The Attitudes Towards Dating Violence Scales: Development and Initial Validation

This study describes the development and validation of three Attitudes Towards Male Dating Violence (AMDV) Scales and three Attitudes Towards Female Dating Violence (AFDV) Scales. These scales measure attitudes toward use of psychological, physical, and sexual dating violence, respectively, by boys and by girls. Eight hundred twenty-three students from grades 7, 9, and 11 participated in the validation study. All six scales have good internal consistencies. As predicted, students were more accepting of girls' use of violence than of boys' use of violence, and boys were more accepting of violence than were girls. The six scales were positively correlated with traditional attitudes toward gender roles and with each other, providing evidence for their construct validity. Higher scores on the AMDV Scales were related to boys' past use of violence in dating relationships and to their having aggressive friends, supporting their criterion-related validity. Higher scores on the AFDV Scales were associated with girls' past use of dating violence but not with their having aggressive friends, providing partial support for their criterion-related validity. Singly or in combination, the Attitudes Towards Dating Violence Scales can be used to increase our understanding of the development and maintenance of violence-supportive attitudes in adolescents of all ages.     

Evaluating the forensic informativeness of mtDNA haplogroup H sub-typing on a Eurasian scale

The impact of phylogeographic information on mtDNA forensics has been limited to the quality control of published sequences and databases. In this work we use the information already available on Eurasian mtDNA phylogeography to guide the choice of coding-region SNPs for haplogroup H. This sub-typing is particularly important in forensics since, even when sequencing both HVRI and HVRII, the discriminating power is low in some Eurasian populations. We show that a small set (eight) of coding-region SNPs resolves a substantial proportion of the identical haplotypes, as defined by control-region variation alone. Moreover, this SNP set, while substantially increasing the discriminating efficiency in most Eurasian populations by roughly equal amounts, discloses population-specific profiles.     

Voting on public spending: Differences between public employees,transfer recipients,and private workers

Politicians who support higher public spending in the hope of gaining the support of transfer recipients, such as the aged, the unemployed, and those on welfare, have no reason to believe that the strategy will succeed; according to the evidence reviewed here, transfer recipients do not vote much differently on such issues from other voters. State and local employees have shown a clear preference for higher public spending, but their numbers are limited and the relative strength of their preference weak, so that their impact on voting outcomes has been only marginal.     

The Impact of Distributive and Procedural Justice on Social Service Workers

The concepts of fairness and justice are embodied within the organizing principle of social justice. Although social justice is a primary focus of social work, social service workers are not always treated with fairness by their own employers. The results from a survey of 255 social service employees from a variety of agencies in Northwest Ohio indicate that distributive justice and procedural justice, two dimensions of organizational justice, are both significant predictors of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, with procedural justice having two to three times the impact of distributive justice.