Research conducted in the United States has found that people exert more effort when they perform a task individually than when they do so in a group. This phenomenon has been labeled social loafing. To examine the transcultural generality of social loafing, 20 male and 20 female Chinese school children in Taiwan were selected from grades 2, 3, 6,…

A study examined the ability of subjects of varying ages to write summaries of very familiar material. In particular, it explored the subjects' planning activities both prior to and during the summarization task. The subjects, 15 fifth, 16 seventh, and 15 eleventh grade students and 11 college students, were given two stories to study for a week.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate, in a broad sense, children's understanding of various types of people in two social domains: television and real life. Specifically, the study was designed to solicit information about (1) the physical and psychological abilities and vulnerabilities children would attribute to television characters and…

The few studies concentrating on adult age changes in discrimination shift behavior have reported that the performance of elderly adults on such tasks is inferior to that of younger adults and, in fact, similar to that of children. To determine whether verbal labeling, which has facilitated the performance of young children, would also reduce age…

The most common approach to self-management research has been to apply it to a specific target behavior, without attending to the generalizability of changes to other facets of one's life. A procedure for measuring self-management effectiveness under real world conditions was developed which emphasized the successful application of self-change…

Use of a semantic differential attitude scale, such as the one developed by Rosencranz and McNevin with the three common factors of autonomy, instrumentality, and acceptability, as well as a fourth dimension interpreted by Holtzman, representing good versus poor affective integration, could potentially reveal similarities as well as differences…

The importance of family life on the development of the child has been well documented. In Africa, however, little research has been undertaken to assess the influence that family life and marital status of parents have on child development. It was hypothesized that African adolescents from broken homes would experience: (1) less involvement in…

Reported in this document are the results of three experiments investigating the potential influence of peers in gender-role socialization. Children were exposed to a series of vignettes providing information about target children who varied in their degree of masculinity and femininity. Drawn from third through sixth grades, participants included…

Approximately 600 telephone interviews were conducted in a study that investigated attitudes toward television and radio programs and program preferences of different audience groups. Findings indicated that younger subjects tended to like rock music and were more concerned with international news than were older subjects. Little difference was…

Similarity of friends and the degree to which friendship selection criteria and similarity change as a function of age were investigated in this study. Subjects were 27 preschoolers, 34 third graders, and 30 sixth graders. Fifty-three percent were male, 47 percent were female, and 29 percent were black. Friendship choices were measured by…

The Swedish Media Panel is a research program about children and young persons and their use of mass media. The aim of the ten-year (1975-1985) project is to explain how media habits originate, how they change as children grow older, what factors on the part of children themselves and in their surroundings may be connected with a certain use of…

Differences in preparing teachers' orientations to the profession and their career goals and aspirations were examined as a function of their life stages and ages. Intensive interviews were conducted before and after the student teaching experience. Half of the student teachers were classified as returning students or adult learners. The other…

A series of studies was conducted to investigate the nature of children's goals and the role of goals in children's competence in peer relations. First, a conceptual framework was devised which consisted of eight goal types reflecting social-interpersonal and task-related achievement aspects of game playing: task mastery, approach-oriented…

Forty-eight children, equally divided among three-, four-, and five-year-old groups, were subjects in a study that explored the development and interrelationships among several facets of writing knowledge and reading readiness skills. Three categories of tasks were administered: knowledge of functions, knowledge of forms, and reading readiness…

A sorting-recall procedure was used to examine the relationship between study and recall organization in reflective and impulsive children at the first and fourth grade levels. Data regarding sorting latencies per trial and the number of trials required to achieve stable sorts were provided by two indirect measures of the deliberateness and ease…