Alternative Question Forms for Attitude Scale Questions in Telephone Interviews

The absence of visual aids in telephone interviews has led investigatorsto seek methods for asking questions which are commonly accompaniedby aids in personal interviews. This study experimentally comparedtwo approaches to asking seven-point scale attitude questionsin a national (N = 4,300) telephone health survey. A randomhalf-sample received the attitude questions as single-step numericalselection tasks. The questions were administered to the otherhalf-sample in two stages, the first asking for a general verbalstatement of attitude and the second asking for a more detailedspecification. The two question forms produced comparable resultsin univariate distributions. Items administered with the one-stepform showed slightly higher intercorrelations. This study representsone step in the process of empirically testing data collectionprocedures which have been deemed necessary in the rich folkloreof survey research. Overall, the results show more comparabilitythan might be anticipated, given the multiple differences betweenthe forms.     

Sex Differences in the Characteristics of Members Lost to a Longitudinal Panel: A Speculative Research Note

A nine-year follow-up of former adolescents reveals sex differencesin the relative deviance and drug involvement of individualslost to the panel in young adulthood. As expected, men who werereinterviewed were less deviant than the noninterviewed, whilethe opposite was observed among women. Specification by raceindicates that the female pattern applies especially to nonwhites,but all women who are reinterviewed, irrespective of race, areno less deviant than the nonreinterviewed. The paradoxical findingfor females may result from changing marital status in thatparticular period of the life cycle and an inverse relationshipbetween delinquency and marriage.     

A study of expediting practices in manufacturing firms

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of one of the most common yet least optimized production management practices—expediting. The intention of this study was to generate quantitative insight into issues that underlie expediting decision making, such as the relative frequency of various causes of expediting, commonly used expediting strategies and tactics, and the interaction of expediting and the production scheduling environment in use. The study centered around a survey sent to 1768 manufacturing staff personnel, with 182 usable questionnaires returned. It is hoped that the data and conclusions presented in this paper will be of use to production management researchers who are interested in expediting as a managerial decision.     

Do worker absences affect productivity? The case of teachers

This article studies the impact of teacher absences on education. Using data spanning three academic years about 285 teachers and 8,631 predominantly economically disadvantaged students from a United States urban school district, it tests assumptions that a substantial portion of teachers' absences is discretionary and that these absences reduce productivity – students' mathematics scores. Since absent teachers are typically replaced by less qualified substitutes, instructional intensity and consistency may decline: ten days of teacher absence reduce students' achievement score by about 3.3 per cent of a standard deviation – enough to lower some students' designation in the state proficiency system and, thus, their motivation to succeed.     

Tocqueville,Beaumont and the Silences in Histories of the United States: An Interdisciplinary Endeavour across Literature and Sociology

Taking the example of the intermittent presence and absence of narratives of slavery, colonialism, and race within standard accounts of the US, we examine how Tocqueville's sociological account of the emergence of democracy in America is transformed when read together with the novel, Marie, written by his friend and travel companion, Beaumont, which addresses issues of American slavery and racism. Our interdisciplinary project proceeds by considering the possible contributions to historical sociology of analysis of literary narratives, and by exploring the translation of social realities into fiction. These interdisciplinary translations, we argue, highlight the specific issue of silences within mainstream narratives about American democracy and enable us to reassess the significance of silences within historiographies of modernity. In particular, the neglect of Beaumont's contribution has given rise to an appropriation of Tocqueville to a largely celebratory account of American democracy and has elided his concern with the lasting consequences of slavery and racism.