Does Sexual Harassment Training Change Attitudes? A View from the Federal Level*

Objective. Employment‐related sexual harassment imposes large costs on both workers and their employers and many organizations have responded by implementing formal policies, grievance procedures, or training programs. However, limited evaluation of these interventions leaves us knowing very little about their impact. Our goal is to add to this limited empirical literature by analyzing the relationship between sexual harassment training and employees' views about what behaviors in fact constitute sexual harassment. Method. We use probit analysis and data drawn from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) of the U.S. federal government to determine—separately by gender—the impact of sexual harassment training on the propensity of workers to define specific unwanted sexual behaviors in the workplace as forms of sexual harassment. Results. We find that sexual harassment training is associated with an increased probability—particularly for men—of considering unwanted sexual gestures, remarks, touching, and pressure for dates to be a form of sexual harassment. We also find that the proportion of agency staff receiving training is positively related to the propensity that an individual employee has a definition of sexual harassment that includes these forms of unwanted sexual behavior. Conclusions. Our results suggest that sexual harassment training programs may be useful in leading workers to be more sensitive to the issue of sexual harassment. Widespread training within the agency has an effect over and above that attributable to the individual's receipt of training itself and training appears to be particularly successful in clarifying men's views about the “gray” area generated by unwanted sexual behavior originating with co‐workers rather than supervisors.     

Predicting Support for Eliminating the Dividend Tax: The Role of Framing and Attributions for Wealth

The proposed elimination of the dividend tax was among the most debated aspects of the Bush administration's economic stimulus package. Both the fairness of the initiative and who would benefit from it were questioned. Drawing on the political rhetoric of these debates, 86 respondents completed materials assessing the effects of framing and attributions for wealth on support for eliminating the dividend tax. The participants were less supportive of eliminating the dividend tax when it was framed as benefiting the wealthy than when the initiative was framed as benefiting the general public. Attributing wealth to personal initiative and "warm" feelings toward the wealthy emerged as the most powerful predictors of supporting the tax's elimination. Implications for social policy and economic justice are discussed.     

The Dynamics of Evolving Beliefs,Concerns Emotions,and Behavioral Avoidance Following 9/11: A Longitudinal Analysis of Representative Archival Samples

September 11 created a natural experiment that enables us to track the psychological effects of a large‐scale terror event over time. The archival data came from 8,070 participants of 10 ABC and CBS News polls collected from September 2001 until September 2006. Six questions investigated emotional, behavioral, and cognitive responses to the events of September 11 over a five‐year period. We found that heightened responses after September 11 dissipated and reached a plateau at various points in time over a five‐year period. We also found that emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions were moderated by age, sex, political affiliation, and proximity to the attack. Both emotional and behavioral responses returned to a normal state after one year, whereas cognitively‐based perceptions of risk were still diminishing as late as September 2006. These results provide insight into how individuals will perceive and respond to future similar attacks.     

Valuing Equal Protection in Aviation Security Screening

The growing number of anti‐terrorism policies has elevated public concerns about discrimination. Within the context of airport security screening, the current study examines how American travelers value the principle of equal protection by quantifying the “equity premium” that they are willing to sacrifice to avoid screening procedures that result in differential treatments. In addition, we applied the notion of procedural justice to explore the effect of alternative selective screening procedures on the value of equal protection. Two‐hundred and twenty‐two respondents were randomly assigned to one of three selective screening procedures: (1) randomly, (2) using behavioral indicators, or (3) based on demographic characteristics. They were asked to choose between airlines using either an equal or a discriminatory screening procedure. While the former requires all passengers to be screened in the same manner, the latter mandates all passengers undergo a quick primary screening and, in addition, some passengers are selected for a secondary screening based on a predetermined selection criterion. Equity premiums were quantified in terms of monetary cost, wait time, convenience, and safety compromise. Results show that equity premiums varied greatly across respondents, with many indicating little willingness to sacrifice to avoid inequitable screening, and a smaller minority willing to sacrifice anything to avoid the discriminatory screening. The selective screening manipulation was effective in that equity premiums were greater under selection by demographic characteristics compared to the other two procedures.     

Temperament and Social Problem Solving Competence in Preschool: Influences on Academic Skills in Early Elementary School

The goals of the current study were to examine whether children's social problem solving (SPS) skills are a mechanism through which temperament influences later academic achievement and whether sex moderates these associations. The participants included 1117 children enrolled in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care. During preschool, mothers and childcare providers rated children's temperamental shyness and inhibitory control, and SPS was assessed using a hypothetical–reflective measure during a laboratory visit. During kindergarten and first grade, teacher‐report of math and language skills was collected. The results indicated that high ratings of inhibitory control in preschool, but not shyness, predicted better kindergarten and first‐grade academic skills. Furthermore, children's SPS competence mediated the relations between both shyness and inhibitory control on later academic skills. The child's sex did not moderate these associations. The results suggest that preventative efforts targeting early SPS skills may buffer against later academic adjustment problems among temperamentally extreme children.     

Emotional death: the charity advert and photographs of childhood trauma

This essay will use current and historical advertisements by the British charity Barnardo’s to analyse the representation of abused children. In particular, it will focus on the 1999–2003 campaigns to explore the connection between the experience of trauma, death and the photographic image in the context of a first world, Western preoccupation with the spectre of the missing, lost or abused child. It will consider the complex attempt to photographically capture the missing image, to invoke a subjective loss and to conjure up the accompanying wound of trauma. The Barnardo’s adverts, like many charity adverts of abuse, attempt to show a traumatic past, that by its very nature as trauma, defeats easy representation. Trauma as an experience produces a crisis of representation. The traumatic event, with its radical disruption of psychic defences, results in an absence or gap in memory, knowledge and recall. The devastating event so overwhelms the senses that it produces a perpetual sense of “belated uncertainty” about “a truth to which there is no simple access” (Caruth , p. 6). These photographs attempt to capture the dislocation of time and distortion of identity for the traumatised child. Whilst structurally they can be read for invoking a sense of aura or credibility as testimony, they do so in a digital age when the status of the “truth” of the photograph as evidence is called into doubt (Robins ). This dislocation of image from referent can be read for its parallels with the dislocating structures of trauma. As such they raise questions of the ethics of “spectral evidence” in a commercialised charity sector.     

Contemporary organizational theory: The demographic,relational, and cultural perspectives

We review three perspectives—demographic, relational, and cultural—that have dominated sociological research on organizations during the past four decades. These perspectives arose in reaction to the atomistic and rationalist–adaptationist assumptions of earlier perspectives on organizations. These perspectives have different conceptions of social structure and thus different conceptions of what creates opportunities for and constraints on action. The demographic perspective holds that social structure is constituted by distributions of social actors along salient dimensions of social and physical space; the relational perspective, by webs of social relationships; and the cultural perspective, by widely shared and patterned understandings of reality and possibility. These perspectives also have different conceptions of identity and therefore motivations for action. For demographers, identity derives from position, absolute or relative, along salient dimensions of social life; for relational scholars, from ties among individuals, groups, and organizations; and for cultural scholars, from social interaction. All three perspectives have been applied to explain behavior at five different levels of analysis: the individual, group or organizational subunit, organization, industry or organizational population, and field. Up to the 1990s, these perspectives were generally applied separately, but over the past two decades, studies have increasingly used multiple perspectives.     

The Spatial Distribution of Poverty and the Long Reach of the Industrial Makeup of Places: New Evidence on Spatial and Temporal Regimes

A wealth of research identifies industrial structure as a central correlate of place‐level poverty and suggests that changes in and the clustering of industry contribute to the spatial clustering of poverty over time. However, few studies have investigated the spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously, and none have effectively examined spatiotemporal interactions. Consequently, a core tenet of theory on poverty in place has not been adequately examined. To address this limitation, we explicitly test hypotheses about systematic variation in the poverty‐industry relationship over time and across space using a new method to quantify dynamic associations by simultaneously accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelation and relationship heterogeneity. The Upper Midwest is our study site given dramatic regional changes in dominant industries (i.e., manufacturing, services, and agriculture) and poverty during the past several decades. We find that the specific character of the poverty‐industry relationship systematically varies along both the temporal and spatial dimensions: Industry is more protective in certain periods than in others according to sector trends, and is more protective in certain places than others conditional on sector dependence. Our approach yields a more precise and reliable understanding of the effect of the long reach of local industrial structure on the spatial clustering of poverty.