Studying and Measuring Civility: A Framework, Trends and Scale

Four essential questions for the study of civility involve developing a definition of the term, determining its effects, establishing trends, and predicting the consequences of civility. A framework for studying it includes the actors, their gender, situations and settings, occupational role requirements, the cultural imperatives defining civility, and the processes through which it is learned. Objective measures of civility in the United States show its variability and change. Four items in the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS) are combined to form a scale of civility. Correlates of the scale show that civility does not differ by gender, color, or region. It is weakly associated with income but is significantly associated with education, occupation, and health. Age, education, and health provide a predictive model of civility. Anger, an emotional aspect of interpersonal exchange, reveals reactions characteristic of civil behavior: waiting for anger to pass before responding, trying to forget the incident, not thinking of revenge, not walking away from the situation, and not yelling or hitting. Hypotheses are proposed for further study that involves age, marital status, occupation, health, and emotional control.     

Understanding Unemployment Across California Counties

Unemployment rates differ widely and persistently across counties. This article examines equilibrium forces related to this geographic disparity with a focus on California. We show that although seasonal variation in employment can account for some of the differences, it cannot explain the total variation. Factors such as educational attainment, age, and gender appear to be strongly related to unemployment differences. Individuals living in higher‐unemployment areas also have a lower propensity to migrate. Because migration is usually considered to be the main equilibrating force, this evidence helps further explain why unemployment rates across counties are persistently different.     

The Psychological Adjustment of Transracial Adoptees: An Application of the Cultural–Racial Identity Model

In response to the need for increased understanding of the identity process of transracial adoptees, the Cultural–Racial Identity Model (A. L. Baden & R. J. Steward, 1995) was developed; however, the model has yet to be empirically validated. The model allows distinctions to be made between racial identity and cultural identity, resulting in 16 proposed identities. Identities are based on the degrees to which individuals (1) have knowledge of, awareness of, competence within, and comfort with their own racial group's culture, their parents' racial group's culture, and multiple cultures, and (2) are comfortable with their racial group membership and with those belonging to their own racial group, their parents' racial group, and multiple racial groups. Four dimensions of the model were determined for study: the Adoptee Culture Dimension, the Parental Culture Dimension, the Adoptee Race Dimension, and the Parental Race Dimension. In this study, the Cultural–Racial Identity of transracial adoptees was assessed by a modified version of the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM; J. S. Phinney, 1992). Psychological adjustment was assessed by the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; L. R. Derogatis & P. A. Cleary, 1977). The sample consisted of 51 transracial adoptees who completed mail survey questionnaires. The exploratory findings supported the Cultural–Racial Identity Model by demonstrating that the modified version of the MEIM successfully yielded variation in the potential Cultural–Racial Identities that the transracial adoptees reported. Findings also did not yield support for differences in psychological adjustment among transracial adoptees having different Cultural–Racial Identities. The implications that the results have for counseling practice and social policy were discussed.     

Factors Associated with Having Flextime: A Focus on Married Workers

To examine flexible work scheduling of married workers a conceptual framework was developed and tested using the 1997 Current Population Survey Work Schedules Supplement. Odds of flextime use were higher for married males, non-Hispanic whites, those with relatively higher levels of education and income, those with a preschool aged child, residents of the Midwest or West (as compared with the South), managers or professionals, and employees of the federal government.     

Citizenship,Pluralism, and Modern Public Space

The article begins with the realist assumption in political science that posits that political violence and chaos occurs in the absence of the state, and that the international system is congenitally anarchic. Using the Y2K problem and the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York as two instances of violent political phenomena within global modernity, this article examines notions of citizenship, pluralism, and their relationships with modern public space through the lens of 'public disaster' scenarios in which the breakdown of centralized systems of power tends to lead to chaos. However, public disasters also appear to create the opposite effect of bonding communities together in the face of adversity that leads to greater social cohesion rather than the breakdown of social institutions. The article tries to resolve this apparent enigma through several theories of public space, democracy, and civil society.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.     

Organisationsentwicklung als Thema von Erwachsenenbildung und Supervisionscurricula

Zusammenfassung  Der Beitrag beschreibt Planung, Verlauf und abschlie?ende Beurteilung eines gruppendynamischen Seminars, in dem für angehende Supervisorinnen und Supervisoren das Thema Organisations-Entwicklung dargestellt und vermittelt werden sollte. Ausgangspunkt war die Kl?rung des Inhaltsraums von Organisations-Entwicklung als geplantem sozialen Wandel, der auf sozialwissenschaftlicher Grundlage zielgerichtet, strategisch und mit Zeitperspektive in der Zusammenarbeit zwischen externer und interner Sach-, Prozess- und Entscheidungskompetenz durchgeführt wird. Als Ziele des Seminars wurden festgelegt, Organisations-Entwicklung als sozialwissenschaftliches Instrument zu begründen, Organisations-Entwicklung-Schritte zu konzipieren und sie kollegial zu kommunizieren. Darüber hinaus wurden Qualit?tskriterien für das Seminar formuliert: Praxisn?he, Kl?rung des Inhaltsraum Selbstorganisation, Selbststeuerung, Ressourcenaktivierung, Konfliktregulierung, Analyse des Gruppenprozesses, Nutzung von Feldkompetenz und Verhaltensmodellen, Etablierung von Feedbackschleifen, Koordination und Synergie, kollegialer Austausch und Kl?rung pers?nlicher Organisations-Entwicklungs-Fragen. Bausteine und Lernorte des Seminars waren das Plenum, die Lernpartnerschaft, das OE-Team, die Beobachterfunktion, die Tagesreflexion, die Sitzung Frage und Antwort, die Darstellung von Praxisf?llen, das Plenum-Feinsteuerung, die Analyse der Arbeitsprozesse des OE-Teams sowie Transfer und Auswertung. Der tats?chliche Verlauf des Seminars wird aus der Perspektive des Leiters kommentiert. Anhand von Verlaufsbeobachtungen und Teilnehmer?u?erungen wird der Eindruck begründet, dass diese Form des Vorgehens als lernintensiv, autonomief?rdernd und für die zu erwerbende Supervisionskompetenz als praxisrelevant betrachtet werden kann.

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This article describes the plantification, progress and final evaluation of a group-dynamic seminar for future supervisors in which the topic organization development was presented and introduced. The content of organization development was first defined as a planned social change which is executed based on social sciences in a goal-oriented, strategic way which considers the time perspective of the cooperation between external and internal specialised-, process- and decision competence. Goals of the seminar were to justify that organisation development is a social science tool, to plan organization development steps and to communicate them to peer seminar participants. Further more, the following quality criteria for the seminar were formulated: practice orientation, definition of self-organisation content, self regulation, resources activation, conflict regulation, group process analysis, field competence and behaviour models usage, feedback establishment, coordination and synergy, mutual peer exchange and finding answers to personal questions about organization development. The building blocks and learn places of the seminar were the plenary sessions, the learning partnership, the od-teams, the observer function, the day analysis, the questions and answers session, the case study presentation, the analysis of the work processes as well as transfer and evaluation. The progression of the seminar is commented from the point of view of the seminar leader. Progress observations and participant’s feedback justify the impression that this way to conceptualise provides an intensive learning experience, supports autonomy and provides relevant and practical supervision competence.

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J?rg Fengler ist Professor der Psychologie an der Universit?t zu K?ln, Heilp?dagogische Fakult?t. Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind u.a. P?dagogische und Klinische Psychologie. Er ist Herausgeber dieser Zeitschrift.     

Bilingual Education Models in Latvia: A view from Belarus

In this article, we look at several issues relating to bilingual education in Latvia, as prescribed by the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science. We examine these issues from the perspective of the past and present situation in Belarus, Russia and the former Soviet Union. It is clear, in our view, that bilingual offers both advantages, but also various drawbacks if it is not implemented in an appropriate way. This applies to both the societal and the personal (cognitive level). Movement towards the dominant languages (in this case Latvian) needs to be viewed as a gradual process. Although each generation of newcomers might start with a passive knowledge of the dominant (second) language, this changes into a fluent grasp of the second language across generations. The original native language will lose its dominance in this process.     

Input-output evaluation of rural development: a forestry-centred application

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of forestry in the rural economy of Scotland. The Generation of Regional Input-Output Tables (GRIT) technique is applied to the estimation of input-output tables for rural Scotland. This is followed by a forestry-centred multiplier analysis. The results suggest that the forestry planting and harvesting sectors offer great potential for improving economic activity. However, their backward linkages with other rural industries seem to be limited. On the other hand, the backward linkages of wood-processing industries with the rest of the economy are strong. From this analysis, it is concluded that the joint development of forestry and wood-processing industries would promote economic development in rural Scotland.     

Physiologically Based Liver Modeling and Risk Assessment

Because of the inherent complexity of biological systems, there is often a choice between a number of apparently equally applicable physiologically based models to describe uptake and metabolism processes in toxicology or risk assessment. These models may fit the particular data sets of interest equally well, but may give quite different parameter estimates or predictions under different (extrapolated) conditions. Such competing models can be discriminated by a number of methods, including potential refutation by means of strategic experiments, and their ability to suitably incorporate all relevant physiological processes. For illustration, three currently used models for steady-state hepatic elimination--the venous equilibration model, the parallel tube model, and the distributed sinusoidal perfusion model--are reviewed and compared with particular reference to their application in the area of risk assessment. The ability of each of the models to describe and incorporate such physiological processes as protein binding, precursor-metabolite relations and hepatic zones of elimination, capillary recruitment, capillary heterogeneity, and intrahepatic shunting is discussed. Differences between the models in hepatic parameter estimation, extrapolation to different conditions, and interspecies scaling are discussed, and criteria for choosing one model over the others are presented. In this case, the distributed model provides the most general framework for describing physiological processes taking place in the liver, and has so far not been experimentally refuted, as have the other two models. These simpler models may, however, provide useful bounds on parameter estimates and on extrapolations and risk assessments.