Social orientation and the social self-esteem of gifted and talented female adolescents

Carlson's developmental theory of self-concept provides a theoretical explanation for equivalent levels of self-esteem among both sexes, despite sex differences in self-concept. The present study tests the applicability of Carlson's theory for a sample of gifted and talented female adolescents by examining three dimensions of possible self-esteem antecedents: actual talent ratings, self-perceptions of talent, and personality attributes. According to Carlson, talent ratings, self-perceptions, and personality attributes consistent with the feminine gender-role stereotype and a social orientation should emerge as positive predictors of the female adolescent's social self-esteem. Results of the regression analyses indicate that the best prediction of the social self-esteem of gifted and talented female adolescents is obtained from a combination of stereotypic feminine socially oriented and stereotypic masculine personally oriented predictor variables. For this sample, constructs such as androgyny appear to be more relevant to the understanding of social self-esteem than dichotomies such as personal-social orientation.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Women's Educational Equity Act, U.S. Office of Education Grant OE G00760497.Received Ph.D. in educational psychology from Case Western Reserve University. Research interest is the career development of the gifted and talented.Received Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Research interests include individual differences, the gifted and talented, and creativity.     

The relationship between crime and private security at US shopping centers

This paper uses self-report data from the 1993 National Shopping Center Security Survey to examine the growing problem of crime at shopping centers located in the United States. Security managers from 369 shopping centers provided data on crime incidents, private security measures, and numerous shopping center demographic measures. Data are analyzed via LISREL using bivariate regression modeling. Results show that there is no direct relationship between the private security measures at the shopping center and the occurrence of property, violent, or public order crimes on the premises. Instead, private security presence is shaped by the size of the shopping center. Direct effects were also found between the incidence of crime on the premises and the size of the shopping center and the presence of various “problematic” persons (i.e., gangs and loitering groups of youth). Possible implications for shopping center security are considered.     

Incidence of auditory ossicle luxation and petrous bone fractures detected in post-mortem multislice computed tomography (MSCT)

As the auditory ossicles are difficult to display without harming them in conventional autopsies, lesions of these minute bones and the ossicular chain are regularly missed. In this study, the method of choice in clinical medicine for the examination of such lesions, namely multislice computed tomography, was applied to 100 corpses.The hereby obtained results regarding ossicle luxation and petrous bone fracture indicated that the lesions were not dependant on the amount, but rather on the type of energy inflicted to the head.     

Reducing Variability in Civil Jury Awards

The purpose of the present study was to test several procedures that could be adopted for reducing unwanted variability in civil damage awards. Four methods for providing guidance to jurors (and judges) about the distribution of awards in comparable cases were compared to each other, to a no-guidance control, and to the capping of awards at a specified maximum, which has been the most commonly legislated solution. The findings of this study suggest several alternative solutions that are better able than caps to solve the problem of unwanted variability in awards.     

Race,occupational status,and pro-active police arrest for drinking and driving

The issue of pro-active police arrest bias by race, occupational status, and police patrol intensity is examined using the offense of DUI (Driving Under the Influence of alcohol). Intoxicated drivers from a 10-weekend roadside survey of vehicles randomly selected from the streets of a medium-sized southeastern metropolitan area are compared to officially arrested drivers apprehended during a corresponding time period. Upon examination, no statistically significant arrest bias was detected by the driver's race. However, compared to the roadside survey population, lower occupational status drivers (i.e., blue collar) were significantly more likely to appear in the arrested population than an upper status (i.e., white collar) driver—especially in the lightly patrolled middle and upper class residential sections of town. The significance of occupational status, when combined with the finding that race was not a significant indicator of difference between the arrested and roadside survey populations, suggests that pro-active police arrest bias is more a function of institutionally determined police patrol practices rather than overt racial prejudice on the part of individual officers.