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The relationship of parenting discrepancy and dyadic adjustment to parental communication behaviors in a videotaped discipline situation was studied in 47 two-parent preschool-child triads. Parents tended to exhibit supportive communication in the discipline situation and indicated low levels of parenting discrepancy and high levels of dyadic adjustment. Parenting discrepancy and dyadic adjustment were not found to be significant predictors of defensive and supportive parental communication. Three null hypotheses dealing with the potential interaction between sex of child and level of discrepancy, sex of child and level of dyadic adjustment, and level of discrepancy and dyadic adjustment were not rejected. The variables of awareness of videotaping, role of disciplinarian, and sex of child were significant predictors of defensive and supportive communication for fathers and the Parenting Discrepancy Scale was a moderately sensitive discriminator between fathers exhibiting high and low levels of defensive communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article points the weaknesses of Richard Bland and Roy Wallis' commentary about the essay on status inconsistency and participation in social movements. The comment began with observations concerning the status inconsistency method represented in the essay and moved to a broader criticism of the notion of status defense. However, Bland and Wallis missed the point of the essay. For instance, they defined status more narrowly than Zurcher and Kirkpatrick in "Citizens for Decency". Moreover, they accused the authors of obsessively seeking some ulterior motive among anti-pornography crusaders which could explain their participation. Finally, they offered no evidence to demonstrate that overrewarded inconsistents would be expected to engage in resistance to changes in their social environment which might threaten their over-rewarded situation.

Goodman's hierarchical modeling is used to analyze the status inconsistency configurations of 67 active participants in an anti-pornography social movement and 44 persons who actively opposed the movement. The substantive results indicated the need to interpret status inconsistency effects in light of the second-order interaction of all three stratification variables—education, occupation and income. We found that inconsistencies between two of the stratification dimensions changed the association between the third dimension and participation in a social movement in the positive direction. A modification of the over-rewarded/under-rewarded inconsistency hypothesis was advanced as a special case of the general finding. The methodological results indicate that the Goodman hierarchical modeling technique is a promising system for establishing empirical linkages between significance testing and substantive interpretations with regard to the area of status inconsistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article selectively reviews and interprets the literature on self-concept and social change. It summarizes the view that in the 1970s the self-conception of Americans, modally considered, manifested a shift from institution to impulse, from social to reflective. The argument is made that in the 1980s the expression of impulse is becoming bureaucratized, newly formated in rationalization and modernization, effectively being institutionalized by assorted societal agents, including sociologists. Speculations arc offered about the implications of that change. Several suggestions are made regarding future research on self-concept and the broader notion of "self," particularly by symbolic interactionists and for the purpose of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The War Game, a military Reserve exercise, was examined by participant observation and informal interviews in order to illustrate the effect of an organization's scripting of emotion upon its members and to demonstrate the facility of dramaturgical analysis to incorporate micro-interactional and macro-organizational factors in the study of emotion. The findings are summarized as suggesting a dramaturgical/mesostructural view of emotional expression in organizational settings. The frame includes organizational scripting (macro), specifics of the immediate situation (meso), interactions among the actors (micro), and actors' resultant formulations for emotional expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviewing by direct question has long been the sociologist's favored means of collecting data. This article seeks to expand understanding of the research interview by proposing the comment as a supplementary data gathering technique. Several methodological and theoretical considerations are discussed that indicate the appropriateness of interviewing by comment for the general purpose of discovery and for eliciting information about certain behaviors, events, and relationships. In order to demonstrate concretely the utility of interviewing by comment, eight types of comments that can be employed for a variety of research purposes are presented and illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with a study which examined the psychosocial, intercultural, interactionist and generic skills of social workers that were significantly correlated with satisfaction of clients with their services. It also provides information on the short-term psychosocial casework for Chicano clients attending two mental health clinics as outpatients. To address the lack of research in this area, the authors conducted an exploratory study to evaluate empirically a model of short-term psychosocially oriented casework with Chicano clients. Although the conceptualization and the application of the psychosocial casework model vary from setting to setting, the model is generally based on a flexible theoretical system that allows it to be used in situations that emphasize the psychological or the social/ cultural spherical system that allows it to be used in situations that emphasize the psychological or the social/cultural sphere of human needs.

The article presents information on a study which compared the self-esteem and racial identity of transracial and inracial adoptees. The social situation of children in both transracial and inracial adoptive settings is obviously complex. The interaction processes are complicated not only by the role adjustments demanded in adoption but also by the multiple references for developing a sense of self-esteem. This exploratory study indicated that there were no differences in overall self-esteem between the sampled transracially and inracially adopted children. Furthermore, the level of self-esteem of the adoptees was as high as that reported among individuals in the general population. This suggests that positive self-esteem can be generated as effectively among black children in white adoptive families as in black adoptive families. However, there appeared to be a difference between the transracial and inracial adoptees in their sense of racial identity. Racial identity seemed to be more of a problem for the black children who were being reared by white families. Such factors as the family's nurturance of the child's black identity, the child's access to black role models and peers in the community and in school, and the parents' attention to the child's black heritage seemed to be influential in the shaping of a positive racial identity.

Utilizing replies from a selected sample of contributors to the literature of symbolic interactionism, this paper examines the nature and extent of institutional ties among respondents holding similar views as to appropriate methodology in sociology. The specific institutional ties examined are those as: (1) fellow graduate students, (2) teachers and students, and (3) departmental colleagues. The methodological differences between the Chicago and Iowa schools, described in other studies, manifest themselves in the present sample, as do other views not neatly classifiable within either of these schools of symbolic interactionism. The more unconventional the conception of methodology held by a respondent, the more likely is the respondent to have been a fellow graduate student, a departmental colleague, and/or involved in a teacher-student relationship with other symbolic interactionists favoring the same conception. Respondents preferring the more orthodox methodological stances in modern sociology are less likely to have shared in such institutional flea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the model for a poverty intervention program that purports to work largely inside the system as an organization funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, yet intends to bring together presently disparate intrasystem and extrasystem components of the community into a single program for social change. This social action approach, conceptualized here as the Overlap model, will be outlined and then for further clarification compared with Saul Alinsky's approach as summarized by Riessman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some of the dynamics and dilemmas of one poverty intervention organization (PIO) as it attempted to enact the expectations and approach the goals of the War Against Poverty. The research methods used in this study were participant observation (in the committee complex and in Topeka Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) staff activities) and unstructured interviews (with Topeka OEO staff and poor and not-poor members of the committee complex). The Topeka OEO is a specific PIO in a specific community--thus generalizations are left to the discretion of the reader. The Topeka OEO has been shown to be a PIO striving to maintain a "functional marginality" between the poor and not-poor and, employing a political organizational style, attempting to bring poor and not-poor together in order to implement on "Overlap Model" for social change. It was concluded that whether or not such organization can endure toward its defined goals, whether or not it can remain functionally marginal without becoming marginally functional, is at this point still a hypothesis being tested.

The article discusses a study that focused on the implications of parenting partnerships after divorce to social work practice. Family systems theory asserts that a family is more than the interaction of societally sanctioned roles. Families require and, in fact, develop structural features that are basically hierarchical in nature. Leadership in an intact family properly resides in the spousal subsystem, a dyad that excludes the children and nourishes the adult needs of the two spouses. The parental subsystem, which includes the children and is directed toward their needs, is subsidiary. Clear but flexible boundaries between the subsystems protect the differentiation of the family system, enabling it to carry out a variety of tasks and to adapt to crises. The traditional assumption has been that following divorce, the family "dissolves," ending spousal and father-child relations. Researchers and clinicians who are actively involved in the problems of divorce have begun to reject this perspective, recognizing the existence of ongoing transactions between former spouses and continued parental involvement by fathers after divorce.

This research examines the issue of prayer in the public schools from a status politics framework, arguing the struggle over prayer may be understood as a surface conflict reflecting a much deeper struggle between two contending ways of life. Regression analysis of original survey data finds strong support for the model hypothesized. Cultural fundamentalists are likely to support reinstitution of prayer in the public schools as an affirmation of their cherished and once dominant values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]