General Media and Media-Related

William L. Rivers, Theodore Peterson and Jay W. Jensen's The Mass Media and Modern Society (Rinehart Press, $8.95)

Ronald T. Farrar and John D. Stevens' (eds.) Mass Media and the National Experience (Harper & Row, price not known (paper back))

Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's Mass Culture Revisited (Van Nostrand, both hardback and paperback at same time–price not yet known)

Wilbur Schramm (ed.) Process and Effects of Mass Communications (University of Illinois Press, details unknown)

The Steranko History of Comics (Supergraphics Publications, 501 Spruce St., Reading, Pa. 19602, $3.00 paperback)     

Engaging MSW Students in Faculty Research: Students’ Perspectives of Involvement in a Program Evaluation

Engaging social work students in research is challenging, in part, because of the way research is taught in the classroom and the need for learners to effectively develop connections between the “abstract world” of research concepts with the “real world” of professional experiences. This article describes the experiences of graduate social work students involved in a process and outcome evaluation of a community-based program. Analysis of student learning outcomes and the team-based model used to engage students in the evaluation are provided to put forth a paradigm of teaching social work research through direct, supervised, and collaborative engagement.     

Using action research to improve health and the work environment for 3500 municipal bus drivers

During the past five decades occupational researchers have documented that bus drivers’ health is worse than in almost any other profession. The authors suggest that the reason there has not been any successful attempt to change this situation is because the focus until now on removing statistically associated external risk factors has been too narrow. The article describes a project whose purpose was to improve the health and well‐being of 3500 Copenhagen bus drivers. At the end, more than 200 interventions were implemented. The authors adopted a new approach of combining epidemiological results and qualitative methodologies, creating a broader explanatory foundation for action, linked by repetitive processes of critical reflection, which was central to defining problems, explaining causes, developing sufficiently effective interventions and measuring effects. The project revealed the importance of several new and potentially preventable factors involving such issues as lifestyle, private stressors and inappropriate management. During the project period an evaluative framework was developed to explore and measure the complex effects of multiple interventions. Three years after the interventions were launched, follow‐ups revealed remarkable improvements such as reductions in stress and body pains, an increase in satisfaction, and improvements in management and the drivers’ cabin. This article is the story of a methodological journey, from classical epidemiology to an approach combining the strengths of survey (broad coverage), qualitative methods (in‐depth focus) followed by critical reflections and ending with action research.     

Let's understand Skodak and Skeels,finally 1

The well‐known study by Skodak and Skeels (1949), in which one hundred infants who were born to unwed mothers of below‐average IQ and were adopted into superior foster homes and grew up to obtain Stanford‐Binet IQs averaging 20 points higher than the IQs of their biological mothers, has frequently been interpreted as a contradiction of the evidence for the high heritability of intelligence. It is here shown that this is a misinterpretation of the Skodak and Skeels results, based on failure to consider the prediction made from a simple polygenic model of parent‐offspring resemblance. The Skodak and Skeels data, when analyzed properly in terms of a quantitative‐genetic model, are found to be not all improbable or contradictory of a broad heritability for IQ in the range of .70 to .80. Also, the common fallacy of generalizing the results of Skodak and Skeels as an environmental explanation of the cause of the approximately 1 σ mean white‐Negro IQ difference is explicated from the standpoint of genetic theory.     

Relational Framing Theory: Utterance Form and Relational Context as Antecedents of Frame Salience

Using relational framing theory, this article examines the influence of utterance type and relational context on the salience of relational frames. The authors report the results of two studies that used scenarios to manipulate utterance form and information about the relationship between interactants. Participants rated the relevance of dominance-submissiveness and affiliation-disaffiliation frames to interpreting the hypothetical interactions. Results showed that judgments of dominance-submissiveness frame salience were sensitive to variations in utterance type and relational context, but the results were mixed for the affiliation-disaffiliation frame. The authors discuss the implications for relational framing theory and the possibility of an affiliation bias.