School attendance and truancy: a socio-historical account

This paper considers ways in which truancy, as a form of social exclusion, has its origins in the history and politics of compulsory education. Despite widespread concern expressed about declining standards, rising indiscipline, incompetent teachers, outmoded curriculum and mounting truancy in the U.K., it is argued here that such issues are not new. Thus, for the purposes of the paper contemporary research, policy and media hype, premised on ‘discovery’ of declining standards of behaviour and school attendance, is questioned precisely because the level of analysis from which they begin is inadequate. Hence, two interrelated aspects of this phenomenon are considered. The first concerns a socio-historical account of compulsory education as it is mediated by the relations between family, law and economy. Here, questions regarding whose interests state education serves, and the juxtaposing of education vs schooling are considered. The second concerns the relatively recent status of mass schooling and shifting definitions as changing policy, historical, political, economic and legal conditions alter its relationship with parents, pupils and the world of work. In this respect the paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to an inter-agency phenomenon. What the paper seeks to demonstrate is the way truancy touches on a sensitive and deeply embedded social nerve, which has its root in the very history and ethos of compulsory state education and its worth.     

FAMILY STRUCTURES OF ASSAULTIVE ADOLESCENTS

This study compared 17 assaultive adolescents and 12 nonassaultive adolescents on a measure of family structure which assesses the family's perceptions of the authority hierarchy and the amount of closeness and distance between family members. The results demonstrated that the experimental group significantly more often perceived the presence of a reversal in the generational hierarchy of authority. The authors discuss the meaning of these results as they relate to violent teenagers and their family interactions.     

ASYMPTOTIC MINIMAX PROPERTIES OF L-ESTIMATORS OF SCALE

This paper asks whether or not the efficient L-estimator of scale corresponding to the least informative distribution in ε-contamination and Kol-mogorov neighbourhoods of certain distributions possesses the saddlepoint property. This is of interest since the saddlepoint property implies the mini-max property, namely, that the supremum of the relative asymptotic variance of an L-estimator is minimized by the efficient estimator corresponding to that member of the distributional class with minimum Fisher information for scale. Our findings are negative in all cases investigated.     

Discussion: Problems in social indicator development

This paper attempts to draw together the critical comments of five reviewers of U.S. government publications in the field of social indicators. Three of these reviews, by Robert McGinnis, Robert E. Herriott and Monroe Lerner, are included in this issue. David seidman's review has been published in the January 1978 issue of The Annals, while Pamela Ebert-Flatteau's general comments have not been published. The diverse comments of these reviewers are organized into four general problem-areas: conceptual problems, problems of measurement, communication problems, and normative problems.     

Sex differentials in premature death among professionals Part I

This is Part I of a two-part article. A reversal of the sex differential in mortality appears in the 1968–72 death rates of white Wisconsin professionals. Six types of possible measurement error do not account for this finding. Substantially more professional women were not married, and this differential in the distribution of marital status accounted for 37.8 per cent of the women’s deaths. The results linking marital status and mortality are discussed in terms of Durkheim’s concepts of social integration andanomie, and are related to recent empirical studies connecting marriage and parenthood with health and mortality. Part II will further analyse the data in terms of cause of death and occupational variables.     

The Effects of a Goal Setting Intervention on Productivity and Persistence in an Analogue Work Task

The authors of this study sought to quantify the beneficial effect of goal setting on work performance, and to characterize the persistence or deterioration of goal-directed behavior over time. Twenty-six participants completed a computer-based data entry task. Performance was measured during an initial baseline, a goal setting intervention that consisted of either a high, unattainable goal (high goal condition) or a low, attainable goal (low goal condition), followed by a return to baseline, and a second goal setting intervention (the alternate goal to the first goal). In the fifth condition, each participant was given the choice to work in either the high or low goal condition. Greater performance increases were reliably observed during the high goal condition than during the low goal condition, but patterns of persistence or deterioration varied across participants. The implications of the findings for the development and understanding of goal setting interventions in the workplace are explored.