Comparison Of Research Findings Research Articles

Priming Events and Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School: Representations and Action

We report on the Italian component of an ethnographic study of children's transition from preschool to elementary school in Italy and the United States. In line with our interpretive approach to socialization, we introduce the notion of priming events. Priming events involve activities in which children, by their very participation, attend prospectively to ongoing or anticipated changes in their lives. We identify different types of priming events in the preschool and show how collective activities in these events affected children's representations of their coming transition to the first grade. We also present interview data on parents' representations before and after their children's transitions to the first grade, and compare these representations with the children's. We found that the children's earlier experiences in priming events in the preschool were important in their adjustment to new rules, schedules, and participant structures of instruction in the first grade. We discuss the significance of our findings for comparative research on early childhood education and for theory development on life transitions and status passage.

The molecular target of antidepressants: J. Perez 1, S. Mori 2, D. Tardito 3, R. Zanardi 1, E. Smeraldi 1, M. Popoli 2, G. Racagni 2,3. 1Istituto Scientifico H. San Raffaele, Dep. of Neuropsychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Milan; 2Center of Neuropharmacology, University of Milan; 3I.R.C.C.S. Centro San Giovanni di Dio-Fratebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy

Adolescents and young adults are four times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than women in all other age groups. In the vast majority of these cases, the perpetrator is an acquaintance of the victim. Date rape is a subset of acquaintance rape where nonconsensual sex occurs between two people who are in a romantic relationship.We conducted a MEDLINE and Current Concepts search for articles relating to date rape and then systematically reviewed all relevant articles.Lifetime prevalence of date or acquaintance rape ranges from 13% to 27% among college-age women and 20% to a high of 68% among adolescents. Demographic characteristics that increase vulnerability to date rape include younger age at first date, early sexual activity, earlier age of menarche, a past history of sexual abuse or prior sexual victimization, and being more accepting of rape myths and violence toward women. Other risk factors include date-specific behaviors such as who initiated, who paid expenses, who drove, date location and activity, as well as the use of alcohol or illicit drugs such a flunitrazepam (Rohypnol). Alcohol use that occurs within the context of the date can lead to: the misinterpretation of friendly cues as sexual invitations, diminished coping responses, and the female's inability to ward off a potential attack.Longitudinal research designs are needed to further our understanding of sexual violence among adolescents and young adults and the most effective ways to eliminate it. Understanding and comparing research findings would be easier if consensus regarding the definitions of date rape, sexual aggression, and sexual assault was obtained. Finally, primary and secondary date and acquaintance rape prevention programs must be developed and systematically evaluated.

The Prevalence in New Zealand of Violence Against Women by their Current Male Partners

The Women's Safety Survey, conducted in 1996, asked a sample of 500 New Zealand women (selected from a pool of almost 2000 women) about their experience of any form of violence (psychological, physical or sexual) used against them by their partners. This article reports some of the survey's main findings on the prevalence of men's physical and sexual violence against their current partners and contrasts these findings with selected examples of recent research elsewhere and in New Zealand. The results suggest that New Zealand women, particularly Maori women, experience a comparatively high rate of violence at the hands of their male partners. However, violence by partners is a complex area to research and different surveys have used different methodologies in their attempts to measure its prevalence. The article concludes, therefore, with a discussion of some of the methodological difficulties in carrying out this type of research and suggests that, in interpreting and comparing research findings, methodological differences cannot be discounted.

Date Rape Among Adolescents and Young Adults

BackgroundAdolescents and young adults are four times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than women in all other age groups. In the vast majority of these cases, the perpetrator is an acquaintance of the victim. Date rape is a subset of acquaintance rape where nonconsensual sex occurs between two people who are in a romantic relationship. MethodsWe conducted a MEDLINE and Current Concepts search for articles relating to date rape and then systematically reviewed all relevant articles. ResultsLifetime prevalence of date or acquaintance rape ranges from 13% to 27% among college-age women and 20% to a high of 68% among adolescents. Demographic characteristics that increase vulnerability to date rape include younger age at first date, early sexual activity, earlier age of menarche, a past history of sexual abuse or prior sexual victimization, and being more accepting of rape myths and violence toward women. Other risk factors include date-specific behaviors such as who initiated, who paid expenses, who drove, date location and activity, as well as the use of alcohol or illicit drugs such a flunitrazepam (Rohypnol). Alcohol use that occurs within the context of the date can lead to: the misinterpretation of friendly cues as sexual invitations, diminished coping responses, and the female's inability to ward off a potential attack. ConclusionsLongitudinal research designs are needed to further our understanding of sexual violence among adolescents and young adults and the most effective ways to eliminate it. Understanding and comparing research findings would be easier if consensus regarding the definitions of date rape, sexual aggression, and sexual assault was obtained. Finally, primary and secondary date and acquaintance rape prevention programs must be developed and systematically evaluated.

Carers of people aged over 50 with physical impairment, memory loss and dementia: a comparative study

While studies investigating factors associated with carer burden suggest that intellectual impairment and behavioural disturbance in the care recipient are more demanding for the carer than physical impairment, comparative research findings are equivocal. Family carers of people with a long-term illness or disability were identified through a survey of 26,000 households in Victoria, Australia. Focusing on carers of those aged over 50 years, three subsamples were selected: 186 carers of relatives with physical impairment only, 182 carers of those with diagnosed memory loss and 117 carers of those with intellectual impairment diagnosed as dementia. Carers of physically impaired relatives reported better health, greater life satisfaction, and less overload, negative affect, family conflict, anger and resentment than carers of those with intellectual impairment, whether labelled as dementia or not. Despite lower impairment levels in the care recipient, carers of those with undiagnosed memory loss reported more resentment about their caring role than carers of those with a diagnosed dementia. The effects on the carer of significantly greater impairment in the dementia care recipient group may be ameliorated by having a diagnosis, bringing with it the potential for increased understanding and tolerance. Fortunately, negative feelings predictive of a sense of burden are subject to a range of interventions: providing information to promote understanding; counselling to tackle negative feelings and family conflict; guidelines to deal with behaviour problems and physical aspects of caring; and community services to reduce overload.

Overview: clinical sites, case material, and special studies.

The Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in 1986 to develop a battery of standardized instruments for the evaluation of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) enrolled in ongoing Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers and other major dementia research programs in the US. At that time, clinical investigation of AD was hampered by the absence of uniform diagnostic criteria and standardized measures for the severity of impairment. Comparison of research findings from individual research centers was not possible because of the variety of approaches to testing. The purpose of CERAD was to create uniformity in enrollment criteria and methods of assessment in clinical and neuropsychological studies of AD, permitting the pooling of information across sites. Study onset. At the onset of the study, a battery of relatively brief but reliable instruments was selected to evaluate patients who had mild or moderate AD. These tests included the overall clinical assessment of the patient1 and neuropsychological assessment of cognitive impairment or dementia.2 These tests were selected for their value in assessment of the progression of the illness at annual intervals over the course of the disease. Once these primary assessments were applied and shown to be reliable, attention was given to standardization of neuropathologic measures of AD.3 The need for this assessment was particularly great because clinical diagnosis could be confirmed only through autopsy examination. The neuropathologic assessment instrument not only provided criteria for the neuropathologic spectrum of AD but also established the types and frequency of coexisting disorders (e.g., vascular disease, Parkinson's disease, diffuse Lewy body disease) at autopsy. After the development of these three major components of the CERAD battery, several other assessments were developed: neuroimaging, frequency rating of behavioral abnormalities associated with AD, characterization of extrapyramidal …

Empowerment and total quality: Comparing research findings in the USA and Brazil

As in many other countries, firms in Brazil that have adopted quality management strategies realize the urgency of empowering their employees in order to satisfy the customer more completely. The challenge is huge, and only a few companies are succeeding. This paper aims at providing fresh insights on how empowerment processes in the scope of total quality initiatives can be effectively managed. It first shares some of the most relevant results of the authors' investigation into empowerment initiatives in 100 leading firms in Brazil, and a comparison with studies in the USA. The reasons why empowerment initiatives in Brazil have much lower levels and generally lack strategic customer focus are examined. The absence of a genuine quality-of-working-life culture and the failure to integrate and align all quality initiatives are identified as major problems. Cultural change difficulties in adopting new paradigms appear to be a root-cause. The findings on the impact of information technology upon empowerment in Brazil are not conclusive. Further research is recommended to investigate this relationship more thoroughly, as well as to find a means of integrating all quality initiatives by way of process innovation.

Comparative Research on the Determinants of the Welfare State: the State of the Art*

ABSTRACTThis paper makes an effort to evaluate the present state of comparative research on the determinants of the welfare state. The major thesis is that both theories and comparative results diverge to an extent that is not warranted by reality. Conflicting findings are in many cases explained by methodological features of the studies, a brief summary of which is given in the paper, and theories of the determinants of the welfare state are often presented in contradictory forms. In fact, their major claims may be integrated. The paper outlines a model of the determinants of the welfare state, which attempts to integrate the major findings of comparative research, and which also allows an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of major theories.

Communicating sympathy and anger to Black and White children: The cognitive (attributional) consequences of affective cues.

This study examined the influence of affective cues from others on children's achievement-related cognitions and performance following failure. Black and white children of middle and low social class were induced to fail an achievement task and an experimenter communicated either sympathy, anger, or no affective reaction. Children's judgments of personal competence, expectancies for success, causal attributions for failure, and persistence on the task were measured. Across all Race X Social Class groups, there were linkages between communicated sympathy and low ability self-ascriptions and between communicated anger and lack of effort attributions, although the sympathy-ability relation was stronger than the anger-effort linkage. In addition, a greater decline in expectancy for success followed the emotional cue of sympathy. These findings were interpreted as further evidence of the role of emotions in an attributional theory of motivation. When the data were examined independent of affective cues, middle-class black children displayed a particularly adaptive attributional pattern. Compared with the other three demographic groups, these children attributed their failure more to insufficient effort, reported higher expectancies, perceived themselves as more competent, and persisted longer at the task. The implications of these findings for comparative racial research are discussed.

A framework for upgrading comparative management research

Nearly a decade ago major problems facing the field of comparative management were identified. They continue to persist today despite considerable progress made in recent years. These problems related to the reliability, validity, and generalizability of comparative research findings will need to be resolved if the field is to attain academic maturity and legitimacy. Indentification and operationalization of critical variables will play an important role in the design of research studies and their conduct. A framework for upgrading comparative management research, with regard to overcoming both theoretical as well as methodological problems, is presented and discussed in this article.