Gender and Gender-Role Orientation Differences on Adolescents' Coping with Peer Stressors

Gender and gender-role orientation differences were explored on adolescents' coping with peer stressors. Eighth-grade and ninth-grade public junior high school students (N = 285) completed the COPE, reporting the strategies they recently used to deal with a stressful peer-related situation. Measures of gender-role orientation (Bem Sex-Role Inventory) and demographic information also were obtained. Factor analysis of the COPE revealed 4 distinct coping factors: active, avoidant, acceptance, and emotion-focused. The most frequently reported stressful event was arguments/fights with same-sex friends. Girls reported more arguments/fights with opposite-sex friends. Boys reported more physical fights and threats. Students' ratings of how much the situation mattered were used as a covariate in a MANCOVA to compare coping by gender and gender-role orientation, to control for perceived stressfulness of situations. Significant gender-role orientation differences were found for active, acceptance, and emotion-focused coping.     

Backpacking to Hailuogou Glacier

MOSTof the world's highest mountains are clustered along the barren, jagged area where Tibet, Nepal, and Pakistan meet, but Gongga Shan-in China's western Sichuan province -stands apart. A Western mountaineering team first reached its summit in 1935, and a Chinese team made the climb in the 1950s. The last team to attempt it perished in an avalanche.     

Mandates, Powers, and Policies

Elections provide a mandate to pursue a set of policies. Party label provides a concise ideological cue for voters to choose among candidates, and research on industrial democracies verifies a link between the parties voters elect and subsequent policy outcomes. The combination of inchoate party systems and economic vulnerability elsewhere may weaken the link between voter choice and policy. When examining economic policies in Latin America, there is some controversy as to whether governments carried out "reform by surprise"—promising one thing during a campaign while implementing another in office. We test whether the ideological reputations of executives' and legislators' parties explain whether they adopt market-oriented policies. We find that the future behavior of presidential candidates is difficult for voters to predict. However, the ideological reputation of legislators is a reliable predictor of policy outcomes, and the relationship is clarified by the prospects of collective action by legislative delegations.     

Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting: Has Its Time Really Come?

In April 1994 GASB released Concepts Statement No. 2, Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting , bringing required SEA external financial reporting a very large step closer to reality. Before long, public financial officials may be required to annually report measures of performance. We are now about halfway through the experimentation phase established in Statement 2. This article summarizes the status of GASB's SEA experimentation process. It then suggests important behavioral, auditing, and other issues which GASB ought to address before proceeding with any formal pronouncements regarding SEA reporting requirements.     

Multiparty electoral competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A model based on multinomial probit

A typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share. Here we use Euro-barometer survey data and European elite-study data from 1979 for the Netherlands and Germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response, based on multinomial probit estimation. For each of these countries, we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model. The latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics. The pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions. We use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions. We go on to propose a model of internal party decision-making based both on pre-election electoral estimation and post-election coalition bargaining. This model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions. We argue that maximizing expected vote will not, in general, be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation.