Partizipation in politischen Parteien. Eine empirische Analyse des Mobilisierungspotenzials politischer Parteien sowie der Struktur innerparteilicher Partizipation in Deutschland

Why do citizens become members of political parties? And why are some party members activists and others not? These guiding questions are analyzed within the context of the general incentives model proposed by Seyd and Whiteley. The basis of the empirical analyses is a survey of the German population as well as a survey of the German party members. It is shown that soft incentives can be sufficient for the decision to become a member of a political party while hard incentives are the main predictor of the decision to become active within a party. Since soft incentives had become less widespread these findings contribute to an explanation of the declining number of party members in Germany.     

ATTITUDE MEASURES IN EVALUATION RESEARCH: A RESEARCH NOTE

The paper focuses on the use of attitude measures in evaluation research. It is suggested that attitude measures can assist evaluators in surmounting the problems of assessing program effectiveness both in process and impact evaluations. Attitude change can be conceptualized as the intended output of programs, as intervening between program variables and behavior or as proxy measures of behavioral target variables that are not readily measurable. Attitude measures can play avital role in evaluation research if an adequate methodology is employed.     

A brief overview of the development of women's studies in the UK

This paper provides a brief overview of Women's Studies (WS) in the UK, drawing attention to its greatest expansion in adult education and, in general, non-degree granting areas of education. It further argues that this impressive diversity, at present, contributes to the invisibility of WS in the UK but that, potentially, the foundation of a National Women's Studies Association could make both the women who do WS, and WS itself, visible and powerful.     

Cross-Informant Ratings of the Emotional and Behavioral Functioning of College Students

One hundred seventy-four college students and a subset of their mothers and fathers provided ratings of college students’ emotional and behavioral functioning. College students and their mothers and fathers demonstrated variable levels of correspondence in their ratings of college students’ internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Similar findings were noted with t-test comparisons, with college students rating themselves as experiencing significantly higher levels of behavior problems than did their mothers and fathers. Further, college students’ ratings of their mothers’ and fathers’ parenting and their perceptions of their parents predicted significantly their ratings of their own behavior problems. Although mothers’ communication reciprocity and perceptions of their college students served as significant predictors of mothers’ ratings, a different pattern of results occurred with paternal variables. Overall, these findings further the understanding of correspondence and predictors of cross-informant ratings of college students’ emotional and behavioral functioning. Kimberly Renk is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, Florida, serving the Department of Psychology’s Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Illinois, her Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at Illinois State University, and her Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of South Florida after completing a predoctoral internship in Clinical Psychology at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. Her current interests include parents’ perceptions of their children’s emotional and behavioral functioning and parent-child interactions. She and her graduate students pursue the study of these topics and provide clinical services to the community surrounding UCF through the Understanding Children and Families laboratory. Reesa Donnelly is a Doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Virginia and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida. Her major research interests include parent-child relationships in the context of cognitive development and health psychology. Jenny Klein is a Doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida. Her main research interests are in the area of family interactions, parenting, and child emotional and behavioral problems in minority populations. Arazais Oliveros is a Doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.A. in psychology from Florida International University and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida. Her major research interests involve the area of children and parenting, especially in families with risk factors for child maltreatment (e.g., marital abuse, medical concerns). Elizabeth Baksh is a Graduate student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.S. in psychology and religious studies from the University of Miami and her M.S.W. from the University of South Florida. Her major research interests include parent-child relationships in the context of pediatric psychology.     

Ideology Isn't Everything: Transnational Terrorism,Recruitment Incentives,and Attack Casualties

In the current literature, the primary determinants of terrorist attack casualty rates have been attributed to religious fundamentalism. While zealotry, martyrdom, and the pursuit of salvation certainly empower religious fundamentalists with the liberty to decimate human targets, I argue that the sustaining necessity to recruit more terrorists from within the population, not religious fundamentalism alone, is an important predictor of the brutality of an attack. When targets are located within a potential recruitment population, there is an imminent need to restrict violence, as unnecessary collateral damage turns potential supporters away, rather than attracts them. Conversely, transnational attacks occurring outside the recruitment population abrogate these restrictions on violence. I test this argument on terrorist attacks from 1998–2005 and find empirical evidence that transnational attacks are a predictive cause of high casualty rates in a target population.     

Rape myth acceptance in men who completed the prostitution offender program of British Columbia

In an effort to characterize the attitudes and characteristics of men who solicit sex, this study investigated rape myth acceptance as assessed by a modification of Burt's Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. The participants were all men who took part in the Prostitution Offender Program of British Columbia after being arrested for attempting to solicit sex from an undercover police officer. Relationships between endorsement of rape myths, other attitudes, sexual behavior, and demographic variables were examined. Results reveal that age, education, use of pornography, ideal frequency of intercourse, and believing that purchasing sex is a problem are all negatively correlated with rape myth acceptance. Positive correlations were found between rape myth acceptance and sexual conservatism, sexual violence/coercion, and social desirability. Results are discussed in terms of the association between rape myth acceptance and the violence frequently perpetrated against those working in the sex trade.     

Parenting,Communication about Sexuality,and the Development of Adolescent Womens’ Sexual Agency: A Longitudinal Assessment

Sexual agency (i.e., the ability to make decisions and assertions related to one’s own sexuality) is associated with sexual health enhancing outcomes. Given that young women are expected to act passively, rather than with agency when it comes to sexual encounters, the present study aimed to explore whether parental support, knowledge, and communication about sexuality during late adolescence contribute to an enhancement of sexual agency in a sample of young women in the long-term. Using a longitudinal design (panel study), 320 female participants who participated in three data collection waves (T1, T2, and T5) were included in the analyses (M_age?=?16.2 years, SD?=?0.50 at baseline). Mediated by the frequency of parents’ communication about sexuality with their daughters, both dimensions of parental support (emotional engagement and support of autonomy) positively predicted adolescent women’s sexual agency two years later. In contrast, parental knowledge of their children’s whereabouts was unrelated to communication and female sexual agency. Specific dimensions of parenting seem to play a crucial role in empowering adolescent girls to act agentic through communicating, emotional support, and encouraging autonomy, which in turn may contribute to healthy sexual behavior in young adulthood.     

Memory Work Reconsidered

In this article we discuss the epistemological status of the knowledge and understandings that a specific way of working with women's experiences—memory work—generates. This discussion is held in the light of the last decades' feminist debate on the risks and problems inherent in research taking women's experience as a point of departure. We put forward memory work as a fruitful method of working scientifically with experiences, especially when it comes to understanding deeply naturalized power structures such as gender, nation, and sexuality. We show how different interpretative modes and practices in memory work may help us locate ruptures and ambivalences in the already known, and open up for understandings and interpretations that take us beyond the discursively given. However, several epistemological as well as methodological issues need to be addressed in order for memory work to render possible new forms of understanding that reach beyond established discourses and concepts. To avoid the much‐debated risk of essentialism and reproduction of different power structures, we argue that a great deal of reflection is required when elaborating research techniques. It is thereby necessary to carefully design the different steps in the process of memory work. This article shows how different ways of handling methodological problems in memory work—concerning foremost the choice of theme for the memory project, the textual practices used when writing memory stories, and the modes of interpretation employed—are crucial for what kind of analysis is made possible. We also highlight the importance of displacing the research problem at a certain distance from the theme of the project. The concepts of transferring and dislocating the research problem are introduced as a means to elucidate how different types of displacement generate different research results.