Adolescent Agentic Orientations: Contemporaneous Family Influence,Parental Biography and Intergenerational Development

Agentic orientations developed in adolescence have been linked to better health, well-being, and achievements in the years following. This study examines longitudinal parental influences on the development of adolescent children’s agentic orientations, captured by the core constructs of mastery beliefs and generalized life expectations. Drawing on multigenerational panel data from the United States (1991–2011), the study examines contemporaneous family factors, but also how parental biographies (their own transition to adulthood) and parents’ own adolescent agentic orientations influence their adolescent children. Study adolescents were 46% male, 52% white, and 15.6 years old on average. The findings indicate that parents’ early orientations and experiences in the transition to adulthood have little effect on their children’s mastery beliefs, but that parents’ generalized life expectations (in adolescence) and having married before having the child were associated with their children’s more optimistic life expectations. Contemporaneous family income and optimistic expectations among parents-as-adolescents were somewhat substitutable as positive influences on adolescents’ optimistic life expectations. The findings contribute to our understanding of intergenerational and over-time influences on these key adolescent orientations.     

A concept in search of a definition: The effects of reasonable doubt instructions on certainty of guilt standards and jury verdicts

Eighty (6-person) juries heard 1 of the 5 reasonable doubt instructions in a trial that either had strong evidence for guilt or favored acquittal. None of the instructions produced acceptable criteria of self-reported reasonable doubt, although instructions that informed juries to be firmly convinced (FC) elicited the highest standards of proof. The FC instructions yielded verdicts that tended to correspond with the evidence in both versions of the trial. FC juries focused proportionately more on the evidence and less on non-probative issues than juries given other instructions. Juries had lower self-reported standards of proof when the trial evidence was weak for conviction as opposed to when it was strong. The discussion addresses the surprisingly low self-reported standards of proof.     

THE ODDS ON CASINO PAINTINGS

ABSTRACT

This article considers the role of decorative paintings in two South African casinos, namely Carnival City and Caesars Gauteng. It suggests that entertainment landscapes such as casinos are subject to subtle and elaborate mechanisms whereby the creation of seductive milieus reinforces the myth of leisure and paradigms of hedonistic consumption. The use of strategies such as themeing is examined in order to propose that entertainment is increasingly predicated on the imperative of creating exotic, fantastic, escapist or extraordinary experiences – but at a price. The contentious issue of the need for a more authentic so-called African identity in casino developments is also broached. The authors point out that within the postmodern cultural hypermarket of unlimited choices, eclecticism and pastiche, cultures and histories have the potential to be reduced to themes and stereotypes, and can be endlessly re-duplicated in simulacral fantasy landscapes. This production of escapist consumer spaces is important, because the social role of casinos in South Africa has undergone radical changes during the last few years – far from being places of adult entertainment, they now embrace diverse forms of leisure activities for families.