Why some Conferences are Difficult: a Study of the Professionals' Experience of Some Initial Child Protection Conferences

The views of 261 professionals attending 36 initial child protection conferences with parental participation were collected by means of a questionnaire. Overall, the professionals found the involvement of parents beneficial to the consideration of risk and the decision-making process, with some provisos. The data revealed that most of the negative responses arose from one third of the conferences, and that these conferences shared particular features relating to family profile and certain conference characteristics. The nature of the difficulties is identified and explored, especially with regard to the ambiguities and the uncertainties involved in risk assessments which contributed to the professionals, negative experiences, and which seemed to be heightened by the parents' presence.     

APPEALING APPEALS:

We read the 1912-1917 New York Time's "One Hundred Neediest Cases" charity campaigns in three ways. First, we examine campagns as they formed an image of the "morally worthy" poor person who was the proper recipient of modern charity. Second, we read these campaigns as moral tales promoting the goodness of the institutional order, particular types of subjects within that order, and particular relationships between subjects who have money and those who need it. Finally, we examine how mythologies, such as those transmitted through these charity campaigns, produce political legitimations, social hierarchy, and structures of domination.     

Letters of recommendation in academe: Do women and men write in different languages?

The present study analyzes seventy-eight letters of recommendation sent to a department of sociology and anthropology for six replacement and two tenure-track positions. The sample consists of fifteen pairs of letters written for women and twenty-four pairs written for men. Each pair of letters includes one written by a woman and one written by a man for the same candidate. Men and women wrote letters differently, but their letters also varied by the gender of the applicant. The concept of tokenism, Gilligan’s theory about moral reasoning, and Acker’s discussion of gendered organizations are used to interpret these differences. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Providence, R.I., April 12, 1991.     

Familiarity effects in nonverbal understanding: Recognizing our own facial expressions and our friends'

In this study we explored how individuals' private expressions are interpreted by the self, same-sex friends, and strangers. Videotapes were made of participants as they watched pleasant, unpleasant, and unusual slides. Approximately a year later, the tapes were shown to the participant, a same-sex friend, another participant, and the other participant's friend. Judges were able to read the facial expressions at levels of accuracy that were significantly greater than chance. They were no better at reading familiar targets (themselves or their friends) than unfamiliar ones (strangers), with only one exception (men were better at recognizing the reactions of familiar targets than unfamiliar targets viewing pleasant slides). In their abilities to understand nonverbal cues, female friends showed resemblances to each other on all accuracy measures (pleasant/unpleasant/unusual X familiar/unfamiliar). Male friends resembled each other only in their understanding of the reactions of unfamiliar men viewing unpleasant slides.This research was supported in part by an NSF grant and an NIMH Research Scientist Development Award to the second author. We thank Charles Frohman and Laura Yamhure for their help with this research.     

Infrence for non-negative autoregressive schemes

The object of this paper is the statistical analysis of Several Closely related models arising in water quality analysis. In particular, concern is with the autoregressive scheme X_r = ρX_r?1 + Y_r where 0 < ρ < 1 and Y's are i.i.d, and non-negative. The estimation and testing problem is considered for three parametric models - Gaussian, uniform and exponential - as well as for the nonparametric case where it is assumed that the Y's have a positive continuous distribution.