Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs

This article reports on the often suspected but rarely researchedtendency of survey respondents to give opinions on topics towhich they have given little or no thought. The findings, basedon a question about a fictitious public affairs issue, do showthat the magnitude of the problem is substantial. But the dataalso demonstrate that this phenomenon does not represent simplerandom error, reflecting instead basic social-psychologicaldispositions which can be elicited, unwittingly, in the contextof the interview.     

Including Families in Residential Work: Educational and Agency Tasks

Correspondence to Stephen Casson, Social Services Department, Civic Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8PA, England. Summary This paper identifies obstacles to the inclusion of familiesby residential establishments. A review of the literature indicatesthat the notion of including families is a worthwhile consideration,but that few programmes have committed themselves with sufficientenergies over time to test the worth of this assumption. Tobring families centre stage a set of obligations is proposedto managers and certain principles from the family dynamicsliterature are identified for inclusion in the training curriculumof residential workers.     

WHERE DOES ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT REALLY COME FROM? CONSTITUTIONAL RULE AMONG THE CONTEMPORARY SIOUX AND APACHE

Governments are public goods that provide the organizational and legal structures by which societies arrange and enforce "rules of the game" that enable divisions of labor, exchange, and collective action. We argue that shared, pre-constitutional cultural norms of political legitimacy among rational individuals provide the foundations of effective self-government. The performance of contemporary Apache and Sioux economies on Indian reservations governed by common federally imposed constitutions is examined to test the framework. Unlike the impoverished Sioux, the relatively successful Apaches are found to have pre-existing political norms that (serendipidously) match the structure of their formal constitution.     

Social Inquiry Reports in One Juvenile Court: An Examination

Summary The paper begins by briefly outlining the current debate overthe usage of social inquiry reports in the juvenile court, particularlywith regard to the effect that their recommendations can haveupon the lives of young people appearing in that court. It thendiscusses the findings of research carried out by the authorinto the social inquiry reports presented to one juvenile court.In particular it examines the contents and format of these reports,the effect that concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘justice’have upon the recommendations of these reports, and the differencesthat exist in the reports presented by the probation and socialservices. It concludes that there is a pressing need for a revisionin the presentation of these reports to the court as no consistentstandard of information is being offered. It also argues thatit is time to reassess the role of treatment in the juvenilejustice system, in the light of this and other recent research,and to separate more clearly the components of welfare and justicewithin this system.     

The Use of a Modified Repertory Grid Technique for Assessing the Self-Concept of Children in Local Authority Foster Care

Dr. C. Hicks, School of Continuing Studies, University of Birmingham, P.O. Box 363, Birmingham, B15 2TT. Summary Two studies were carried out using a modified form of the repertorygrid technique to investigate the self-esteem of children inLocal Authority Care. The aim of the first study was to comparethe self-perceptions and self-esteem of Children in Local AuthorityCare with a group of matched controls. Two groups of ten subjectswere given a modified repertory grid task, which involved presentingeight pictorial elements and eight bipolar constructs, and askingthe subjects to rank order the elements according to their perceptionof each construct. The results indicated that children in Local Authority Carea) have significantly lower self-esteem scores (t=2.25, p<0.025)and b) have significantly fewer positive constructs about themselvesoverall (X²=7.07. p<0.01). The second study used a correlational design and looked at therelationship between the number of caretaker changes and self-esteem,in a single further group of eleven children in Local AuthorityCare. The same technique for assessing self-esteem was used as inStudy 1. The results showed a significant negative correlation(r=–0.638, p<0.025) suggesting that the more movesa child experiences, the lower the self-esteem is likely tobe. The results of both these studies are discussed in terms oftheir implications for Local Authority Child Care policy andfor the use of the repertory grid technique as a procedure forassessing self-esteem.     

COHORT TRENDS IN ATTITUDES ABOUT LAW AND ORDER: WHO'S LEADING THE CONSERVATIVE WAVE?

Aging is commonly assumed to be associated with the adoptionof increasingly conservative social and political attitudes.Empirical tests of this assumption have provided little support,but most analyses have focused on attitude domains where publicopinion was shifting in a liberal direction. Using three itemsabout law and order, a domain marked by conservative trends,this paper evaluates the aging-conservatism hypothesis withdata drawn from 18 national surveys covering the period 1959–85.Attitude changes in four cohorts are analyzed with Tay lor'shierarchical goodness-of-fit procedures for evaluating trendsin public opinion. The findings show that each of the cohortshas participated in the shift toward more conservative opinionson law and order issues, and that either constant or zero differencescharacterize the trends in percentage differences between theoldest and the other cohorts. In the absence of differentialrates of change, we conclude that older cohorts are no morelikely than younger cohorts to adopt conservative law and orderattitudes and that period effects are influencing each of thecohorts equally.     

INFORMATION AND SEARCH: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO THE THEORY OF MINIMUM WAGES

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in a concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.     

TWO-PART PRICING FOR A MULTI-PRODUCT MONOPOLIST

This paper examines profit-maximizing multi-part pricing arrangements by multi-product monopolists. The results indicate that prices set by such firms will deviate from the marginal-cost-pricing efficiency norm when multi-part tariffs can be set on only a subset of the firm's product line. Per unit prices will be set above marginal cost when the monopolist sells goods that are substitutes, while per unit prices for complements may be set above or below marginal cost. In either case, the pricing strategy will involve increasing the demand for goods on which an entry fee can beset.     

Uncovering Rape: The Watchdog Press and the Limits of Agenda Setting

This article reports the findings of the second in a seriesof field experiments on the agenda-setting effects of news mediainvestigative reports. The authors used a pretest-posttest quasi-experimentaldesign to assess the impact of a newspaper investigative seriesabout rape on a randomly selected group of Chicagoans and apurposive sample of policy makers. Unlike the first study, theseries had a minimal impact on public opinion and policy making,but affected profoundly the subsequent newspaper coverage ofrape.