1992 career guide. Best jobs for the future. Salary survey

The best news many workers are looking for when annual review time rolls around this year is that they'll have a job for the foreseeable future. A raise? That's surely hoping for too much. Indeed, some 10 percent of the organizations surveyed by the Wyatt Co., a compensation and benefits consulting firm in New York, have frozen wages this year. About 3 percent plan to do the same in 1992. But salaries have clearly been pummeled harder in some industries than in others. The paychecks of people who work in the retail trade and in the building materials and equipment industry, for example, have barely kept pace with inflation this year. Next year promises more of the same. Those in the legal field, by contrast, enjoyed raises of 8 percent in 1991, and nurse-anesthetists averaged 10 percent. Across the board, salaries in 1991 went up 5.5 percent. But businesses are cynical about the economy's prospects, says Wyatt compensation expert Marsha Cameron, and their planned raises for 1992 average only 5.3 percent. To determine where a profession pays best, U.S. News, in conjunction with Wyatt, took a look at what 18 jobs pay on average at the entry, senior professional and middle manager levels in five regions of the country. The salaries come from Wyatt's survey of more than 3,500 organizations across the United States. New graduates in software engineering may want to send their résumés to Texas and Colorado, for example, where starting salaries, at $34,200, average $6,200 more than in Alabama and Georgia.250+     

Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI): A Systemic Approach to Complex Developmental Trauma

Children and youth who have experienced foster care or orphanage-rearing have often experienced complex developmental trauma, demonstrating an interactive set of psychological and behavioral issues. Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) is a therapeutic model that trains caregivers to provide effective support and treatment for at-risk children. TBRI has been applied in orphanages, courts, residential treatment facilities, group homes, foster and adoptive homes, churches, and schools. It has been used effectively with children and youth of all ages and all risk levels. This article provides the research base for TBRI and examples of how it is applied.     

Revisiting Dynamic Social Impact Theory: Extensions and Applications for Political Science

Traditional social science research tends to regard political attitudes as the product of individuals’ internal processes. This approach ignores the existence of external influences on individual attitudes, particularly that of social communication. We argue that political attitudes are neither confined to the individual, nor are they wholly social constructions. This study examines how political information is structured and communicated through a social medium. We employ multi-agent simulation to replicate and extend a previous simulation of attitude formation based on Latané’s (American Psychologist 36:343–356, 1981) theory of social impact. Specifically, our extension of the previous model incorporates motivated reasoning processes, attitude persuasiveness, and agent uncertainty in order to more accurately capture the pervasiveness of social communication. These changes allow us to model effects not previously possible, such as attitude polarization and information cascades. Results from this study show that realistic structures in the distributions of attitudes can be recreated using prevailing aggregate- and individual-level models of attitude formation. By formally modeling the dynamics of social impact, researchers gain insight into social influences on individuals’ attitudes and the consequences for public opinion.     

Attributions for Improvement in Children Bullied at School

ABSTRACT

This mixed methods study describes attributions for improvement following reductions in victimization for children who were bullied at school. It also tests hypotheses from attribution theory about attributions associated with improvements. The sample was a subset of families who participated in an RCT of a family cognitive-behavioral program to reduce victimization; to be included, both the parent and child needed to report reductions in child victimization at 9 months. Attributions were compared across conditions, respondents (parents versus children) and time. Both parents and children attributed improvements most often to actions by the target child. Intervention families were more likely than control families to attribute changes to their own efforts than to external factors. The relevance of internal attributions for the success of interventions is discussed.     

The Decision Not to Furl the Confederate Flag in My Classroom

Over the last year and a half, a number of scholars, pundits, and journalists have criticized college campuses for coddling students by constructing environments that protect them from offensive opinions and evidence that disconfirms their prior attitudes. In this article, I suggest two pedagogical techniques that can help students encounter and digest evidence that may go against their preconceived worldviews and opinions: teaching rational versus irrational thought and quantitative research design and critique. Guiding undergraduates through empirical studies on sensitive topics and encouraging them to critique their findings in a rational, academic manner can help ease them into more reasoned and less reactionary discourse about race, gender, religion, politics, and any other controversial topic in today’s contentious climate. I use my own experience teaching students research design in the months following a race-related murder to illustrate the effectiveness of this method in an extreme circumstance.