Bookselling Online: An Examination of Consumer Behaviour Patterns

Based upon empirical research, and using a range of methods, this paper examines the behaviour and experiences of consumers in online bookselling settings and offers comparison between online and offline (traditional) bookselling. The research finds that while the convenience of online bookshops is important, the key factors enticing consumers online are a combination of breadth of range, ease of access to obscure titles, as well as ‘personalised’ recommendations and customer reviews. The research is of value to the book trade, highlighting consumer responses to widely adopted online marketing approaches. The research also contributes to scholarly knowledge in the fields of consumer behaviour, e-marketing and e-commerce in online bookselling, as well as providing findings which can be tested in other online settings, informing future theoretical research.     

Instructional/Educational Media

Public Telecommunications Review (bi-monthly at $12.50 per year in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, $17.00 Elsewhere) and Volume I:1 appeared in August 1973

S. Young Lee and Ronald J. Pedone's Summary Statistics of Public Television Licensees Fiscal Year 1972 (Washington: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1973—no price listed, paperback)

Frederick Williams, Geraldine Van Wart and Monty Stanford's Carrascolendas: National Evaluation of a Spanish/English Educational Television Series (Austin, Texas: School of Communication, Center for Communication Research of the University of Texas, June 1973—$6.00, paper)

Children's Television Workshop offers its 1973 Annual Report (1 Lincoln Plaza, N.Y. 10023) which discusses developments in Sesame Street, Electric Company     

Communication Research and General Media

William B. Fairley and Frederick Mosteller, eds. Statistics and Public Policy (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977— price not given)

Julian L. Simon's Basic. Research Methods in Social Sciences: The Art of Empirical Investigation (New York: Random House, 1978—$14.95)

Delbert C. Miller's Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement (New York: McKay, 1978—$14.95, with a paperback edition available)

James Monaco, ed. Media Culture and Celebrity: The Media as Image Makers (New York: Delta Books (Dell), 1978—$4.95 each, paper)     

The contributions of parental management language to executive function in preschool children

This study investigated relations between preschoolers’ emergent executive function skills and their interactions with parents, with particular focus on the verbal utterances parents use to guide children's behavior (i.e., management language). Parent–child dyads (n = 127) were videotaped during a structured play task and the frequency of two types of management language, Direction (high control) and Suggestion (low control), was observed. Children's executive function was assessed using the Head–Toes–Knees–Shoulders (HTKS) task. Latent growth modeling was used to investigate relations between management language and the development of children's executive function. Direction language (i.e., commands) was negatively associated with children's age three executive function but not significantly related to the rate of executive function development over time. Conversely, Suggestion language (i.e., questions and statements that offer children some degree of choice) was positively related to executive function at age three but negatively related to growth. The potential importance of management language as a parenting behavior that contributes to various aspects of children's self-regulation during preschool and kindergarten is discussed.     

A Note on the Correction for Chance Success

A questionnaire was filled out by 108 graduates of a B.A. program in psychology. The subjects provided biographical data and information about credits in psychology, GPA, fields of interest, reasons for majoring in psychology, psychology-related employment during undergraduate study, plans for graduate study, occupational use of psychology after graduation, occupational and/or personal value of the B.A. program, value of faculty help and advisement, and outstanding characteristics of helpful faculty. Analyses of the data led to 11 conclusions, some of which confirm the findings of a previous study and others of which provide new information about the uniform as well as differential effects of the undergraduate curriculum.     

Amateur values in pageantry

This essay argues for an enlarged conceptualization of deception. A multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments of forty‐six deception‐related terms identified a number of aspects underlying the construct. They included evaluation, detectability, and premeditation. The elicited terms were subjected to a hierarchical cluster analysis, which revealed six families of deception: fictions, playings, lies, crimes, masks, and unlies. Implications of these results were explored.