bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Urban Education, the General Education Initiative, and Service Delivery to African-American Students
Authors: Obiakor Festus E. , Algozzine Bob , Ford Bridgie A.
Published: March 2007

Recent reform initiatives have placed the responsibility for effectively educating students with special learning needs in general education. A driving belief of the "general education initiative" is that more students can be effectively served in general classrooms than is currently the case. Two areas (i.e., school climate and parental involvement) that must be discussed if such reform efforts are to make a real difference are presented in this article. Practical suggestions are provided for professionals to consider when embracing questions related to the best and proper place for African-American students with special needs to be educated.
School Boards that Hire Female Superintendents
Authors: Marietti Margaret , Stout Robert T.
Published: March 2007

In a mailed survey, presidents of278 school boards in 19 western states were asked to describe the processes and procedures used in their most recent searches for a superintendent. In general terms, school boards which hired female superintendents were more likely to head urban and suburban systems, to be better educated, to have a higher social class, and to have a majority of females on the board By implication, the general increase in female school board members may lead to a general increase in female superintendents. This bodes well for America's school systems.
Reducing the Relational Distance between Actors
Authors: Bryant Nita
Published: March 2007

The research reported here centers on two African American principals and their efforts to include parents in a school restructuring program. One was successful, whereas the other was not. The findings are presented within a sociological frame work as principals' attempts to reduce the relational distance between home and school. Although some have argued that this distance is countered by matching actors on racial characteristics, these results indicate that the problem is somewhat more complex. Rather, one principal's ability to correctly read the surrounding community and his relationship to it emerged as the most important factor in determining his success in minimizing the home/school gap.
The Effects of School, Family, and Community Support on the Academic Achievement of African American Adolescents
Authors: Sanders Mavis G.
Published: March 2007

This study explores the effects of teacher, family, and church support on the school-related attitudes, behaviors, and academic achievements of African American urban adolescents. To achieve this objective, 827 students in an urban school district in the Southeastern United States were surveyed. Interviews were conducted with a subset of the research population to enhance and aid in the interpretation of the questionnaire data. The analyses show that students' perceptions of teacher and parental academic support and church involvement indirectly influence achievement through their positive and significant influences on students' academic self-concepts and school behaviors. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.
Young People, Trouble, and Crime
Authors: BAZEMORE GORDON
Published: March 2007

Restorative justice has emerged in recent years as a promising approach to youth crime focused on repairing harm and rebuilding relationships. Although the practice of restorative justice has already demonstrated significant effect on individual crime victims and offenders in a number of jurisdictions around the world, a greater community-building potential has yet to be realized as a result of the failure to understand and apply restorative principles in diverse contexts. This article presents an overview of the normative theory of restorative justice focusing on three core principles. It then considers the connection between restorative theories of intervention and informal social control and social support mechanisms and the application of restorative justice practices as a means of strengthening both as core components of social capital in the response to youth crime and troublesome behavior.
Identity Politics and Student Resistance to Inner-City Public Schooling
Authors: MIRON LOUIS F. , LAURIA MICKEY
Published: March 2007

Investigating the conditions that foster organized expressions of power and the circumstances that students exploit to engage in political, collective forms of resistance warrants researchers' serious attention. Inner-city schools are uniquely situated as changing demographics and global and national migration continue to reconstruct schools as host sites of identity politics. In this article, the authors investigate the sites of inner-city schools where contests over identity are waged. Their findings indicate that the experience of being African American in the neighborhood school, where students feel stuck “back here,” is vastly different from the experience of being African American in the citywide school where the all African American population feels a part of its cultural community and the wider society. Denied equality and difference in both school settings, students from the same neighborhood and students from various neighborhoods demand their equal rights with varying degrees of intensity.
Deviant Lifestyles
Authors: HAWDON JAMES E.
Published: March 2007

Bond theory is one of the most influential theories in criminology. Many researchers, however, have discarded the concept of involvements. This research reconceptualizes this concept. Factor analysis recovers seven routine patterns that measure involvement. These factors are then used in a multiple regression model to predict adolescent marijuana use. The routine patterns are powerful predictors of use, even when other elements of the bond are included in the equation.
Adjudicated Adolescent Girls and their Mothers:
Authors: KERPELMAN JENNIFER L. , SMITH SONDRA L.
Published: March 2007

The current study was designed to examine linkages between mothers' and daughters' identity and relationship perceptions, their interactions around identity beliefs, and adolescent identity development within a population of adjudicated adolescent girls. Interviews and an interaction task were completed by 25 mother-daughter pairs. Findings revealed both positive and negative identity and relationship themes. Furthermore, observations of mother-daughter interactions suggested that there were patterns promoting and impeding healthy identity development. Implications for practice are discussed.
Daily Routines and Crime
Authors: HAWDON JAMES E.
Published: March 2007

Since 1969, Travis Hirschi's control theory has been one of the leading explanations of delinquency. The theory has withstood not only the test of time but also rigorous empirical investigations. Although his theory has been generally supported, Hirschi's concept of involvement has been criticized as being, at best, analytically indistinguishable from commitment and, at worst, unrelated to delinquent behavior. However, when reconceptualized as daily routine patterns, involvement is a powerful predictor of criminal activity.
Emancipatory International Relations: Good News, Bad News or No News at All?
Authors: Spegele Roger D.
Published: March 2007

Although international relations theory is witnessing a veritable explosion of theoretical works in the general area of what I call, for reasons that will become clearer below, emancipatory international relations (EIR), a full-length critical study of this genre of theorizing has not yet been written, so far as I am aware. My project is to fill the lacuna. This will involve describing, analysing and criticizing a group of theories whose central assumptions and presuppositions have been shaped by continental philosophy, especially those derived from the work of Kant, Marx and Nietzsche. In my study I will examine certain common features of theories or discourses loosely divided into four groups: Kantian cosmopolitan; international critical theory; poststructuralist and postmodernist theories; and feminist international relations theories. My goal in this article is to describe these forms of emancipatory international relations and to examine why they count as emancipatory and how they differ from other kinds of theory. `I see no reason why we should not be business like about the nebulous.' - Anonymous.
The Endorsements of Interpretation
Authors: Doepke Frederick
Published: March 2007

Support is given to Habermas's argument that we interpret thoughts only by seeing persons as actually justified in their circumstances. Habermas holds further that his argument extends to moral thinking, in that we understand it only by actually taking the moral point of view, and he thinks this is illustrated by Kohlberg's theory of moral development. While this illustration is denied here on the ground that Kohlberg's theory accepts Rawls's theory of justice, it is argued that the extension to morality can be made with a theory like Gewirth's, in which morality appears as a form of rationality.
Habermas and Transcendental Arguments
Authors: Power Michael
Published: March 2007

Habermas's transcendentalism in Knowledge and Human Interests ( KHI) deserves to be reappraised for a number of reasons. Prevailing conceptions of strong transcendental arguments, which inform many of his critics, cannot be sustained. The analytic reception of Kant suggests a more modest role for them that is remarkably similar to Habermas's claims for the paradigm of rational reconstruction. Hence a reinterpretation of transcendentalism provides a new basis for establishing a continuity between his early and later work. Habermas's underlying argument structure owes much, albeit unconsciously, to Kant's concept of a regulative idea. Only the "as if" status of regulative ideas allows one to make sense of the metacritical structure of KHI and Habermas's transcendental arguments emerge as deeply hermeneutic in character rather than logical in any formal sense.
Multi-Modal Argumentation
Authors: Gilbert Michael A.
Published: March 2007

The main stream of formal and informal logic as well as more recent work in discourse analysis provides a way of understanding certain arguments that particularly lend themselves to rational analysis. I argue, however, that these, and allied modes of analysis, be seen as heuristic models and not as the only proper mode of argument. This article introduces three other modes of argumen tation that emphasize distinct aspects of human communication, but that, at the same time, must be considered for the full understanding of argumentation. These modes are (1) the emotional, which relates to the realm of feelings, (2) the visceral, which stems from the area of the physical, and (3) the kisceral, which covers the intuitive and non-sensory arenas. At its most extreme the view holds that arguments may be given (almost) wholly within one mode and not be at all susceptible to those methods of argument analysis previously used. A more cautious statement allows that any interactive argument will (possibly) contain elements from various modes, and that to attempt to reduce these all to the rational is prejudiced reductionism.
Bertrand Russell and the End of Nationalism
Authors: Greenspan Louis
Published: March 2007

This article argues that nationalism is an important topic in Bertrand Russell's thinking about politics and society and that his writings on this subject are worthy of consideration by those who study nationalism today Russell anticipates contemporary "modernist" and "ethnicist" accounts of nationalism, providing, over a lifetime, the precedent of both of these theories struggling within the bosom of one thinker. Russell's theory is structurally closer to that of the modernists. Like them, Russell believes that the growth of a modern global economy has made all nationalisms, whether progressive or reactionary, obsolete. But after declaring the obsolescence of nationalism in 1917, Russell was compelled to wrestle with the persistence and vitality of nationalist movements and sentiment throughout the rest of the century. The author argues that Russell's experience suggests that this modernism, which dismissed all nationalisms, led to political absurdities and compelled Russell to argue for the distinction between predatory and imperialist nationalisms—a distinction he had rejected in the wake of World War I.
Knowledge Personal or Social
Authors: Agassi Joseph
Published: March 2007

Karl Popper's methodology can be seen as the situational logic of research. Popper called his method "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject." It was dismissed as metaphysical by those who refuse to give up an ideal knowing subject (a perfect human inductive processor). This article surveys the failure of modem discussions of this ideal, from the earliest (the writings of Sir Francis Bacon) to the latest (Kripke). The knowing subject exits at last, but leaves behind interesting results. The ideal knowing subject embodied ideal rationality, outside culture and history. Giving up this ideal invites us to integrate science with its background, to grade rationality (from magic to science), and to integrate different degrees of rationality under one rule.
Nonoptimal Alignment
Authors: van DRIEL KEES , OOSTERVELD PAUL
Published: March 2007

An algorithm to measure agreement between sequences as proposed by Dijkstra and Taris is discussed. It is concluded that the “optimal alignment” algorithm does not necessarily produce the optimal solution, that is, the minimal distance between two sequences.
Studying Rare Events Through Qualitative Case Studies
Authors: HARDING DAVID J. , FOX CYBELLE , MEHTA JAL D.
Published: March 2007

This article considers five methodological challenges in studying rare events such as school shootings. Drawing on the literature on causal analysis in macro-historical and other small-N research, it outlines strategies for studying school shootings using qualitative case studies and illustrates these strategies using data from case studies of two rampage school shootings: Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, and Westside Middle School outside Jonesboro, Arkansas. Strengths and limitations are discussed as well as lessons for studying rare events.
A Note On Correlated Errors in Repeated Measurements
Authors: Wiley James A. , Wiley Mary Glenn
Published: March 2007

This paper considers a test score model in which the true score and the measurement error are autocorrelated. After some preliminary remarks on corrections for attenuation, the paper focuses on the three-wave case (t = 1, 2, 3), demonstrating identifiability, showing an estimation algorithm, and providing a numerical illustration.
Estimation of Nonresponse Bias
Authors: Hawkins Darnell F.
Published: March 2007

An imputation procedure is used to estimate the effects of nonresponse on issues of substantive interest in a social survey. Using this method, one can determine that nonresponse bias may have differential effects on variable means, depending on the combination of independent variables used in the ensuing substantive analysis of data from the survey.
On Rescuing the Nonequivalent-Control-Group Design
Authors: MOHR LAWRENCE B.
Published: March 2007

The nonequivalent-control-group design is important because true experimental designs are frequently either infeasible or undesirable and other quasi-experimental designs have only quite limited applications. This design, however, has been disparaged as nearly useless because it depends upon statistical methods that may give biased results when applied to it. The design is too important to let lie in this condition. It is suggested that slight modifications, a few of which have been offered by others, might render it more reliable. One such modification, quite simple, widely applicable, and highly restorative of internal validity, is suggested here. The bias associated with the standard design is presented as resulting from basic violations of the assumptions of statistical methods. Both reduction of the bias and estimation of its extent are shown to be possible if the comparison group is selected at random from the relevant population and used by itself, rather than in conjunction with the experimental group, for the preliminary estimation of parameters. The modified design is shown to have various advantages relative to its unmodified form and even, at times, relative to true experimental designs. A secondary purpose of this article, supportive of the first, is to clarify the analysis of evaluation designs by conceptualizing the issues in terms of ordinary least-squares regression.
Normalization Ridge Regression in Practice
Authors: BULCOCK JEFFREY W. , FUNG LEE WAN
Published: March 2007

Both ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression methods are sensitive to multicollinearity. The standard statistical solution to the multicollinearity problem is to use one of a family of biased, variance-reduced estimation methods collectively known as ridge regression (RR). In the presence of multicollinearity, RR is usually more efficient than OLS; thus, in theory, two-stage ridge regression (2SRR) should be able to outperform 2SLS. RR, however, is not a problem-free method for reducing variance inflation. It is a stochastic procedure when it should be nonstochastic, and it does not meet the boundary condition. It is argued that the problems of RR stem from the use of the minimum mean square error criterion. An alternative called the variance normalization criterion is proposed that, in theory, copes with the dilemmas of RR while preserving the advantages of RR over OLS. Normalization ridge regression (NR) is used to estimate a nonorthogonal recursive model, and two-stage normalization ridge regression (2SNR) is used to estimate a nonorthogonal, nonrecursive model. Comparisons were made between OLS, RR, and NR estimates and between 2SLS, 2SRR, and 2SNR. On the basis of eight performance indices it was concluded that the NR and 2SNR procedures were efficient variance reduction methods, and hence, useful statistical solutions in the last resort to the multicollinearity problem.
Log-Multiplicative Models for Multiway Tables
Authors: PANNEKOEK JEROEN
Published: March 2007

Goodman (1979) and Andersen (1980) recently presented a log-multiplicative model for the analysis of association between two discrete variables. This model can be viewed as a log-linear model with certain restrictions on the interaction parameters. The usual log-linear interaction parameters are factorized in two sets of parameters, one set pertaining to the row variable and one set pertaining to the column variable. These two sets of parameters can be viewed as row and column scores. In this article the model formulated by Goodman and Andersen is reviewed and some generalizations for multiway tables are discussed. A three-way table is analyzed as an example.
The Logit Model and Response-Based Samples
Authors: XIE YU , MANSKI CHARLES F.
Published: March 2007

It is well-known that, under the logit model for binary response, the random sampling and response-based sampling maximum likelihood estimators coincide for all parameters except the intercept. Citing this coincidence, many researchers have assumed the logit model and analyzed data from response-based samples as if those data were obtained by random sampling. We argue that this practice should be avoided unless the researcher really believes the logit specification. One preferable alternative is the weighted maximum likelihood estimator of Manski and Lerman (1977). Random sampling maximum likelihood analysis does not have a natural interpretation when the true response function is not logit. Weighted maximum likelihood analysis estimates a constrained best predictor of the binary response and so remains interpretable.
Labor Management in the Southern Textile Industry
Authors: COVERDILL JAMES E. , FINLAY WILLIAM , MARTIN JACK K.
Published: March 2007

This article explores a method developed by Ragin called qualitative comparative analysis or QCA. QCA would appear to offer two attractive possibilities: (a) it combines a consideration of systematic and ideographic elements in a single analysis; and (b) it overcomes some notable limitations of traditional quantitative and qualitative methods. The aim of the authors is to contrast the logic and results of QCA with traditional qualitative and quantitative analyses through a consideration of labor management practices in the southern textile industry. The authors argue that QCA represents a bridge between traditional qualitative and quantitative approaches, because it draws on some aspects of each. It is not, however, without its own limitations, because it leaves out some very admirable aspects of these other methodologies. This analysis suggests that different methodological strategies should be used to complement one another, because each provides valuable insights that can be checked and augmented by the others.
Death Penalty Charging in Los Angeles County
Authors: WEISS ROBERT , BERK RICHARD , LI WENZHI , FARRELL-ROSS MARGARET
Published: March 2007

The authors analyze death penalty charging data for Los Angeles County involving homicides from 1990 to 1994. The data were collected by the Los Angeles Times. This data set is one of the largest tabulations of homicide defendant data yet collected. A Bayesian logistic regression analysis is applied with a proper prior formulated to provide conservative inferences. The authors illustrate procedures for inferences for polytomous predictors and report three analyses with three partially overlapping sets of covariates.
The vernacularisation of Hindutva: The BJP and Shiv Sena in rural Maharashtra
Authors: Hansen Thomas Blom
Published: March 2007

The recent conquest of political power in Maharashtra by the Shiv Sena-BJP combine was premised upon the advances made by these parties into the rural districts of the state in the late 1980s. This political expansion was made possible by a growing dissatisfaction with the immobility of the Congress organisation, which in the course of the 1980s proved incapable of incorporating the new upwardly mobile groups thrown up by the intensified commercialisation in the rural areas. Taking four village studies in the Aurangabad region as its point of departure, the article argues that it was the Shiv Sena's and BJP's successful assumption of the discourse of 'aggressive Hindus' in a region marked by long-standing communal tension, along with a growing opposition to ineffective Congress policies in the region, which made the region into a stronghold of the two hitherto urban-based parties. It is finally argued that it was especially the Shiv Sena's translation of the Hindutva discourse into the dominant political idiom of Maratha valour and rustic virtues, rather than the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation, that provided a crucial impetus to Hindu communal politics in the state.
Helvétius
Authors: WOOTTON DAVID
Published: March 2007

It is a remarkable fact that of all the ideas and aspirations which led up to the Revolution the concept and desire of political liberty, in the full sense of the term, were the last to emerge, as they were also the first to pass away.

Alexis de Tocqueville
At the Edge
Authors: BROWN WENDY
Published: March 2007

Here lies the vocation of those who preserve our understanding of past theories, who sharpen our sense of the subtle, complex interplay between political experience and thought, and who preserve our memory of the agonizing efforts of intellect to restate the possibilities and threats posed by political dilemmas of the past.

—Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation”

In the same way in which the great transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as the legal categories of the ancien regime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate—and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about.

—Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics

Looking obliquely at the edges of things, where they come together with other things, can tell you as much about them, often, as can looking at them directly, intently, straight on.

—Clifford Geertz, “The Near East in the Far East”
Liberalism and Multiculturalism
Authors: KUKATHAS CHANDRAN
Published: March 2007

My business in this state

Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,

Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble

Till it o'errun the stew: laws for all faults,

But faults so countenanc'd that the strong statutes

Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,

As much in mock as in mark.

Shakespeare

The greatest liberty of subjects, dependeth on the silence of the law.

Hobbes
Ethnicity and Ethnic Media Use
Authors: JEFFRES LEO W.
Published: March 2007

Ethnicity continues to be a political and social force on the national and international scenes. After a discussion of the literature on ethnicity and communication, this article tracks a panel representing 13 different White ethnic groups in a metropolitan area. Data were collected every 4 years, beginning in 1976 and continuing through 1992. In 1976, 13 ethnic groups were surveyed, and 11 groups were tracked in subsequent surveys. Although each wave collected data unique to that period, all surveys included items tapping ethnic identification, ethnic behaviors, ethnic media use, and mainstream media use. Using a variety of analytic techniques, the author finds evidence that ethnic media use leads to stronger ethnic identification across time, suggesting that ethnic media can help sustain ethnic identification in a multicultural context.
THEORETICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF CHILDREN'S ATTENTION TO TELEVISION
Authors: HUSSON WILLIAM
Published: March 2007

This article is a critical analysis of three issues that are central to the study of children's attention patterns to television. These issues are: (1) the meaning of the term “attention”; (2) the various types of stimulus attributes subsumed under the term “television”; and (3) the implications the child's level of intellectual development may have for the way he or she attends to the screen. Analysis of these issues yielded some of the following implications for TV attention research: (1) Differences in children's information processing abilities may not necessarily predict differences in children's attention patterns, because only certain conditions appear to be optimal for attention patterns to differ as a function of the child's level of intellectual development. (2) The term “television” subsumes a wide array of program variables, both with respect to form and content. Form variables are typically used to predict changes in children's attention behavior, whereas content variables are typically used to predict changes in children's social behavior. It is conceivable, however, that form variables might account for changes in children's attention behavior. The failure to make these linkages reflects a limitation of the current state of theory concerning the effects of television on children's behavior.
MOTHERS' COMMENTS ABOUT TV
Authors: MESSARIS PAUL , KERR DENNIS
Published: March 2007

Interview data from a sample of 336 mothers of elementary school children were used to examine the relationship between family communication style (that is, the degree of concept orientation or socio-orientation) and mothers' comments to their children about the content of TV programs. The major findings were as follows: Concept orientation was associated positively with mothers' exploration of moral issues raised by TV programs in discussions with their children (but not with the giving of explicit directives about the implications of these issues for the children's own conduct). Concept orientation was also associated with mothers' use of TV as an occasion for giving their children information about historical, geographic, or scientific details pertinent to a TV program. Finally, concept orientation was associated with mothers' statements to their children that things on TV are just make-believe. Socio-orientation, on the other hand, was associated with mothers' statements to their children that various aspects of TV are true-to-life and, in particular, with maternal confirmations of the reality of TV portrayals of misfortune and evil.
OBJECTIVE NEWS REPORTING
Authors: WESTERSTÅHL JÖRGEN
Published: March 2007

First, the concept of objectivity in news reporting is presented in a scheme, assumed to contain its main components. The author's practical experiences from eight major objectivity studies, in which the components are operationalized and applied in content analyses, are reported and discussed. Finally, it is suggested that the tested criteria of objectivity should be complemented by an interest theory, in order to deal with the fundamental problem of the significance of different news items.
CRIME SHOW VIEWING BY PREADULTS
Authors: CARLSON JAMES M.
Published: March 2007

The research reported here examines the impact of viewing television crime shows on preadults' attitudes toward civil liberties. The data analyzed were the result of a survey of school children in grades six through twelve. Generally, heavy viewers of crime shows were more likely to have anti-civil libertarian attitudes. This relationship survived controls for seven background variables. Crime show viewing had its greatest impact on the attitudes of subgroups that normally are predisposed to support a civil libertarian viewpoint. These groups included children in the higher grades, children from middle class homes, and children whose parents do not place a great deal of stress on conformity. The results indicate that television entertainment may be an important source of political learning.
SOURCE, DESTINATION, AND ENTROPY
Authors: FINN SETH , ROBERTS DONALD F.
Published: March 2007

Although Shannon and Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication has had a profound impact on the development of communication research, few scholars have adapted Shannon's concepts to their research questions. The authors argue that the failure to recognize the difference between the two fundamental orientations in Shannon's theory—the relationship between source and destination and the technical characteristics of transmission channels—has retarded the use of Shannon's concepts, especially his measure of information. Taking care to differentiate between these two aspects of information theory, the authors review the small body of empirical research inspired by Shannon's theory. They find that Shannon's entropy measure is especially useful in the study of human systems because it permits researchers to analyze categorical data using quantitative statistical tools.
POP MUSIC IN HUNGARY
Authors: SZEMERE ANNA
Published: March 2007

This article explores the structure of pop music in Hungary, focusing on social factors under which the music has developed. A distinction is made between the mere existence of a musical idiom and that of the culture built around it. An understanding of this distinction helps explain points of pressure on the pop music industry in Hungary and offers a possible answer to the question of how an inherently anti-authoritarian type of art may develop under the control of authoritarian cultural politics.
PREADULT LEARNING OF POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE
Authors: DENNIS JACK
Published: March 2007

This article addresses the question of the influence of mass media and interpersonal communication on the growth of partisan independence among American preadults; 3-wave panel interview data from Wisconsin preadults (aged 10-17 in early 1980) and their parents are used. New measures of political independence are introduced. Preadults become increasingly independent as they get older. Significant antecedent variables are the parent's independence and education, and the preadult's media exposure, attention and trust, and interpersonal political information seeking. None of these effects is large, and they are specific to particular measures of independence.
Image Effects in the Appreciation of Video Rock
Authors: ZILLMANN DOLF , MUNDORF NORBERT
Published: March 2007

Sexual and/or violent images or both were added to the visual portion of a rock-music video whose original visuals were both nonsexual and nonviolent. The music was used in a control condition. Enjoyment of the rock music was markedly influenced by particular visual embellishments. The involvement of sexual stimuli intensified music appreciation in both males and females. There was a tendency for the involvement of violent stimuli to have a similar effect. However, the combination of sexual and violent images failed to enhance appreciation of the music. Irrespective of enjoyment, the presence of visual embellishments influenced the perception of music also. The visualization of rebellious lyrical elements, whether or not emphasizing sex or violence or both, fostered perceptions of greater musical rebelliousness. The involvement of violent images produced the strongest effect of this kind. Additionally, the involvement of sexual images made the music appear more sensual and romantic for males. Females, in contrast, found the rock music devoid of visual embellishments most romantic. Finally, females, in contrast to males, reported less enjoyment for visual accompaniments of rock that involved sexual images than for those that were devoid of them, and they objected more strongly than males to the incorporation of sexual images in publicly accessible rock-music videos.
Predictors of Horror Film Attendance and Appeal
Authors: TAMBORINI RON , STIFF JAMES
Published: March 2007

A survey was conducted to determine the antecedents of the exposure to and appeal of horror films. Audience members leaving the theater after viewing Halloween II were interviewed using a questionnaire that contained measures of specific reasons for liking horror films as well as measures of several individual-difference variables. A model emerged from structural equation analysis indicating that three important factors in the appeal of horror films are (a) the audience's desire to experience the satisfying resolutions usually provided in these films, (b) the audience's desire to see the destruction often found in these films, and (c) the sensation-seeking personality traits of audience members for these films. In addition, age and gender were important predictors. Horror films were enjoyed more by males and by younger viewers.
The Effect of Conflicting Information on Media Skepticism
Authors: COZZENS MICHAEL D. , CONTRACTOR NOSHIR S.
Published: March 2007

Media skepticism is defined as the degree to which individuals tend to disbelieve or discount the picture of reality presented in the mass media. Media skepticism is caused in part by the process by which individuals are confronted with discrepancies between their personal experience of reality and the reality portrayed in the media. As a result, they discount the media portrayal. Given this conceptualization, it was hypothesized that exposure to nonmediated information that conflicts with information gained from a media source would cause an increase in media skepticism. The hypothesis was tested in a controlled experiment. Results support the hypothesis and suggest that media skepticism may be a useful construct for future research in communication processes and effects.
Children's Representations of Television and Real-Life Stories
Authors: WATKINS BRUCE
Published: March 2007

Children at Grades, 3, 5, and 8 wrote two narratives; one was a “television” story and one a “real-life” story. Stories were examined for presence of particular kinds of content (e.g., stereotyping, high aggression) and for presentational style and complexity (e.g., length, elaboration on character states, reliance on visual descriptors). Children portrayed different content in real-life versus television stories but there was no relationship between content portrayals and reported amount of television viewed. However, real-life stories were more elaborate and complex than television stories for low television viewers. This difference decreased as reported televiewing increased, and television stories were considerably more complex than real-life stories for high viewers at eighth grade. It is suggested that frequent exposure to television's symbol systems may provide higher viewers with formats with which to represent television prototypes as well as comparable real-life prototypes.
Genre and Gender in the Structure of Music Preferences
Authors: CHRISTENSON PETER G. , PETERSON JON BRIAN
Published: March 2007

Whereas young audiences are known to distinguish among several types of popular music, there is evidence that the several genres are organized from the listener's standpoint, that music types go together to form “metagenres.” In addition, it is suggested that, for a variety of reasons, gender is central to the ways in which popular music is used and tastes are organized. This article presents an analysis of the music preference structure of college students based on responses to a variety of music use and preference measures and concludes: first, that the underlying structure of music preference cannot be accounted for by reference to two or three factors but is multivariate; second, that there are crucial differences between males and females in terms of their “mapping” of music types.
Innovation Through Communication in an Educational Bureaucracy
Authors: TJOSVOLD DEAN , McNEELY LEONARD T.
Published: March 2007

Communication between people from diverse organizational units can facilitate innovation. Employees of a postsecondary educational institution were interviewed to obtain specific incidents of when they tried to solve problems innovatively. The results indicate that employees with cooperative goals, but not those with competitive and independent goals, communicated openly and skillfully, made progress in solving the problem, developed high-quality and creative solutions, efficiently used their resources, felt positive about the experience, and expected to work with others successfully in the future. The predominant reason given for cooperative goals was common objectives. The results suggest that cooperative goals complement the skillful communication of diverse perspectives to foster innovation in an organization.
Attribution in Social and Parasocial Relationships
Authors: PERSE ELIZABETH M. , RUBIN REBECCA B.
Published: March 2007

This study examined social and parasocial interaction from interpersonal attribution perspectives. Parasocial interaction is a perceived interpersonal relationship on the part of a television viewer with a mass media persona. We proposed that attributional confidence associated with parasocial interaction would mirror that resulting from social interaction and that personal construct theory and uncertainty reduction theory might add to knowledge about the nature of attributional confidence. Soap-opera-viewing college students (N = 105) completed questionnaires. Analysis revealed that, similar to social relationships, parasocial relationships with favorite soap opera characters were based, to some extent, on reduction of uncertainty and the ability to predict accurately the feelings and attitudes of the persona. The discussion focuses on implications of these findings for uncertainty reduction theory and personal construct theory.
A View of Studies on Bibliometrics and Related Subjects in Japan
Authors: MIYAMOTO SADAAKI , MIDORIKAWA NOBUYUKI , NAKAYAMA KAZUHIKO
Published: March 2007

This article surveys studies on bibliometrics and related subjects in Japan. Reviewed articles are classified according to the following categories: (a) studies on bibliometrics—including bibliometric laws, citation studies, scientific communication, and software tools for bibliometrics; and (b) application of bibliometrics—including policies for scientific research, bibliometrics and information retrieval, and databases in oriental languages. An interesting characteristic in the Japanese studies is that databases of texts in oriental languages such as Japanese and Chinese have been developed. Applications of fuzzy set theory to document retrieval using bibliometric techniques are also observed. We emphasize the models and methods used in common between bibliometrics and other fields of sciences.
Desensitizing Children's Emotional Reactions to the Mass Media
Authors: WILSON BARBARA J.
Published: March 2007

This experiment assesses the effectiveness of two desensitization strategies for reducing emotional reactions to mass media. Children from two grade levels (kindergarten and first vs. second through fourth grade) were assigned to one of three conditions before watching a frightening movie scene involving lizards: passive exposure to a live lizard, modeled exposure during which the experimenter touched the live lizard, or no exposure. Results revealed that modeled exposure decreased emotional reactions and negative interpretations of lizards for both age groups, whereas passive exposure had a more limited effect on emotional reactions and did not influence interpretations. The findings are consistent with current theories of desensitization and observational learning.
Effects of Disturbing News on Recall of Subsequently Presented News
Authors: MUNDORF NORBERT , DREW DAN , ZILLMANN DOLF , WEAVER JAMES
Published: March 2007

Both male and female respondents were exposed to a television news program. Immediately following exposure to either an emotionally disturbing or an innocuous, affectively neutral news story, respondents watched a sequence of standard news items. The placement of these items was systematically varied through three time slots of 90 s each. In the two preexposure conditions, all items appeared equally often in all time slots, thus allowing comparisons over time as well as at given times. A surprise information-acquisition test was administered for the contents of the news items. Compared with the control condition, the acquisition of information from the news items following the emotionally charged, disturbing story was significantly poorer for a period of 3 min. No appreciable difference in information acquisition was observed thereafter. The apparent impairment of information acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval after emotionally charged news stories is discussed in terms of emotion theory. Practical implications are considered.
Reacting to Graphic Horror
Authors: TAMBORINI RON , STIFF JAMES , HEIDEL CARL
Published: March 2007

A study of viewer responses to film clips containing scenes of graphic horror was designed to evaluate the effect of empathy upon emotional reactions. Prior to viewing, subjects completed questionnaires measuring dimensions of empathy, including wandering imagination, fictional involvement, humanistic orientation, and emotional contagion. Several weeks later, subjects were exposed to movie clips containing graphic scenes of horror. During exposure, measures of skin temperature were obtained as an indicator of physiological response. Immediately following exposure, subjects filled out a questionnaire measuring emotional and behavioral responses. The data were subjected to path analysis in order to test a model relating dimensions of empathy to emotional and behavioral responses. The results indicate that empathy is a critical variable for consideration in research on emotional reactions to graphic horror.
A Nonlinear Dynamic Model of Social Interaction
Authors: BUDER EUGENE H.
Published: March 2007

This article presents a dynamic model of dyadic social interaction. It is shown that a set of simple deterministic arithmetic operations representing basic assumptions about social-involvement behavior can lead to a variety of complex outcomes, including asymptotically stable behavior, self-sustaining periodic behavior, and chaotic behavior. These outcomes illustrate the emergence of macroscopic interaction-level properties from microscopic individual-level rules.
Gratification Models of Satisfaction and Choice of Communication Channels in Organizations
Authors: DOBOS JEAN
Published: March 2007

Uses and gratifications models derived from the mass media literature were applied to the study of media satisfaction and choice in organizations. Telephone interviews were administered to key informants in 241 organizations, which varied in size, type of business, environmental instability, and length of time the most frequently used communication technology had been in place. Of the models tested, cross-channel discrepancies in gratifications obtained from media alternatives predicted choice of each channel and satisfaction with a communication technology but not satisfaction with face-to-face or written memos. Measurement of gratifications sought at a general level of organizational communication content seeking yielded inconclusive results for models incorporating gratifications sought. Further research is needed with channel-specific gratifications sought and the expectancy-value models not tested here.
The Organizational Underpinnings of Contemporary Media Conglomerates
Authors: TUROW JOSEPH
Published: March 2007

Synergy and related strategies have become major building blocks of the global mass media system as it moves into the 21st century. This article examines the architecture of that system, with emphasis on the United States. It describes the way that executives are responding to key changes that have affected the U.S. media system and others during the past couple of decades. Their activities are raising important challenges for members of the public as well as for their competitors.
Mood States Influence the Production of Persuasive Arguments
Authors: BOHNER GERD , SCHWARZ NORBERT
Published: March 2007

This study examined the impact of mood on the production of persuasive arguments. Research demonstrates that a happy (as opposed to neutral or sad) mood often leads to less systematic information processing but to greater creativity in production tasks. It was hypothesized that individuals in a happy (as opposed to sad) mood produce more original and more persuasive arguments, especially when asked to advocate an unfamiliar (i.e., counterattitudinal) position. Eighty-seven college students were put in a happy or sad mood and asked to write a proattitudinal or a counterattitudinal essay on one of two topics. Happy subjects generally rated their own essays as being more persuasive than sad subjects did. External ratings revealed, however, that happy subjects' essays were judged to be more persuasive when they were counter-attitudinal but not when proattitudinal. No mood effects on various measures of originality were found. Thus support for the hypothesis was found with respect to judged persuasiveness but not to originality. Results are discussed within the framework of models of mood and cognition.
Attentional Inertia and Recognition Memory in Adult Television Viewing
Authors: BURNS JOHN J. , ANDERSON DANIEL R.
Published: March 2007

The theory of attentional inertia holds that attentional engagement increases over the time course of a look at television and that this engagement rapidly dissipates when the look ends. The theory was tested in a study of 41 undergraduate students' viewing of 2 hours of videotaped dramatic television programs and associated commercials. The main results were that (a) inertial engagement sustains looks across boundaries between programs and commercials, (b) inertial engagement does not carry over from one look to the next, (c) inertial engagement was associated with greater recognition memory for TV content, and (d) as predicted by a model of attentional inertia, look length distributions are approximately lognormal and hazard functions are nonmonotonic with a peak at about 1 second.