Measuring violence risk and outcomes among Mexican American adolescent females

Central to the development of culturally competent violence prevention programs for Hispanic youth is the development of psychometrically sound violence risk and outcome measures for this population. A study was conducted to determine the psychometric properties of two commonly used violence measures, in this case for Mexican American adolescent females. The Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2) and the Past Feelings and Acts of Violence Scale (PFAV) were analyzed to examine their interitem reliability, criterion validity, and discriminant validity. A sample of 150 low-risk and 150 high-risk adolescent females was studied. Discriminant validity was indicated by the perpetrator negotiation scale and by the victim psychological aggression and sexual coercion scales of the CTS2 and the PFAV. Analysis indicates that the CTS2 scales and the PFAV demonstrate adequate reliability, whereas strong criterion validity was evidenced by eight of the CTS2 scales and the PFAV.     

Children don't always tell the truth

Although children are being more frequently called as witnesses in court proceedings, they often do not tell the truth. If lying is defined as giving a false statement for personal gain, then lying is only one of several causes for children not giving an accurate account of events. Other reasons include an immature brain, a congenitally acquired defect in the central nervous system, or the presence of an emotional disturbance such as psychosis or hysteria. The desire of a child to please others--that is, parents, therapists, or lawyers--may also result in an invalid statement. These factors and motivations should be considered in trying to interpret a youngster's statement.     

The underexamined assumptions of the invisible hand: Monetary incentives as policy instruments

To alleviate overcrowding in pretrial detention facilities, the City of New York established a program offering substantial budgetary increments to those district attorneys' offices in the city that reduced the number of long-term detainee cases. The experience with this program suggests that the inherent assuptions underlying a monetary incentive strategy—the existence of capacity, the avoidability of goal displacement, and the efficacy of financial rewards—need to be carefully examined if implementation is to be successful.     

Partisan and ideological belief systems: Do they differ?

In this paper a direct comparison is made between the cognitive content of ideological and partisan belief systems. A quasi-experimental design was used in a two-part study. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a partisan or ideological condition and asked to categorize and then scale contemporary leaders, groups, and issues as either Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. Results indicate that the meanings of partisan and ideological belief systems are quite similar — their cognitive attributes (issues, groups, and leaders) are interchangeable at the categorical level and highly correlated (r=0.86) in their degree of typicality. Political sophistication is determined to contribute significantly to the degree to which partisan and ideological belief systems are related. For politically sophisticated subjects (Ss) the two belief systems are highly related (r=0.90), whereas for low sophisticates, the belief systems are only moderately related (r=0.50). Sophistication also plays an important role in structuring Ss' own issue preferences. High sophisticates in both the liberal-conservative and Democratic-Republican conditions exhibit a greater level of issue constraint, which can be interpreted as either ideological or partisan constraint.Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1983.     

Health habits and depression in adolescence

In a study of the relationship between health habits and depression, 80 high school students, selected on an availability basis, were administered a Health Behaviors Questionnaire (HBQ) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). The HBQ and the BDI significantly correlated (r=0.43p<0.01). Those who smoked were more frequently depressed than those who did not (X ²=10.5p<0.05), and those who used drugs other than marijuana were depressed more frequently than those who did not (X ²=9.2p<0.01). Mildly overweight boys (overweight by more than 5% of their ideal weight) and mildly under-weight boys (underweight by more than 5% of their ideal weight) were moreThis research was supported in part by a grant from the American Diabetes Association and by National institute of Health Grant MH 15529.Received his M.D. at George Washington School of Medicine. Major interest is interface of child psychiatry and pediatrics.Received his M.D. at Downstate Medical Center, State University of New York. Major interest is metabolic changes in adolescence.Received her M.A. from Queens College, New York. Major interest is measurement of human behavior.Received his M.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Major interest is adolescent sexuality.Received her Ph.D. in psychology from Hofstra University. Major interest is evaluation of clinical programs. depressed than boys of normal weight (p<0.02). The more pounds underweight the girls were, the more depressed they were (r=0.482, p<0.05). The closer the weight of a girl who perceived herself as overweight was to her ideal weight, the more depressed she was (r=–0.428,p<0.05).     

Black-box models of candidate evaluation

All contemporary models of candidate evaluation are memory-based models in that they treat the direction and strength of evaluation as a function of the mix of positively and negatively valued (valenced) information retrieved from memory. Yet, oddly enough, despite the assumption that memory mediates judgment, none of the major models looks at the processes involved in what information voters recall and how that evidence was integrated into a summary evaluation. In this sense then, political science models of vote choice are black-box models: They are silent about how voters actually go about interpreting information and integrating the evidence into a summary evaluation of the candidates. In this article we critique the major political science models, call attention to the implicit assumptions they make about what evidence is assumed to be in memory, and conclude with an argument for introducing process into our explanations of vote choice.