Book review

Veronica Doubleday, Three Women of Herat. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988, ix + 222 pp., glossary, illustrative chapter headings, colour photographs; L12.95. ISBN 0–224–02440‐X.     

Society as emergent and more than rational: An essay on the inappropriateness of program evaluation

In considering the efficacy of program evaluation researchers have not put language in proper perspective. They have not acknowledged that information gained from applied research is partly determined by situational factors, that language is selective and goal-oriented, justifying activity as often as it describes it, or that some important action cannot be expressed. The importance of language distinguishes applied social assessment from the natural science models of research from which it was derived. Examples from a wide range of applied situations are used to illustrate that, as an anticedent-consequent model of objective quantified assessment, evaluation is also inconsistent with the complex, resourceful, emergent social processes it is intended to measure. Three alternatives to quantification are discussed to illustrate interventions that may be made when the disadvantages of program evaluation outweigh the advantages.Preparation of the paper was supported by National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral training grant 5T222-MH00180. Comments and requests for reprints should be sent to Nancy Cochran, Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, State of Illinois, 160 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago. Illinois 6061.     

A meta-analytic review of the weapon focus effect

This meta-analytic review examined 19 tests of the weapon focus effect—the hypothesis that the presence of a weapon during commission of a crime will negatively affect an eyewitness's ability to later identify the perpetrator. A significant overall difference between weapon-present and weaponabsent conditions was demonstrated, with weapon presence leading to reduced identification accuracy. Overall, the size of the effect was small (.13) for the dependent measure of lineup identification and moderate (.55) for feature accuracy. Discussion focuses on those factors that appear to mediate and facilitate the weapon focus effect. This research was supported by a grant from the Bush Foundation through Augsburg College.