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The article discusses the institutional pressures and constraints faced by mass communication. Mass media communicators live in a climate of intense competitive pressures. These are personal, situational, social, institutional. The purpose of this paper is to look at some of these systems of pressures and inhibitions from the communicators' point of view. The basic data are interviews conducted with mass communicators involved in the reporting of schools and education in the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Beyond citing representative or authoritative views of these specialized communicators, the article has attempted to illuminate the nature of institutional relationships in mass communication about another social institution and something of the flavor and climate of mass communicator decision-making in different social systems. The more distant goal of these studies is the development of a scheme and terminology for the more systematic analysis of communicator decisions within the framework of a theory of mass communication.

It is almost tautological that family living requires a certain amount of group decision making. That families differ in the way in which they make decisions and that too little is known of this aspect of family life are probably equally obvious. In our early attempts to teach rational decision making to young married couples, it became apparent that many husbands and wives had little realization of the way in which they or their spouses behave in such interaction. It is the intent of this paper to report on the effort to observe directly the roles that members play in family decision making interaction, giving attention to theoretical and procedural matters as well as to some findings of the study. The actions of the mates, observed in terms of Bales' categories, are considered to constitute part of their actual or "real" roles in the particular decision making session. Several difficulties inhere in the use of a questionnaire to determine the role conception of husbands and wives and, thus, in the determination of the relationship between real and conceived roles.

This paper describes the development of a new observational system designed to provide data to test Hoffman's (1961) hypotheses concerning the adoption of solutions to problems in groups. Interobserver agreement in assigning members' statements to solution categories was relatively good in 20 3- and 4-man groups. 2 indexes of members' emotional attachment (valence) to solutions were strongly related to the adoption of the solutions by the group. The valence indexes correlated about .50 with members' rated satisfaction with the solution [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiment consisted of a paper-and-pencil problem solving task to test if the effort required to obtain 1 solution influences the S's ability to solve similar problems. The conclusions are that the greater the effort required to develop a solution procedure: (a) the slower the change to another more appropriate solution procedure, (b) the greater the propensity of change during extinction to an alternative decision procedure that is similar to the learned procedure, and (c) the less the propensity to recognize and use a trivial decision procedure that is also feasible. The results were significant at the .05 level. The Ss were 46 male undergraduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]