The Future of Incidental Findings: Should They be Viewed as Benefits?

This paper argues against considering incidental fndings (IFs) as potential benefts of research when assessing the social value of proposed research, determining the appropriateness of a study's risk/beneft ratio, and identifying and disclosing the risks and benefts of participation during informed consent. The possibility of generating IFs should be disclosed during informed consent as neither a risk nor beneft, but as a possible outcome collateral to participation. Whether specifc IFs will be disclosed when identifed is a separate question whose answer is material to determining whether IFs constitute a risk or a potential indirect beneft of participation. Finally, three types of IF should be distinguished and treated diferently during informed consent: those that will be routinely generated (e.g., results of testing to determine study eligibility), those that can reasonably be characterized in terms of their nature and frequency of generation (e.g., misattributed parentage), and those of unpredictable nature and frequency that can be characterized only in general terms. Research protocols should provide a rationale for sharing or not sharing IFs of these three types with participants. Regulatory review of such plans should not, however, be confused with regarding IFs as potential benefts when assessing the study's risk/beneft ratio or merit.     

Factors which deter public officials from reporting corruption

A survey of over 800 public sector employees was conducted to explore the factors which would be most likely to deter public sector employees from reporting workplace corruption. Respondents were asked to consider whether they would make a report in the absence of certain factors which have been found in past research to impact on the decision to make reports. The aim was to determine which workplace strategies managers should make a priority when encouraging employees to report workplace corruption. Concern about not having enough proof was the most commonly reported deterrent, followed by the absence of legal protection from negative consequences. The factors which were reported as deterring the least number of respondents were the absence of role responsibility for reporting corruption and not being directly affected by the corruption. Respondents from lower income groups were more likely to be deterred from reporting corruption in the absence of encouraging factors. In addition, a relationship was found between a lack of information about mechanisms for reporting corruption and a negative attitude toward reporting corruption. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Direct supervision and delinquency: Assessing the adequacy of structural proxies

This research tests the hypothesis that children who grow up in families that carefully and consistently monitor children's behavior will be less delinquent than children in families where supervision is lax and/or haphazard. Although research operationalizing direct supervision in family interactional terms has supported this hypothesis, research using structural proxies for direct supervision (i.e., family size, broken home, and employed mother) has tended to show negligible effects. This research tests the direct supervision hypothesis using a more parsimonious structural proxy — the ratio of adults to children in a household. It is hypothesized that this ratio will be negatively related to delinquency, and that it will be a stronger predictor of delinquency than more common structural measures. Using data from the 1986 wave of the Monitoring the Future survey (Bachman, Johnston, and O'Malley, 1986), bivariate and multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models reveal that none of the structural variables, including the ratio of adults to children, are good predictors of delinquency. These results support Wells and Rankin's (1958) contention that family structural proxies are inadequate for testing the specific family functional processes on which direct supervision hinges.     

Boundaries of Legitimacy: Sex, Violence, Citizenship, and Community in a Local Sexual Economy

Studies of prostitution have overlooked the role of law in constituting the identities and sexual practices of women in the sex trade and defining the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence in the sexual economy. Drawing on field work with sex trade participants in a northwestern United States city, this paper explores how the cultural logic of modern liberal law shapes women's identities and interpretations of their actions. In positioning women in the sex trade as "sexual outlaws" to be managed and subjected to the full scope of legal authority, the law simultaneously limits women's citizenship and withdraws its protection. Moreover, in restricting women's ca-pacity to invoke fundamental legal rights, the law effectively sanctions "private" or extralegal forms of discipline and creates a space for violence. Given the paradoxical position these women hold as sexual outlaws on the one hand and frequent victims of physical and sexual assault on the other, I explore how they negotiate consent and resist violence.     

The emotional motivation of righteous behavior

A distinction is made between two types of prosocial behavior: personal-helping and righteous behavior. Past studies suggest that sympathy may motivate personal helping but not righteous behavior. The latter may be better predicted by feelings of moral outrage and existential guilt. An experiment was designed to motivate a piece of righteous behavior, the writing of a political letter to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. A series of premeasures ascertained strength of attitude, sense of efficacy, acceptance of responsibility, and prior antinuclear behavior. Subjects who supported a nuclear freeze were exposed to material advocating a nuclear test ban, a video of a congressional aide who argued for the efficacy of writing letters to congressional representatives, and emotionally arousing material on the bombing of Hiroshima. After answering a questionnaire that included items to measure emotional state, subjects were individually given the opportunity to write a letter as they were waiting to be interviewed. Social pressure was deliberately minimized. Extent of moral outrage predicted both previous behavior and letter-writing behavior during the experiment. It combined with previous behavior and sense of efficacy to predict 56% of the variance in experimental behavior: Neither sympathy nor existential guilt were significantly related to this righteous behavior.