Managing the impacts of large public programs

This paper is the result of a research project which investigated the impact of the U.S. space program on the American economy. Based on their field studies of past space program impacts, the authors develop several conclusions regarding the overall management and strategic planning of large public programs. In this article, the author outlines a structured approach to strategic planning and evaluation which will aid public program managers to respond to the challenge of impact management.     

The different voices of helping: Gender differences in recounting dilemmas

Carol Gilligan (1977, 1982) has proposed fundamental gender differences. Women typically conceptualize interpersonal dilemmas in terms of people and their relationships, whereas men often orient to dilemmas as practical problems. Although considerable research has explored these gender differences, they have usually been treated as psychological traits or abstract moral orientations. In this article we show how Gilligan’s theory accounts for gender differences when interviewees described their efforts to prevent others from driving under the influence (DUI intervention). This result extends Gilligan's theory by showing how it can account for real life differences between men and women. By demonstrating the relevance of Gilligan's gender differences to everyday life, we lay a foundation for further sociological exploration of her ideas. His interests include divorce, social demography, and research methods. His book on the intergenerational transmission of divorce will be published by Stanford University Press. Jerome Rabow has been a professor of sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles since 1965. He has published more than 100 articles in the areas of drunk driving intervention, gender and money, education, and race relations. He recently completed Tutoring Matters: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About How to Tutor (Temple University Press, 1999), a book based on the tutoring experiences of his UCLA students. Professor Rabow is also a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles. He is also Research Psychologist and co-director of the Substance Abuse Research Center in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Newcomb has published over 200 papers and chapters and has written three books. His research interests include: etiology and the consequences of adolescent drug abuse; structural equation modeling, methodology, and multivariate analysis; human sexuality; health psychology; attitudes and affect related to nuclear war; and cohabitation, marriage, and divorce.     

Entering the Political Elite in Canada: The Case of Minority Women as Parliamentary Candidates and MPs*

Cette recherche analyse les femmes des minorités ethniques comme nouveau groupe social visant à accéder à l'élite politique. Elle est axée sur les conséquences liées à leur appartenance à une «double minorité». L'analyse examine deux modèles de cheminement de carrière qui offrent des caractérisations alternatives quant aux obstacles de recrutement auxquels se heurtent les nouveaux groupes sociaux et qui créent des attentes différentes quant aux ressources détenues par les femmes des minorités, comparativement à celles des groupes plus établis. Les résultats principaux, fondés sur un sondage canadien de 1993 sur les candidats parlementaires et completés par de l'information sur les députés, appuient davantage le modèle de «compensation» et, en général, semblent indiquer que l'inégalité continue de caractériser le processus d'accès à l'élite politique. This study examines minority women as a new social group seeking access to the political elite, emphasizing the consequences of their “double minority” status. The analysis considers two career path models that make alternative characterizations about the recruitment barriers faced by new social groups and that yield different expectations about the resources held by minority women compared with more established groups. The main results, based on a 1993 Canadian survey of parliamentary candidates, supplemented by information on MPs, indicate more support for the “compensation” model and, generally, suggest that inequity continues to characterize the process of political elite access.     

Resistive training and long-term function in older adults

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a 24-month moderate-intensity resistive-training intervention on strength and function in older adults. A repeated-measures experimental research design was employed as a sample of 55 apparently healthy, older, community-dwelling volunteers (30 exercisers- 25 women and 5 men; 25 comparisons- 16 women and 9 men) were evaluated for strength of 5 muscle groups that influence lower extremity movement and physical function. Strength and function were evaluated at 6-month intervals. The findings from this study indicate that a moderate-intensity resistive-training program increases strength in older adults and that the strength benefits are retained for the duration of the intervention. Furthermore, a long-term strength-training program can increase independent-function skills in older adults and might therefore aid in prolonging functional independence.     

Politics,Public Opinion,and Privatization: A Test of Competing Theories in Great Britain

Reforms known collectively as the new public management (NPM) are sweeping governments worldwide. For a movement espousing customer-based service orientations, there is a curious paucity of research on citizens' attitudes toward these reforms. We know little about how citizens feel about them, how they arrive at their conclusions, and how durable their attitudes are likely to be. Using citizen attitudes culled from the 1987--1992 British General Election Panel Survey, we apply multiple regression analysis to begin exploring these issues in one critical area of NPM reform: privatization of state-owned enterprises. We find that the overall predictive power of the five theoretical perspectives culled from public opinion research and operationalized in our model is quite respectable, but that evaluations are too complex for any single explanation of public opinion formation to capture. We also find that British attitudes toward privatization were most associated with cue-taking from leaders and parties, ideological moorings associated with individualism, and income. From these findings we offer a set of hypotheses suitable for testing in future research—most especially, a disparate impact hypothesis—that have important implications for practice and theory-building regarding public opinion and market-based administrative reforms worldwide.     

Effects of Structuring on Students' Perceptions of Career Counseling

This study examines the effects of the use of structuring on participants' impressions of a counselor during an initial career counseling session. A total of 232 undergraduate students viewed a videotape of an initial career counseling session. Both groups observed the identical tape with the exception that one group was additionally shown a brief structuring segment. The 2 groups were compared across the variables of attractiveness, expertness, and trustworthiness as measured by the Counselor Rating Form. The participants were also asked to rate their willingness to see a counselor about a career issue before and after viewing the videotape. Significant differences were found across the dependent measures. Implications of the findings for counselors are discussed.     

Clustering objects on subsets of attributes (with discussion)

Summary.  A new procedure is proposed for clustering attribute value data. When used in conjunction with conventional distance-based clustering algorithms this procedure encourages those algorithms to detect automatically subgroups of objects that preferentially cluster on subsets of the attribute variables rather than on all of them simultaneously. The relevant attribute subsets for each individual cluster can be different and partially (or completely) overlap with those of other clusters. Enhancements for increasing sensitivity for detecting especially low cardinality groups clustering on a small subset of variables are discussed. Applications in different domains, including gene expression arrays, are presented.