PREDICTING MARITAL SUCCESS AFTER FIVE YEARS: ASSESSING THE PREDICTIVE VALIDITY OF FOCCUS

Engaged couples who took a premarital inventory called FOCCUS were contacted 5 years later to see if their scores would predict their future marital success. Results showed that FOCCUS successfully predicted the future marital success of most couples, supporting the predictive validity of FOCCUS. The results also indicate that FOCCUS and PREPARE are roughly comparable in terms of their predictive validity.     

An intelligent system for experimental design-some ideas

There is a growing movement towards the construction of statistical expert systems by statisticians to assist incertain aspects of their work. As one of the most'abused’ areas, experimental design could benefit from a system ofthis type. This paperoutlines some ideas on how a system for intelligently constructing designs could be built.     

Setting Up a Rural Private Practice*

This irreverent, somewhat breezy paper describes the experience of the author in establishing a private practice in an unusual setting and offers some observations for others. Editor.     

Fathers in child welfare: caseworkers' perspectives

Five focus groups substantially agreed about the lack of paternal participation in child welfare services and the reasons for low paternal involvement. The groups had considerable disagreement about whether child welfare professionals should address this issue. Some caseworkers believed that all fathers and mothers should be treated identically with respect to services to be offered and time frames for services; other caseworkers thought that the special circumstances of some fathers, such as lack of child care experience, called for service approaches that differ from those for mothers. Another disagreement was whether more fathers would be more involved if services were gender sensitive, that is, if agencies provided male caseworkers for fathers and had father-only services. Much of the debate focused on pragmatic considerations (would gender-sensitive services improve paternal participation and outcomes?), although some participants were concerned about equity (would such services give fathers an advantage in disputed custody cases?).