Women in the police: Integration or separation?

This study reports on the incorporation of female officers into the Atlanta Bureau of Police Services which until recently had an all-male occupational subculture. Fieldwork techniques included one-year of participant observation and the structured interviewing of 50 police officers.Findings indicated that women have been acculturated into the behavior and attitudes characteristic of the male police group. Specifically, they express increased cynicism and distrust of the public, and their behavior is abrupt with an unsympathetic demeanor. Conversely, women police officers have not been accepted as equally capable as male police officers by the latter. This discriminatory reaction results in a male overprotective attitude which is expressed in male domination of both detective and uniformed officers' work. These findings are congruent with the data from other studies which examined occupations in which women were numerically rare (tokens).The author concludes that because females emulate the male officers' ethos and behavior, and because they have not been accepted as equals in the police group, they have not greatly changed the male subculture of policing.     

Perceived income adequacy and selected financial management practices among families in Chile and Mexico

The purpose of this study was to explore the perceived adequacy of families' incomes and selected financial management practices (food budgetin debt, saving) in two Latin American countries. An interview survey was used to gather socioeconomic and demographic information from 537 families in Chile and Mexico. There were major differences between Chile and Mexico in the income adequacy responses and also major differences within countries between income levels. Implications of the findings for policy makers and curriculum planners who work in developing countries with inflationary conditions and income inadequacies are discussed.     

The use of constructive-developmental theory to advance the understanding of leadership

Constructive-developmental theory is a stage theory of adult development that focuses on the growth and elaboration of a person's ways of understanding the self and the world. In this article we review how the constructive-developmental frameworks of Kegan [Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press], Torbert [Torbert, W. R. (1987). Managing the corporate dream: Restructuring for long-term success. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin.], and Kohlberg [Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive developmental approach to socialization. In D. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization: Theory and research. New York: Rand McNally] have been applied in the theoretical and empirical literature on leadership and management. Although the literature has produced a number of propositions, the notion that a leader's order of development should impact his or her leadership effectiveness or managerial performance has generated the most research. We found mixed support for this proposition as well as a number of limitations in the research in general. To have a greater impact on the leadership field, constructive-developmental theory needs to generate more robust research, to link more clearly with on-going streams of leadership research, and to explore the contribution of aspects of the theory beyond individual order of development.     

The changing sociological construct of the family

Recent attempts to announce the death of the family as a useful analytical category for sociologists are rebutted as being premature. The tendency to view household relations as family relations or, indeed, couple or gender relations as family relations seems to have arisen in the early 1970s. Earlier attempts to construct an empirically grounded analysis of family relationships have been curiously neglected. An account of one family on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent provides some illustrative ethnography on both the positive uses of family members-particularly siblings - and on the way the social boundaries of this family are constructed by its members. It is argued that the family is best understood as a system of relationships that change over time. There is a curious lack of systematic ethnography of contemporary family relationships so that what is taught to students as the sociology of the family may be widely at variance with their own personal experience. This may be partly a result of relying too much on random surveys of households at the expense of detailed explorations of existing patterns of social relationships and social meanings. Developing theoretical arguments on the basis of inadequate or inappropriate ethnography is evidently a dangerous and misleading exercise.     

The role of the family therapist in supportive services to families with handicapped children

The family therapist can play a critical role in assisting families of handicapped children develop positive functioning patterns. In this paper the author identifies a number of typical interactional difficulties found in these families together with the unique challenges they place before the family therapist and strategies that she has found to be effective in working with them on their relationship problems.     

Self Actualization in Marital Enrichment

The study attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of the Pairing Enrichment Program (PEP), a marriage enrichment program, in enhancing self-actualization. Shostrom's Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) was administered to an experimental group of married couples immediately prior to participating in PEP. A waiting list control group completed the POI at the same time. Three weeks later, following the completion of PEP for the experimental group, the POI was again administered to both groups. An analysis of co-variance was performed to test the effects of gender, group, and the interaction of these two factors on change in self-actualization (Post-POI minus Pre-POI), adjusting for six co-variables: Education of each, age of each, number of years married, and number of children. The results indicated that 1) being husband or wife had no significant effect on one's level of self-actualization, and that 2) the change in level of self-actualization was significantly greater (Positive Direction) for PEP participants than for non-PEP participants on the "I" and "C" scales of the POI