Interviewing Children about Real and Fictitious Events: Revisiting the Narrative Elaboration Procedure

Elementary school children participated in a staged event. Two weeks later they were randomly assigned to three interview conditions: (a) a streamlined version of the Narrative Elaboration (NE) procedure involving training in the use of reminder cue cards, (b) exposure to reminder cue cards without training in their use (cue card control group), and (c) a standard interview including no NE training or exposure to reminder cue cards (standard-interview control group). Children in each interview condition were questioned about the staged event and a fictitious event to determine whether children trained in the streamlined NE procedure would provide more information about a staged event than would children in the two control groups and whether the NE interview would result in increased reporting of false information when questioned about a fictitious event. Results indicated that children questioned with the NE interview reported a greater amount of accurate, but not a greater amount of inaccurate, information during cue-card presentation for the staged event than did the cue-card control group. Analyses further indicated that the NE-interview group did not report significantly more false information about the fictitious event than did children in the two control groups. Large standard deviations for the NE-interview children's cue-card recall indicate that the streamlined NE procedure was useful for many children in reporting the staged event, but may have contributed to a small number of children providing false information for the fictitious event. Further research is being conducted to determine which children may be more likely to be helped and which children may be more likely to provide false information regarding a fictitious event.     

The Human Dimensions of Pollution Policy Implementation: Air quality in rural China

The People's Republic of China is experiencing severe air pollution with very serious public health and economic consequences. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has sought to utilize bureaucratic, political, legal and educational vehicles to address these problems. This paper examines the ways in which those policy measures have been communicated to, understood by, and acted upon by the citizenry, drawing in important part on household and epidemiological surveys conducted in Anhui. Our study suggests that the central government's message has yet to be absorbed to the degree intended and then considers both why this has been the case and how the effectiveness of policy mechanisms might be enhanced.     

Rape and the Reasonable Man

Standards of reasonability play an important role in some of the most difficult cases of rape. In recent years, the notion of the reasonable person has supplanted the historical concept of the reasonable man as the test of reasonability. Contemporary feminist critics like Catharine MacKinnon and Kim Lane Scheppele have challenged the notion of the reasonable person on the grounds that reasonability standards are gendered to the ground and so, in practice, the reasonable person is just the reasonable man in a gender neutral guise. These critics call for the explicit employment of a reasonable woman standard for application to the actions of female victims of rape. But the arguments for abandoning a gender-neutral standard are double-edged and the employment of gendered standards of reasonability is likely to have implications that are neither foreseen by, nor acceptable to, advocates of such standards. Reasonable agent standards can be dropped, in favor of appeals to the notion of a reasonable demand (or expectation) by the law. However, if reasonable agent standards are to be retained, gendered versions of such standards are not preferable to gender-neutral ones.