ON THE VALUE OF INTEGRATING APPROACHES TO FAMILY THERAPY

This paper considers the strengths and weaknesses of an integrative approach to family therapy. An integrative approach can explain a broad range of human behavior, can shape intervention strategy in a manner appropriate to each case, can allow for treatment of a broad client population, can combine the strengths of each of the specific approaches, can promote objectivity in selection of strategies of change, and can permit easy expansion of the repertoire of techniques. The potential pitfalls basically revolve around the complexity of practice; in particular, the possibility of inconsistency of approach. With care, these pitfalls can be avoided. Integration is viewed as a viable alternative to school-specific practice in family therapy.     

The Tenant Labor Market and Lynching in the South: A Test of Split Labor Market Theory*

Split labor market theory was originally advanced as a general approach explaining ethnic antagonism as the result of class-based interests. In this investigation, the threat to “high-priced” (white) labor from “cheap” (black) labor within the farm tenancy system of the postbellum South is examined as an underlying cause of the lynching of blacks by whites. Supporting this interpretation, the ratio of black to white tenants in southern counties, a measure of the level of economic threat to high-priced labor, is shown to be a strong predictor of lynching rates in the Cotton South. Findings for the Non-Cotton South, however, are inconsistent with theoretical expectations. We conclude that racial violence linked to economic competition between working-class whites and blacks was limited to that part of the South dominated by the plantation system.     

Bias in transition-specific survival and movement probabilities estimated using capture-recapture data

Transition probabilities can be estimated when capture-recapture data are available from each stratum on every capture occasion using a conditional likelihood approach with the Arnason-Schwarz model. To decompose the fundamental transition probabilities into derived parameters, all movement probabilities must sum to 1 and all individuals in stratum r at time i must have the same probability of survival regardless of which stratum the individual is in at time i + 1. If movement occurs among strata at the end of a sampling interval, survival rates of individuals from the same stratum are likely to be equal. However, if movement occurs between sampling periods and survival rates of individuals from the same stratum are not the same, estimates of stratum survival can be confounded with estimates of movement causing both estimates to be biased. Monte Carlo simulations were made of a three-sample model for a population with two strata using SURVIV. When differences were created in transition-specific survival rates for survival rates from the same stratum, relative bias was <2% in estimates of stratum survival and capture rates but relative bias in movement rates was much higher and varied. The magnitude of the relative bias in the movement estimate depended on the relative difference between the transition-specific survival rates and the corresponding stratum survival rate. The direction of the bias in movement rate estimates was opposite to the direction of this difference. Increases in relative bias due to increasing heterogeneity in probabilities of survival, movement and capture were small except when survival and capture probabilities were positively correlated within individuals.     

Why a Mental Health Clinic Should Avoid Family Therapy*

Describing the unsettling effects of adding family therapy procedures to the offerings of a mental health clinic, the author argues that changes in the theory of causation, diagnosis, therapeutic technique, and clinical training are required in order to make such an innovation. Consequences are likely to include disorientation of the staff, radically changed administrative procedures, and others, including service to larger numbers of people and better treatment outcome. Editor.     

The Sale of Two Cities: A Semiotic Comparison of Disneyland with Marriott's Great America

Much is revealed through the contrast of two related but divergent forms. In this essay, Elizabeth Mechlingand Jay Mechlingcontrast Disneyland with a later but more loosely themed park, Marriott's Great America in Santa Clara, California. Using the perspectives and methods of semiotics in Louis Marin's Marxist reading, this essay asks, “What are the stories that Disneyland and Marriott's Great America tell?…the ways in which popular culture both teaches and evokes stories that ‘think themselves’ in our minds.” These two parks, though allied in the theme format and rooted in a common bourgeois capitalist culture, are found to promote very different attitudes and values.