Re-Imagining Family Therapy: Choosing the Metaphors We Live By

This paper examines the influence of dominant metaphors in everyday and professional language, and relates this theme to emerging concerns with the historically dominant metaphor in family therapy: the family viewed as a system. Increasing interest is being shown in the development of alternative metaphors, especially those based on aspects of language and literary practice e.g. conversation, discourse, rhetoric, narrative and text. However, the fundamental question remains: how do we choose the metaphors we wish to live by? To address this question, a journey into postmodernist cultural studies is made and the concept of the ethical-poetical imagination is borrowed as a criterion for comparison and choice. From this vantage point, preferences for the metaphorical future of ‘postmodernist’ family therapy are expressed and explained.     

Eye-Tracking Data: New Insights on Response Order Effects and Other Cognitive Shortcuts in Survey Responding

Survey researchers since Cannell have worried that respondents may take various shortcuts to reduce the effort needed to complete a survey. The evidence for such shortcuts is often indirect. For instance, preferences for earlier versus later response options have been interpreted as evidence that respondents do not read beyond the first few options. This is really only a hypothesis, however, that is not supported by direct evidence regarding the allocation of respondent attention. In the current study, we used a new method to more directly observe what respondents do and do not look at by recording their eye movements while they answered questions in a Web survey. The eye-tracking data indicate that respondents do in fact spend more time looking at the first few options in a list of response options than those at the end of the list; this helps explain their tendency to select the options presented first regardless of their content. In addition, the eye-tracking data reveal that respondents are reluctant to invest effort in reading definitions of survey concepts that are only a mouse click away or paying attention to initially hidden response options. It is clear from the eye-tracking data that some respondents are more prone to these and other cognitive shortcuts than others, providing relatively direct evidence for what had been suspected based on more conventional measures.     

Ethics and Choosing Appropriate Means to an End: Problems with Coal Mine and Nuclear Workplace Safety

A common problem in ethics is that people often desire an end but fail to take the means necessary to achieve it. Employers and employees may desire the safety end mandated by performance standards for pollution control, but they may fail to employ the means, specification standards, necessary to achieve this end. This article argues that current (de jure) performance standards, for lowering employee exposures to ionizing radiation, fail to promote de facto worker welfare, in part because employers and employees do not follow the necessary means (practices known as specification standards) to achieve the end (performance standards) of workplace safety. To support this conclusion, the article argues that (1) safety requires attention to specification, as well as performance, standards; (2) coal-mine specification standards may fail to promote performance standards; (3) nuclear workplace standards may do the same; (4) choosing appropriate means to the end of safety requires attention to the ways uncertainties and variations in exposure may mask violations of standards; and (5) correcting regulatory inattention to differences between de jure and de facto is necessary for achievement of ethical goals for safety.     

AN EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF UNCERTAINTY IN THE ENVIRONMENT TO INFORMATION USED BY DECISION MAKERS*

This paper discusses the relationship between uncertainty in a decision making environment and the desired characteristics of information used for decision making. The work is aimed at providing a better understanding of the variables that affect the design of Management Information Systems. An experiment was conducted using an inventory simulator. The subjects could decide on inventory control variables and the amount and type of information to be used in monitoring system performance. The demand for inventory was an external random variable under the control of the experimenter. The experiment investigated how different demand variances affected the decision information used, the decisions made, and the resulting decision effectiveness (cost.) It was found that decision review frequency was not affected by demand variability. However, age and degree of summary of information used were greatly affected. Subjects exposed to high variability used data with a shorter history and a higher level of detail than those exposed to low variability. It was also found that the number of reports used increased from the low to middle variance group, then decreased at very high variance. Subjects tended to “give-up” on their information system at high variance, and they relied on additional safety stock to prevent frequent stockouts. Finally, the correlation between the information used and decision effectiveness as measured by cost was low. This result was contrary to the subjects' beliefs that more and better information produced “better” decisions. It indicates that although variability may strongly affect preferences for different types of information, the information used may not in turn affect decision performance.     

RETURN ON INVESTMENT AS A CRITERION FOR INVENTORY MODELS

In the past most inventory formulations have utilized cost minimization or profit maximization as an optimizing criterion. When viewed from the standpoint of the owner or investor, maximizing the return on investment (ROI) is an appropriate criterion for many types of inventories. This paper proposes ROI as a criterion for inventory models and derives optimal reorder rules for some common assumptions. An economic order quantity that differs greatly from the traditional formulas is discussed. The paper also enumerates the conditions under which ROI is an appropriate criterion and contrasts it to the traditional cost minimization and profit maximization criteria.