The future of private sector unions in the U.S.

Conclusion As noted, the union movement’s significant decline during the last four decades is primarily a private sector phenomenon. Since the mid-1950s, the union density of private sector workers has dropped from more than a third to less than a tenth, in contrast to that found in government employment, which is now about 37 percent. We are indebted to the Donner Foundation for support and to Noah Meltz and Rafael Gomez for research and intellectual advice.     

A generalized semi-Pareto minification process

In this paper a generalization of the semi-Pareto autoregressive minification process of the first order is given. The necessary and sufficient condition for stationarity of the process is determined. It is shown that the process is ergodic and uniformly mixing. The joint survival function and the joint density function of the random variables X _n+h and X _n are determined. The extremes of the random variables X ₁, X ₂, ..., X _n and the geometric extremes of random variables X ₁, X ₂, ..., X _N are derived and their asymptotic distributions are discussed. The estimation of the parameters is discussed and some numerical results are given.     

Sexual and Reproductive Strategies Among Serbian Gypsies

This paper deals with a full range of sexual and reproductive behaviors among different tribes of Gypsies in Serbia. The examined traits include rates of fertility, mortality, age distribution, education, crime rates, and parental care. In addition, Gypsy traditions of culturally prescribed sexual behavior are also studied. It is found that Gypsy tribes employ different reproductive strategies, ranging from an extreme, for humans, r (reproductive) strategy to a more typical K (parental) strategy. The reasons bringing about these differences come from the Gypsies' readiness to adjust their behavior and reproduction in order to create the most favorable strategy in a given environment. This paper elucidates and contrasts the more typical r-selected Gypsies with a group of K-selected Gypsies living in a Serbian village.     

Streamlining for democracy: Intercultural predispositions of the Croatian secondary school population

This work interprets the results of empirical research conducted into the intercultural predispositions of secondary school students in Croatia. Data were collected in 1993 and in 1998, using specially constructed questionnaires in which, for a variety of democratic values, a Likert-type battery of questions, were given to respondents. In 1993 the stratified research sample consisted only of secondary school students, while in 1998 the research sample also included students, parents and teachers. An analysis of the results shows that: (1) students had, generally speaking, affirmative attitudes both in 1993 and 1998 and that the hierarchy of support for these values remained the same; and (2) all three groups examined in 1998 shared a common hierarchy of values. However, they differed in the degree to which they accepted democratic values; teachers ranked the highest, students the lowest. The fact that students' attitudes were much closer to their parents' than to their teachers' leads to the conclusion that schools are not the major factor in the "political" socialization of young people in Croatia. This indicates a need for the introduction of new curriculum in all secondary schools. This curriculum should include educational content that emphasizes democratic values and intercultural relations, and methods that stress students' participation through action, reciprocity, dialogue, and solidarity, led by well-trained teachers.     

SFILTEX: toward an expert system for time-series filter design

This paper describes an attempt to develop a statistical expert system (FILTEX) as an intelligent aid for time-series filter design. To this end the knowledge of the filter design strategy is represented in Prolog and coupled with numerical routines of a general purpose signal processing package. This knowledge-based system is conceived as a set of independent knowledge sources integrated into a system by a blackboard mechanism which embodies overall control of the filter design process. Modularity and flexibility of knowledge representation in such a framework preserve usability of the evolving system during its development from the original numerical package to an expert system for filter design. This approach seems to be more flexible than the use of shells and less time consuming than building from scratch. A novel method for incorporating classical statistical information into an uncertainty management mechanism is presented. Experimental results confirm the feasibility of the approach and set directions for further research.     

WHAT'S HAPPENED TO FAMILY INTERACTION RESEARCH? AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT AND A FAMILY SYSTEMS VIEWPOINT

The origins and evolution of family interaction research are outlined in order to examine the apparent lag in the field after the initial hopes and enthusiasms of the 1960s. It is argued that family interaction research naturally drew upon the methodology of social psychology and that there was an insufficient integration of the implications of the clinical viewpoint of family systems theory into research procedure. A discussion is presented of some central concepts in scientific psychology, drawing conclusions as to how they can be broadened for the special field of family research. An experimental method for evaluating the public verifiability of complex clinical notions is described, and a number of recent investigations are scrutinized in the light of our critique. It is concluded that there are grounds for being optimistic that the gap between clinical and research thinking can be bridged, making the assessment and refinement of abstract and intricate concepts discovered in clinical procedures accessible to scientific experimentation.     

Double disenchantment of politics: A systems theory approach to post‐socialist transformation

Many social scientists argue that the precarious future of post‐socialist societies is determined by cultural constraints to which the actors of transformation are exposed. In contrast to this approach, the paper focuses on those developmental obstacles which are inherent to the structure of post‐socialist societies. The analysis draws primarily on social systems theory, especially on the theory of functional differentiation. In the first part, the changing role of political actors is dealt with. The competitive nature of the democratic political process have forced the new and old political actors to adopt a pragmatic and professional attitude towards their activity. Not all of them, however, have been able to adapt to the new rules of the political game. Adaptation problems are mostly faced by those political actors who played a decisive role in the initial stages of democratization on the basis of their informal political influence. The second part of the paper focuses on the changes related to the societal functions of the democratic political system. Irrespective of the ambitions of political actors, democratic politics is inherently ‘unsuitable’ for the extensive regulation of society. A democratic political system presupposes a relatively high ability of other societal subsystems to rely on self‐regulation. The absence of this ability is an important source of systemic tensions in post‐socialist societies. These two sets of changes can be characterized as the double disenchantment of politics. Both on the systemic level and on the level of actors politics has lost many attributes of a ‘privileged’ societal activity. But the process of disenchantment can give rise to demands for a revival of the politics of ‘great deeds’.     

Environmental awareness and energy problems in Croatia

The article discusses the results of sociological research on environmental awareness in Croatia. A strong anti‐nuclear attitude is present, especially with respect to radioactive waste. Education is by far the strongest determining variable: those of high educational qualifications are critical in general as well as vis‐à‐vis specific issues, yet not necessarily critical in a negative sense.     

The Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse among Slovak Late Adolescents

ABSTRACT

The present study aimed to assess the prevalence and characteristics of child sexual abuse (CSA) in a large-scale sample of Slovak late adolescents. Randomized cluster sampling was used to sample 2186 students in their final school year of secondary school with mean age of 18.6 years (SD = .7 years). The study employed the Child Sexual Abuse Questionnaire consisting of multiple behavior-specific questions. The prevalence of CSA was analyzed separately for three clusters of CSA and gender. The prevalence of non-contact forms of CSA was 40.6% among girls and 17.7% among boys. CSA with physical contact without penetration was reported by 30.2% girls and 11.6% boys. The prevalence of CSA with penetration was 5.6% among girls and 1.3% among boys. More than half of CSA occurred between 16 and 18 years of age. The severity of abuse was positively associated with acquaintance to the perpetrator. Roughly 43–56% disclosed the abuse to another person. The majority of disclosed CSA was revealed to peers and partners. A negligible proportion of CSA instances were reported to the police. Prevention activities should consider a broad spectrum of CSA in order to counteract tendencies to associate CSA only with unwanted sexual intercourse.