that has an extremely low gradient (slope of only 3 cm · km^-1). The region is characterized by a heterogeneous landscape that has developed over the past five millennia, functioning as an interconnected mosaic of wetland, upland, estuarine, and marine ecosystems. The boundaries of this system were defined as the historic drainage basin from the Kissimmee River system through Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades, Florida Bay, and out through the Florida Keys to the coral reef tract. This geographic area is interconnected through the regional hydrology, with its unifying surface and subsurface freshwater transport system. However, in the final analysis, the interaction of geologic and climatic processes determine the system's hydrology, a major determinant of community and landscape structure and the point of connectivity between natural and human systems. This review examines the role of climate, geology, soils and sediments, topography, and hydrology in shaping and modifying ecological systems through time. However, it is clear from the wetland nature of this system that the predrainage hydrologic features were critical to the sustainability of the Everglades. Important hydrologic features include sufficient water quantity, storage, and sheetflow, and the appropriate hydroperiod and timing of water releases over both annual and interannual variations in precipitation.     

Formal planning in major U.S. corporations

As the world about us changes, managers in all types of institutions try to cope in a variety of ways. In the early 1960s, many corporate managers realized they could not make sound decisions about future business activities in an expedient, reactive manner because their firms were growing very large and complex with new technologies, products, markets and competition to deal with. As a result, formal planning techniques which had been used in narrow functional applications were introduced on a much broader scale and formal long-range planning became popular. New corporate planning functions appeared in many companies, as well as new staff planning specialists and planning executives. The author conducted a field study on the design of these systems in the mid-1960s and he argues that they showed great promise for improved management.With this history in mind, we might ask why such subjects as ‘planning techniques’ and ‘problems of implementation’ are still topics of concern. It would seem that such techniques would be well known and established in most firms after 10–15 years. However, this is not the case, for during a second field study of corporate planning systems which was completed in 1976 the author found that many corporations, including some of the largest ones, had redesigned their planning systems in the early 1970s, essentially making a fresh start at formal long-range planning. (See Table 1).From his recent field study the author concludes that all corporations experience problems in implementing and using a formal planning system. The nature of these problems and some possible remedies are the subjects upon which this article focuses.     

City-wide relationships between green spaces,urban land use and topography

The growing proportion of human populations living in urban areas, and consequent trends of increasing urban expansion and densification fuel a need to understand how urban form and land use affect environmental quality, including the availability of urban green spaces. Here we use Sheffield as a case study of city-wide relationships between urban green space extent, quality (vegetation cover and tree-cover), and gradients in urban form and topography. The total area of buildings and length of the road network are equally strong negative predictors of extent of green space, while the former predictor is a more important negative influence upon green space quality. Elevation positively influences extent of green space but negatively influences tree-cover. In contrast, slope of terrain positively influences green space quality and is the best predictor of tree-cover. Overall housing density is a more important negative predictor of extent of green space and tree-cover than the densities of individual housing types. Nevertheless, the latter are more important influences upon levels of vegetation cover. Threshold effects of densities of different housing types suggest opportunities for optimising green space quality, with implications for housing policy. Variation in ecological quality of green space may partly reflect different historical intensities of industrial activity.     

The unconscious in economic decision-making: Convergent voices

Mainstream economics assumes that decision-making is a conscious cost-benefit process, ignoring the pervasive role of unconscious thought processes. Recent research in neuroimaging, genomics, and psychoanalysis exposes the role of unconscious and “nonconscious” processes, providing tools for analyzing economic decision-making. Neuroimaging reveals examples of brain function that modulate decision-making, but are not under conscious control. Psychoanalytic research provides evidence of the role of emotions and the unconscious in human behavior and decision-making. We advance the case for integrating psychoanalysis and neuroscience for a new perspective on the role of the mind in decision-making and economic behavior.     

Older People and the Health–Social Care Boundary in the UK: Half a Century of Hidden Policy Conflict

The boundary between health and social care services has been an important focus of both social research and policy reform in many western and northern European countries. In the UK there is a history of particularly sharp divisions between the centrally funded NHS and locally run social services. A consequence for older people, especially those with less acute or "intermediate" needs, is that they may be rationed out, ignored, or treated inappropriately on either side of the boundary. This paper seeks to go beyond explanations in terms of financial, administrative and professional divisions by using now-available public records to show how the boundary between health and social care was set in stone in the immediate postwar years and resulted in a constant battle between the two services over the needs they would meet. The first part of the paper examines a largely hidden history of health and social care policy. The second part examines the new NHS Plan and the extent to which it is likely to resolve the problem of the boundary.     

Stemming inequality? Employment and pay of female and minority scientists and engineers

When white men overwhelmingly dominated the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) work force, the high pay in STEM occupations was a major source of gender and race inequality in the U.S. economy. As women, Blacks, and Latinos increasingly study STEM fields, new possibilities for achieving pay equality are opening. We test whether the reality matches the promise using two large data sets. Analysis of a five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census and the 2001-06 American Community Surveys shows that women and minorities earn more, relative to comparable white men, in STEM than in non-STEM fields. This general pattern persists in analysis of a 1% sample of federal personnel records, which include better measures of work experience and education. Thus, federal efforts to increase the representativeness of the STEM workforce should increase pay equality in the economy by moving women and minorities into traditionally high-paying fields.