Differentiating specialists and generalists within college students' social support networks

In order to examine the relationships among social network structure, types of social support, and determinants of support satisfaction, an alternative method was used to score the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ). Factor analysis procedures suggested that college students' (N=198) social networks consisted of four groups: nuclear family, other family, friends, and others. Satisfaction with support was positively related to the proportion of the network occupied by nuclear family and negatively related to the proportion of friends in the network. Evidence was found for the presence of both support specialists and support generalists in the networks of the college students. These results are discussed from a developmental perspective with attention to the implications for interventions.     

Relationship of life events and social support with psychological dysfunction among adolescents

Relationships among major life events, perceived social support, and psychological disorder were assessed in a sample of older adolescents. Negative life events and satisfaction with social support were significantly and independently related to a range of psychological symptoms. Further, the relationship between negative events and disorder was moderated by gender, the types of events experienced, and anticipated change in the psychosocial environment. The importance of the use of standardized and psychometrically sound measures of life events, social support, and psychological disorder is highlighted.Received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1980. An assistant professor, he is currently investigating stress and coping among children and adolescents.Received her Ph.D. from the University of Vermont in 1985. An assistant professor, she is currently studying social support.Received Ed. M. from Harvard Universtiy. He is a doctoral student in clinical psychology interested in the role of social support in coping with stress during adolescence.Received her BA from the University of Vermont. She is a doctoral student in clinical psychology.     

Political tolerance and stages of moral development: A conceptual and empirical alternative

The latest revisionism in the study of political tolerance has produced some of the most provocative well-designed research in the field of political science. In particular, the work by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus offers one of the most fully specified and rigorously executed models of public opinion formation. Yet this contemporary revisionism is flawed. This paper argues that these researchers misconceptualize tolerance, that this misconception contaminates their measurement process, that the resulting model is misspecified, and that the political conclusions offered are not supported in fact or principle. More generally this paper argues that the field of public opinion as a whole has been trapped by limited conceptions about the nature of cognitive constraint and by simplistic and inadequate methods for measuring and identifying this constraint. To remedy this, a developmental measure of cognitive moral stages is fashioned along lines suggested by Kohlberg. This measure satisfies a number of tests for both validity and reliability and appears to be one of the most powerful predictors of tolerance and intolerance — if not the most powerful single predictor.     

Self-reported delinquency and home life: Evidence from a sample of British girls

This study examines the correlation between family variables and delinquency (both self-reported and official) in a small sample of British teenage girls. Factor analysis of the 72-item Home Life Questionnaire (from T. H. Hirschi [1969] Causes of Delinquency, University of California Press, Berkeley) revealed a clear four-factor structure of caring and communication, discipline, pressure and mother-daughter closeness, which cumulatively accounted for 31% of the variance. Multiple regression of these factors onto self-reported delinquency indicated the maternal factor to be most powerful, explaining 25% of the variance in self-reported delinquency. Institutionalized and noninstitutionalized girls showed only chance differences in terms of the quality of their home life.Anne Campbell's research interests are in sex differences in antisocial behavior, especially aggression.     

Perceived fairness of drug-testing policies: An application of Leventhal’s principles of procedural justice

Employees rate the fairness of organizational policies by applying principles of distributive and procedural justice. Using Leventhal’s (1980) Principles of Procedural Justice, the current study surveyed 279 upper-level college and graduate students to determine the impact each principle has on support for drugtesting policies. The results support the hypothesis that drug-testing programs that violate these principles are viewed as unfair.