Medical care, living conditions, and children's well-being

We examine the effect of medical care and living conditions on children's physical and psychological well-being. We develop a causal model in which living conditions (including the socioeconomic status of the family and the social-psychological aspects of family functioning) may affect well-being both directly, and indirectly through medical care. We find that families in the higher social classes and families that function well tend to go to large prepaid groups where they receive good medical care. High quality technical care of illness, in turn, improves physical health. The quality of psychotherapeutic care, on the other hand, has no effect on psychological well-being. For this aspect of health, the effect of living conditions is largely direct, rather than indirect by way of medical care. Families characterized by high levels of functioning have children who are psychologically healthy. In addition, physical health affects psychological well-being, but not vice versa.     

Evaluating alternative approaches to strategic planning

The question which, unfortunately, often goes unanswered, is whether a company's process of corporate planning is optimal. Furthermore, even if they wished to answer such a question there is little in the literature which can provide them with a direct, and explicit evaluative model. This paper examines the development of planning and the many different contributors towards its theoretical underpinning. Whilst recognizing that planning is a field which is a ‘semantic's jungle’ the authors carefully pick their way through the mine-field of misunderstanding and misquotation and clearly establish a base-line for evaluation and indeed propose a detailed methodology. It is hoped that this paper will be a fore-runner of many which will assist the executive in his important evaluative role concerning alternative planning approaches.     

The corporate energy policy: A management planning perspective

The energy problems facing the world have been receiving increasing attention in the press and in business journals. This article examines the attitudes of 224 U.S. business executives toward the energy crisis and examines the role of a corporate energy policy in minimizing the economic impact of future energy price increases and/or shortages. A plan for a corporate energy policy is proposed.     

The "Positivity Bias" inEvaluations of Public Figures:Evidence Against Instrument Artifacts

The "positivity bias" is a term used to describe the consistentfavorable evaluation of public figures found in surveys overthe past 40 years. This paper explored several possible artifactualexplanations for this bias,focusing on the survey instrumentitself. Two experiments varied the labeling and ordering ofscale endpoints, the affective value of the initial contextevaluated, and the presence or absence of a prestigious jobtitle associated with the nameof the public figure. None ofthe variations produced significantly different levels of positivitythan the standard control condition used in each experiment.RichardR. Lau is a graduate student in social psychology at the Universityof California, Los Angeles. David O. Sears is Professor of Psychologyand Political Science at UCLA. Richard Centers is Professorof Psychology at UCLA. This research was supported in part byGrant #SOC73-09153 A03 from the National Science Foundationto David O. Sears. The authors wish to expess their thanks toMark Williams, who did most of the coding and checking involvedin the survey.     

Marital alternatives and the regulation of sex

The relationship between the occurrence of extramarital affairs (as an indicator of the reduction of normative constraints) and commuter marriage (as an indicator of the reduction of structural constraints) was examined. It was found that when couples set up two separate homes they were not more likely to have affairs than when they shared a single home (or that the reduction of structural constraints does not necessarily lead to the reduction of normative constraints). In contrast to other studies that stress opportunity as a key factor in the occurrence of extramarital affairs, this study suggests that attitudes toward affairs are neither enforced nor weakened by opportunity. Two underlying orientations to marriage, which exist simultaneously in different segments of the population, were uncovered: one involving an attachment to the family as institution and one involving an attachment to the family as companionship.