Responsibility Budgeting at the Air Force Materiel Command

The case study reported here challenges conventional wisdom about the feasibility of implementing responsibility budgeting and accounting practices in U.S. government. A variant of this practice took root and operated effectively in a large federal agency—the Air Force Materiel Command—during the period of study. Contrary to conventional wisdom, implementing a meaningful form of responsibility budgeting and accounting does not require changes in public management policies or systemic institutional reform. However, the evidence shows that instituting practices of responsibility budgeting and accounting may require considerable administrative ingenuity in adapting the generic practice to the situation at hand.     

The assessment of mother-child interactions in physically abusive and nonabusive families

Physically abusive mothers and their children were compared with matched nonabusive mothers and their children in a laboratory playroom setting. Parenting skills, as well as mother-child interaction patterns, were assessed using three different tasks designed to create varying levels of parental stress and child frustration. Mother-child interactions were observed and coded. Questionnaire measures of knowledge of child behavior and a measure of social desirability were also administered. Discriminant function analyses revealed that 10 of the 11 abusive mothers and 10 of the 12 control mothers could be correctly identified, representing an 87% classification rate. The main difference between the two groups was in the overall rate of activity. Abusive mothers engaged in significantly less behavior toward their children than control mothers; behavior rates were essentially similar for both groups of children. Abusive mothers contingently praised appropriate behavior significantly less often than controls, and abused children complied significantly less often to requests. The implications of these findings for the understanding and treatment of abusive parent-child interactions were discussed.     

Diffusion of responsibility in crime,punishment, and other adversity

Three studies tested the hypothesis that an individual acting alone, compared with an individual group member, would be held more responsible for behavior leading to a negative consequence. In one study, 240 subjects read scenarios of an event with a negative outcome involving one, two, three, or four individuals. As predicted, there was a significant inverse relationship between the number of participants and the degree of attributed responsibility. The second study investigated subjects' attributions of responsibility for criminals committing a crime alone or with a partner. Single perpetrators were considered more responsible than those acting with a partner, although there was no difference in sentence length assigned. In the third, archival-type study, prison sentences for criminals who had actually committed a robbery alone or with others were examined. Again, there was diffusion of responsibility: criminals acting alone received significantly longer sentences than perpetrators who had committed a similar crime, but who had acted with others.