What's different about truants? A comparison study of eighth-graders

Differences and similarities between 25 eighth-grade truants and 25 nontruants-matched for age, grade, gender, and ethnicity-were explored on four dimensions: family variables, friendship patterns and interests, behavior and attitudes toward school, and cognitive factors including academic ability and achievement. The major differences were in school behavior, attitudes, academic ability, and achievement. The most frequent reasons given for truancy were boredom and dislike of school and teachers. Truancy was associated with highly disruptive classroom behavior. The salience of school variables suggests that truancy prevention and intervention strategies should include improved course content, teaching, and school climate. The necessity of having a comparison group is stressed in order to distinguish characteristics of normal adolescent development from those associated with maladjustment.Received Ph.D. from University of California, Davis. Current interests are early adolescents' development and school environment.     

The role of emotional abuse in physically abusive relationships

Two hundred thirty four women were interviewed to assess the relationship of emotional abuse to physical abuse. Six major types of emotional abuse were identified. Analyses determined if the types of emotional abuse were related to the frequency and severity of physical abuse. Women in long-term abusive relationships were contrasted with women experiencing only short-term abuse. Other comparisons consisted of: women who thought emotional abuse was worse than physical abuse vs. women who thought the opposite; and women who could predict physical abuse from the emotional abuse were compared with those who could not. The extent to which the women believed the men's threats and ridicule or thought their abusive behavior was justified was used as a factor to determine the impact of emotional abuse. Future research should investigate emotional abuse patterns in nonbattering relationships for comparison with battered women's experiences.     

Prospects for Low-Income Mothers' Economic Survival Under Welfare Reform

This article discusses implications of data on the income andemployment patterns of welfare recipients for the types of programmaticand financial investments that states will need to make forsuccessful welfare reform. Research by the Institute for Women'sPolicy Research found that even before welfare reform, womenworked significant amounts of time and relied heavily on familysupports to survive, when possible. High school education andjob training are important predictors of having welfare andescaping poverty, while work experience alone has relativelylittle effect on leaving welfare. States will be challengedto provide these educational services within the restrictionson job training and education under the new welfare laws. Workingwelfare recipients in the institute's sample spent more thanone third of their income on child care, which speaks to theimportance of increased child-care subsidies for helping womenescape poverty. It is important for states and communities tomonitor the implementation of supportive services, track outcomesfor women who leave welfare, and improve work environments andemployment benefits.     

Relationship between depressed mood and sex-typed personality characteristics in adolescents

The current study investigated the relationship between self-reports of depressed mood, self-esteem, and endorsement of sex-typed personality characteristics in a normal adolescent population. For positively valenced (socially desirable) sex-typed characteristics, masculinity was inversely related to depression while femininity was not significantly related. In contrast, for negatively valenced sex-typed characteristics the masculine and feminine scales showed similar effects: all were positively correlated with depression. Self-esteem was the best single predictor of depression and none of the sextyped characteristics contributed significantly beyond that accounted for by self-esteem. The results support previous findings with younger children and high school students by demonstrating that sex-typed characteristics in adolescents are significantly associated with depression, although this relationship is accounted for by the variance shared with self-esteem, a more general measure of mental health. However, the presence of negative feminine-typed characteristics was as highly correlated with depression as the absence of positive masculine characteristics and both relationships were stronger for females than males. Thus the linkages between sex-role socialization, sex-typed characteristics, self-esteem, depressed mood, and clinical depression bear further investigation, and may prove useful in understanding the development of depression in males and females.Received Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Pennsylvania State University in 1976. Current research interests include the development of depression and eating disorders.Received Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the Pennsylvania State University in 1981. Current research interest is childhood depression.     

Key women,key issues

Gillian Beer, George Eliot, Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Key Women Writers series (Harvester Press) Sussex, 1986.     

Restorative Justice: The Challenge of Sexual and Racial Violence

The paper reviews the theory and policy proposals of recent formulations of abolitionism and restorative justice. Challenges are posed to some of the assumptions of abolitionism by considering its applicability to acts of violence against women, children, and minority ethnic citizens. In particular, the assumptions that dangerous offenders are few, and that the 'meaning' of a harmful act is negotiable between perpetrators and victims, are called into question. The symbolic function of criminalization and penalization is discussed. The paper considers whether the strategies suggested by recent proponents of forms of abolitionism and restorative justice can satisfy doubts about the adequacy of earlier abolitionist formulations in relation to both the symbolic and instrumental functions presently served by criminal law.Whilst calls for further criminalization and penalization of racial, sexual, and domestic violence are understandable, the abolitionist case that retributive justice is more likely to increase rather than reduce such violence, and to leave victims unsatisfied, is defended.     

Justice of Conjugal Divisions of Labor—You Can't Always Get What You Want

The new intramarital distributions of 190 young parents in their third month of first parenthood were studied in a multifaceted distributive and procedural justice framework. For a large majority, justice was an important dimension in their intramarital distributions of household labor, child care, leisure time, breadwinning. Justice ratings of various principles in general were more liberal than the reported practice, in women even more than in men. The practice reported was mainly traditional, with a gender-segregated distribution of labor. A pattern of marked consistencies and inconsistencies between the principles rated as just and factual practice emerged. Inconsistencies occurred more often in women than in men.