One of the most frequently touted benefits of higher education is the opportunity to interact with people different from oneself, yet these interactions do not automatically lead to positive outcomes. The purpose of this study is to explore how one particular context for diversity interactions, service-based alternative break programs, may provide…

Cross-cultural friendships and peer interactions are important skills for Latino students to become socially adjusted in U.S. schools. Culturally responsive social skill instruction allows educators to teach essential social skills while attending to the native culture and personal experiences of the students. The present study examined the…

Leadership is a multifaceted construct. It requires mentoring as a lifelong experience. Leadership is not an isolated phenomenon, but an activity completely interrelated with those one leads. It can never be separated from its essential community or organizational context. This makes the experience of mentoring all the more critical. Adding yet to…

The need to collaborate in the fields of business, health care, and technology is not a new concept. Educational institutions, however, have been slow to recognize the need to teach collaboration skills (Brownell & Walther-Thomas, 2002; Jackson, 2004). This article focuses on the development of the Collaboration Self-Assessment Tool (CSAT). The…

Background: Traditional approaches to race in the United States have located race in individuals and groups and reduced the ambiguities of interaction to differences in attitudes, levels of awareness, and stages of identity development. Alternatively, locating race in social stratification has made it an over-determined product of inequalities in…

The article suggests a contextualist approach to helping isolated or rejected learning disabled children. In this approach the source of social problems is attributed to both partners in a peer relationship. Rather than remediating the social deficits of the LD child alone, instruction occurs within the context of ongoing peer interactions.…

This paper reports a methodological study in which live communication between young married spouses was compared with a self-reporting of their communication processes. Results support the use of observational research as a methodological tool in the search for an understanding of marital communication patterns. (Author)

Tests the hypothesis that a response to a given feedback statement will be its reciprocal. In Phase 1, a pool of feedback statements was written and scaled along dimensions of power (dominance-submission) and affect (affection-hostility). In Phase 2, these statements were used as the basis for giving feedback and replying to it. (Author)

Two adults with developmental disabilities were trained to increase their prompt and polite acknowledgments of coworker initiations by means of daily review of interactions of the previous day which had been recorded. The review included self-evaluation, praise, corrective feedback, and role-play. Behavior changes were maintained during follow-up…

The study was designed to assess the impact of a structured communications skills workshop of self-referred clients who expressed problems in feeling uncomfortable, awkward, or isolated in their relationships with others. (Author)

Presents a conceptual and operational definition of one cognitive dimension of communicative competence--interaction involvement--based on Goffman's model of face-to-face society. Reports two studies to support the validity of the definition. Outlines the implications for future research on communicative competence as well as instructional…

The social/verbal interactions of six employees with moderate or severe mental retardation and six workers without mental retardation were observed in restaurant settings. Among findings was that interactions between workers with mental retardation and the job coach correlated negatively with the workers' initiation of interactions with co-workers…

This article presents a brief overview of Gestalt theory, the group interventions utilized to experiment with interpersonal contact in a conference workshop along with their theory base, an evaluation of the workshop, and some experimental ideas and recommended activities that group leaders may want to incorporate into similar interpersonal…

This study examined the response of intermediate-grade boys (N=18) and girls (N=20) with (N=20) or without (N=18) learning disabilities (LD) to experimental dyadic interactions, either friendly or unfriendly. Children with LD were hypersensitive to both situations and girls with LD appeared most negatively affected by the unfriendly interaction.…

This study first classified empirical measures that have been used to assess the social integration of employees with disabilities. It then aggregated findings describing social interaction patterns in employment. Ten categories of measures of social interaction were identified and occurrence of social interaction was found to vary by…