Noting that there is growing interest in systematic, ethnographic studies of mass media and their primary audiences (families), this paper seeks to encourage additional ethnographic study of audience behavior by discussing some theoretical concerns that bear on the qualitative research enterprise. To do this, the paper first introduces a variety…

K.E. Ferguson's analysis of women's place in capitalist society and the concurrent elevation of bureaucratic structures seriously challenges administration analysts. According to Ferguson, modern bureaucracy requires constant maintenance in reifying its dominance structure and locating and suppressing opposition. This analysis can be applied to…

It has been suggested that surveys dealing with the incidence of crime among the elderly do not take into account the varying individual and group levels of fear and exposure to threat of victimization. Data from Law Enforcement Assistance Administration surveys were used to review the personal victimization of older persons, incorporating the…

K. Burke's (1945) pentad identifies five contributing factors in any communication event: agent, purpose, act, scene, and agency. Using the pentad as an organizational schema, this paper summarizes problems in methods used by behavioral researchers to study the deceptive communication event. The paper argues that fragmenting the communication act…

Research on personality and aging has been limited by several factors, including nomethetic assumptions about traits; overreliance on morale scales as measures of adaptation; and the confounding of cohort, time of measurement and age effects. An idiographic approach, which focuses on traits that individuals subjectively feel as important, may help…

During the last few years the research enterprise dealing with the status projections of youth, and in particular, the numerous empirical studies focusing on occupational aspirations and expectations, has increasingly come under criticism within the sociological community. The paper acknowledges the criticism directed toward projection research as…

Verbal and nonverbal patterns of dominance in dyads formed from a group of 72 college students determined to be sex-type males, sex-type females, or androgynous individuals were investigated in the study described in this paper. The paper first notes problems in recent research on sex differences in communication, presents the research questions…

Even though attrition presents a serious threat to the validity of longitudinal research, there is a lack of standardization for reporting it. To examine the effectiveness of four tests for attrition -- two for external validity and two for internal validity -- the tests were applied to two large scale projects: the first, Project HASP, is a…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a model of the psychological processes that take place when a persuader decides to use or not to use a given persuasive message. The assumption is made that if the perceived emotional impact of a message is more positive than an ethical threshold (which varies from person to person), the persuader will use…

Psychological literature seemingly provides contradictory answers to the question of whether women and men are equally effective as leaders. There are generally two approaches used to answer this question: assign males and females the role of leader, keeping certain extraneous factors constant, and then compare leader or group effectiveness; or…

Until recently, research on management and careers typically examined white, middle-class male subjects. Patterns, norms, and career problems brought to light by this research are not necessarily applicable to wider populations. When studies on women did appear, at first they were typically more polemical than scientific; they sought to prove…