Social Activists: Lessons for Community Psychology

In a graduate class in community psychology, each student studied the lives and achievements of social activists. This article integrates the work and accomplishments of 5 social activists into a conceptual and methodological framework for social change within community psychology. These activists worked on issues including national liberation, women's suffrage, the rights of migrant workers, and community development. The methods used by these activists are particularly relevant to the field of community psychology. The article discusses the implications of the work and accomplishments of these social change agents.     

Consequences of Population Change for Retail/Wholesale Sector Employment in the Nonmetropolitan Great Plains: 1950–19961

Abstract A rural economic restructuring perspective and central place theory are used to assess the impact of population change on retail/wholesale sector employment for the 438 nonmetropolitan counties of the Great Plains region from 1950 to 1990. Findings indicate that county level population declined for every decade except the 1970 turnaround decade, and the greatest losses were in completely rural nonadjacent counties. The civilian labor force declined for all but the 1970 decade, when there was a substantial increase due to increased nonmetro manufacturing and the baby boom cohorts reaching labor force age. Retail/wholesale labor force increased in every decade except the 1980s. However, regression analysis found a positive and highly significant relationship between population change and retail/wholesale employment change. For this region, population decline is a major contributor to decline in the retail/wholesale employment sector at the county level. Preliminary data from the 1990–1996 period indicate a population and labor force rebound from the 1980s. However, as in the 1980s, gains are most likely concentrated in a small number of mainly urban nonadjacent counties.     

‘New concepts for unknown lands’: Deleuze and Guattari's non-nationalitarianisms

This article responds to the arguments of Hardt and Negri through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, seeking to show that the latter offer a range of concepts that reveal the diminishing role of the nation-state and national identity in the contemporary world.     

Critical incident stress debriefing and its effects on coping strategies and anger in a sample of Australian police officers involved in shooting incidents

This study investigates appraisal and coping behaviours, and symptom and expectation outcomes following a critical incident and Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD). Two groups of 30 Australian police officers from the New South Wales Police Service who had been involved in shooting incidents were examined. One group received CISD and the other did not. The group that received CISD showed a significant reduction in anger levels and greater use of some specific adaptive coping strategies. However, one cannot be certain as to the extent of CISD's contribution to this improvement, since a variety of other factors in the officers' lives, as evidenced by other measures taken throughout the study, may help to explain the variation. Results are discussed in light of the contextual features in officers' lives that impact upon the outcome responses to such incidents.     

Robust estimation of location in samples of size three

Youden (1953) discussed the practice of averaging the two most concordant observations in sets of three measurements as a method of estimating location. Distributional results for this estimator can be found in Seth (1950) and Lieblein (1952). It follows from their work that the sample median has smaller variance for normal and uniform populations. In this paper it is shown that themedian stochastically dominates the average of the two closest observations for uniform, normal, double–exponential and Cauchy populations and thus is the superior resistant estimator in these cases for a broad class of loss functions. However, an example is given in which, for a particular contaminaion model and loss function, the mean of the closest two observations has smaller risk than the median.     

‘Playing’ doctors and nurses? Competing discourses of gender,power and identity in the British National Health Service

This paper adopts a feminist poststructuralist approach to demonstrate the ambiguities and complexities which exist in the relationship between work and subject. Recent studies in organizational sociology have argued that the discourses of work, and changing working cultures, have had a powerful effect on the production of subjectivities. New forms of working behaviour have been constructed as desirable, which often draw on personal qualities such as gender. This paper draws on research conducted with doctors and nurses in the British National Health Service to reveal the ambiguities which exist in the ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to these discourses. The discourses of work and organization are constantly mediated through, and destabilised by, the intertextuality that exists with competing discourses such as those of professionalism, gender, home and performance. Although organizational discourses are clearly powerful in the construction and performance of subjectivities, the interplay between discourses means that these are constantly destabilised and undermined.     

Assessing trunk roads—The conservationist viewpoint

The economic, social and environmental impacts of trunk roads have, to say the least, created much heated discussion and perhaps too little considered evaluation. This paper puts forward a methodology for effectively examining the Trunk Roads Programme from the environmentalist's viewpoint. The authors rightly concentrate on the fact that the road programme has, to some extent at least, become a paradigm for the whole consumer based system. They pursue the argument further than the elementary conflict between competing systems of public transport and pursue the difficult, but important, questions of the dichotomy between the desire for individual mobility (and its assumptions of human liberty) and the need to evaluate external costs which are rarely levied in full upon the beneficiaries. Whilst much of the article concentrates on the principles of a cost benefit evaluation, it brings out some rather important and long term aspects of the construction of these arteries of society which can be described as either scars upon the earth or liberating and effective avenues of mobility. The question remains a vital one for society at large.     

Facial expressions as modeled by shade gradient manipulations

The ability to model facial expressions by applying shading gradient manipulations to Langer stress lines was assessed in the current experiments. It was hypothesized that the perceived intensity of expressions and the judged faceness of the schematic stimuli would vary as a function of the depth or density of stress lines as measured by shading differences; light and dark contrasts on the facial surface. Expressiveness differences based on the shading manipulations were observed for some stimulus configurations with some differences differentiating the upper and lower halves of the face. The results implicate the shading manipulations as a potential notation system for describing the informational support for the perception of facial expressions, thus providing an empirical measure of relevant stimulus parameters.