Attitudes To Marriage Among Young Tertiary–Educated Women

This study explores the attitudes to marriage and child-bearing held by women graduates born 1957–62. It is argued that this is a group of women for whom economic and cultural pressures to enter marriage are low, due to changes in social structures and the availability of a feminist philosophy that provides an alternative value system to patriarchy. With extrinsic pressures to marry so reduced, what factors determine the marriage and family decisions that they make? Interviews with a small sample of these women provide some strong pointers. Marriage at an appropriate age and to an appropriate partner was seen as providing substantially more benefits than costs. Delaying marriage until personal identity had been achieved was considered very important, with independent living, work and overseas travel contributing to identity formation. Supportiveness and egalitarianism were considered crucial qualities in a spouse, and those who were married had tended to marry men who were as or more ambitious for their wives than for themselves. An overall attitude of entitlement-with-organisation emerged. The increase in socioeconomic differences among women-in-their-own-right is discussed.     

‘The Bang’ and SNAP: Controversial Issues in Schools

Over the last few years there has been a series of ‘moral panics’ over the introduction of Peace Studies into educational institutions. This case study examines the recent public controversy over an educational play call The Bang presented in secondary schools in New South Wales, and the associated attacks on student interest groups called Students for Nuclear Awareness and Peace (SNAP). The case study raises questions about power relations in the social construction of ‘controversy’ and ‘objectivity’ and the strategic dilemmas these imply for progressive teaching about social issues in schools.     

PARADOX AND ORTHODOX: FOLIE À DEUX?*

In the recent family therapy literature, therapists have been cautioned to use paradoxical looking techniques as either a last resort, or else not to use such actions at all with specific problems. The paper argues that these stances arise from a rigid adherence to a set of orthodox views from which these actions appear contradictory. Similar to family systems, when such orthodox therapy systems do not question or alter their own premises in the face of contradiction, they tend to attribute either badness or madness to the action and either try to exorcise the badness, or banish the action. The literature which either prescribes “paradox as a last resort,” or which proscribes it altogether is reviewed and critiqued. Walter Buckley's process/adaptive system model is recommended as a positive alternative view from which such previously pardoxical actions may often be elected as a logical and effective first choice.     

Examining the link between social responsibility and decision styles

The paper examines the factors that influence socially responsible decision making by individuals. The study found four social responsibility styles: Playing it Safe, Weather The Storm, Problem to Solve, and Hope it Goes Away. These styles describe individuals on the basis of decision style, propensity for risk, and coping style. The styles explain why people with different values might come to the same decision in the same circumstances.     

Effectiveness of student assistance programs in Nebraska schools.

BACKGROUND: This study investigated whether Nebraska schools with Student Assistance Programs (SAP) are associated with reduced adolescent alcohol use and a higher level of academic achievement than students from schools without a SAP. METHODS: In 1992, the Toward a Drug Free Nebraska (TDFN) survey was administered to 3,454 students in grades seven to twelve at eighty-three Nebraska schools. A second survey, the TDFN "team activity report" collected from each school's team, the presence of a SAP (n = 34 schools) or absence of a SAP (n = 49 schools). Student responses for alcohol use and academic achievements were linked with the presence of a SAP through use of a school identification number on both surveys. RESULTS: Students from schools with a SAP reported a lower use of alcohol in the last thirty days, compared with students from schools without a SAP program (p < 0.05), and they also reported a significant difference in academic achievement (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: While this study used post hoc analysis of data, the results suggest lower alcohol use and higher academic achievement among students from SAP schools. Given SAPs' popularity, these trends suggest that further research should be conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of student assistance programs.     

Dangerous Knowledge: The Political,Personal, and Epistemological Promise of Feminist Research in Management and Organization Studies

Feminism is a theoretical perspective and social movement that seeks to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, sexist inequality and oppression. Yet feminist research remains marginal in the most prestigious management and organization studies (MOS) journals, as defined by the Financial Times 50 (FT50) list. Based on a review of how feminism is framed in these journals (1990–2018), we identify three overlapping categories of how feminism is represented: (i) as a conceptual resource which is used to address specific topics; (ii) as an empirical category associated with the study of specific types of organization or organizing practice; and, rarely, (iii) as a methodology for producing knowledge. While feminist knowledge exists beyond these parameters, such as in the journal Gender, Work & Organization, we suggest that the relative absence of explicitly feminist scholarship in the most prestigious MOS journals reflects an epistemic oppression which arises from the threat that feminism presents to established ways of knowing. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work, we use the ‘sweaty concept’ of dangerous knowledge to show how feminism positions knowledge as personal, introducing a radical form of researcher subjectivity which relies on the acknowledgment of uncertainty. We conclude by calling for the epistemic oppression of feminist scholarship to be recognized and redressed so the potential of feminism as a way of knowing about organizations and management can be realized. This, we argue, would enable feminist research praxis in MOS to develop as an alternative location of, in bell hooks' term, healing that challenges the main/malestream.     

School-Related Social Support and Adolescents’ School-Related Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction at School

Grounded in Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT; Deci and Ryan in Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum, New York, 1985; Psychol Inq 11(4):227–268. doi: 10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01, 2000; Ryan and Deci in Am Psychol 55(1):68–78. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68, 2000), the present study mainly aimed to (1) test a theoretically-based model proposing that the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs at school mediates the relationship between school-related social support (i.e., teacher support and classmate support) and school-related subjective well-being and (2) explore the invariance of the model across gender and age groups. A total of 1476 Chinese adolescents (males = 712; early adolescents = 676; Mage = 15.40) completed a multi-measure questionnaire tapping the targeted variables. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypotheses. Results indicated that school-related social support (i.e., teacher support and classmate support) related statistically significantly to adolescents’ school-related subjective well-being. Furthermore, a multiple-mediators analysis indicated that autonomy, competence and relatedness needs satisfaction at school partially mediated the relation between teacher support and school-related subjective well-being, and fully mediated the relation between classmate support and school-related subjective well-being. Lastly, the results supported partial invariance of the model with respect to gender and age groups. Limitations of the study are considered and applied considerations to improve adolescents’ school-related subjective well-being are discussed.     

Bayesian adaptive two-stage design for determining person-time in Phase II clinical trials with Poisson data

Adaptive clinical trial designs can often improve drug-study efficiency by utilizing data obtained during the course of the trial. We present a novel Bayesian two-stage adaptive design for Phase II clinical trials with Poisson-distributed outcomes that allows for person-observation-time adjustments for early termination due to either futility or efficacy. Our design is motivated by the adaptive trial from [9 V. Sambucini, A Bayesian predictive two-stage design for Phase II clinical trials, Stat. Med. 27 (2008), pp. 1199–1224. doi: 10.1002/sim.3021[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]], which uses binomial data. Although many frequentist and Bayesian two-stage adaptive designs for count data have been proposed in the literature, many designs do not allow for person-time adjustments after the first stage. This restriction limits flexibility in the study design. However, our proposed design allows for such flexibility by basing the second-stage person-time on the first-stage observed-count data. We demonstrate the implementation of our Bayesian predictive adaptive two-stage design using a hypothetical Phase II trial of Immune Globulin (Intravenous).