Twenty deaf students attending Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) were interviewed to study social and academic aspects of mainstreaming. While students appreciated the opportunity to attend mainstream college classes and felt they were succeeding academically, they also experienced separation and even isolation within the mainstream class.…

Students with personal-social problems report seeking help from friends and relatives first, as compared to faculty, clergy, and counseling centers. To investigate the subsequent referrals friends might provide, 28 college freshmen, 14 male and 14 female, rated 16 problem descriptions on a 0-9 point scale according to the likelihood that they…

School refusal, as differentiated from both school phobia and truancy, is a term used to denote emotionally-based avoidance of school. To identify factors associated with school refusal, 41 junior high and high school students (including special education school refusers, special education non-refusers, and a comparison group from a regular…

The role of women's college peer groups in aiding women to continue along or in encouraging them to drop out of certain career paths was investigated. During an ethnographic phase, freshmen were interviewed; during the survey phase a survey instrument was administered to sophomores. Respondents were from predominately black Bradford University…

A recent concern with the informal support systems of elderly people has focused on the ways in which the eldery live independently with the help of others, primarily the family. In order to explore the dimensions of social space (emotional closeness, and physical distance) as they relate to friendship, elderly, unmarried women (N=70) living in a…

The project described in this paper focuses on researching approaches to ease the student's transition from elementary to middle school. The method presented equips teachers with an eight-step strategy for helping students think through everyday decisions and stressful situations. The materials target situations that children face while…

A total of 145 children 4 through 6 years of age attending 12 day care centers in Sweden answered a picture questionnaire consisting of 10 stories about everyday events which might occur in the center. Each child listened individually to the stories and gave his/her answer by choosing one of two or three pictures describing possible outcomes of…

The paper examines current research on the social and personal competence of learning disabled (LD) adolescents and young adults, revealing two major lines of inquiry: (1) interpersonal environment (perceptions by others, sociometric status, social behavior deficits, verbal and nonverbal communication skills), and (2) affective status…

This paper focuses on an important aspect of second language acquisition, namely, the complex set of modifications in the rules governing the forms and functions of the new language that are required by specific sociocultural contexts. These adjustments in language, or shifts in register, play a crucial role in interpreting utterances for social…

The literature suggests that children steadily move away from egocentric thought and acquire more effective interpersonal skills as they age, but at puberty a new egocentrism makes self-disclosure difficult. To develop an adequate behavioral measure of self-disclosure, 16 situations were described to children aged 8, 11, and 14 years old, who then…

A primary school drug abuse prevention program was evaluated. The program consisted of 2 years of Magic Circle on the Human Development Program (designed to positively influence students' social and emotional development via a teacher-led discussion of a particular topic) and 1 year of Jigsaw (a structured peer teaching method in which students…

By structuring the manner group members use to reach a decision, managers can affect the processes and outcomes of decision making. Business administration undergraduates (N=78) were randomly assigned to three groups and told to make group decisions based on the process their manager selected, i.e., they were either to seek concurrence, debate…

Entrance into college is considered a stressful experience, with many students experiencing depression and maladjustment. A longitudinal study was conducted to investigate three major models of depression among college students, i.e., the life events model, the cognitive-attributional model, and the social support model. Subjects were 134 freshmen…

The study examined social behaviors of 19 gifted and 19 nongifted preschool children. A social behavioral inventory was developed from repeated observations of interactions collected during an 8 week pilot study. Four general categories of behavior were observed and analyzed: verbal positive (greeting, conversation, compliment, concern, laughing,…

Piaget's last works (1975, 1977, and 1980) add a dynamic aspect to his earlier exceptionally formal structural model. He portrays change in more functionalistic terms and describes conflict, referring to the process of perturbations and compensations to explain the regulations of the network of cognitive cycles. He suggests three types of balances…