With the trend toward early retirement and the fact that people are living to an older average age, more years of an individual's life will be spent in retirement. To examine personal values as psychological determinants of the retirement preparation process, 206 classified university employees, between the ages of 50 and 65 years of age,…

As the fit between job values and job rewards becomes more important to American workers, it is important to understand factors which may affect these values. Data from the combined General Social Surveys of 1974, 1976, 1977 and 1980 were used to investigate the influence of education, job prestige, earnings, age, sex, race, and family…

Protection motivation theory proposes that a perceived threat to health activates cognitive appraisals of the severity of the threatened event, the probability of its occurrence, and the efficacy of a coping response; a recent reformulation of the theory incorporates self-efficacy expectancy as a fourth mediating cognitive process. To test the…

Many would agree that learning on the Web--a highly autonomous learning environment--may be difficult for individuals who lack motivation and self-regulated learning skills. Using a social cognitive view of academic motivation and self-regulation, the objective of the present study was to investigate the relations between students' motivational…

Consensus has been identified as a dimension of family solidarity with important implications for the family network. To investigate the factors contributing to consensus between older adults and their sibling of most contact, 275 adults (173 females, 102 males), with a mean age of 74 years, were interviewed using a questionnaire covering work and…

Values are a central concept in understanding and predicting human behavior. Value priority differences have been shown to predict important political, social, and economic attitudes and behaviors. The purpose of this study was to identify differences and similarities among the value hierarchies of adolescents who have never tried alcohol,…

Whether or not there are sex differences in helping behavior is a question that has attracted interest from both theoretical and applied perspectives. A meta-analysis was conducted of 172 studies of helping behavior, coded for publication date, source, sex of author, sample size, setting, type of appeal for help, availability of other helpers, sex…

This report presents a methodology for examining perceptual development in the arts and describes a study based on this methodology. The purpose of the study was to chart the developmental course of perceptual skills used in the arts and to investigate whether these skills generalize across art forms and aesthetic properties or whether they are…

While data on the onset of cigarette smoking among younger adolescents has been investigated extensively, it is less clear whether the same social factors influence older adolescents. To examine these social factors, as well as the influence of personality and beliefs, 1,977 high school participants in an anti-smoking study completed a…

The relation of moral reasoning to moral behavior has been the subject of a substantial number of empirical studies; it may be more productive to employ a configuration of characteristics to predict moral behavior. To investigate the relation of moral reasoning and personality variables to moral behavior, 74 undergraduates, 30 males and 44…

Kohn's work on the relationship between social class and parental values was expanded by searching for value dimensions other than Kohn's self-direction/conformity construct and by investigating three aspects of social structure: immigrant status, quality of neighborhood, and housing type. Data were collected from parents of 305 9- to 11-year-old…

Health care providers have become increasingly interested in involving individuals in health promotion activities and programs. To investigate those variables which might predict an individual's interest in becoming involved in health promotion, 84 male and 125 female undergraduates were administered paper and pencil measures to assess their…

A study examined screening measures that are used to predict whether a student will teach after graduation from an agricultural education program. The population for the study consisted of 72 student teachers studying in the Department of Agricultural Education at the University of South Florida from 1977 to 1982. Before starting student teaching,…