Search

This document describes the Mentors, Peer Groups, and Incentives (MPI) demonstration project, a model for helping early adolescent underclass males to improve academic performance and reduce the probability of premature fatherhood. A first section discusses the working definition of the underclass as a group where dysfunctional behaviors are common; reasons for underclass growth, including a growing division of men from jobs and families; how higher academic achievement among youth and less teenage pregnancy can reduce the size of the underclass; and reasons for targeting young males. The second section reviews a few concepts in the social psychology of behavioral change to provide a conceptual framework for mentor roles. The third section describes the model, provides examples of mentor activities, and shows how mentors use peer groups and incentives as tools. Full-time mentors would serve proteges as affiliates and intimate older friends, life skills teachers, administrators of behavioral change, and academic advocates. Peer groups are an ideal tool for youth who are bound together by a common experience of rejection by the larger community and whose cultural tradition values group over individual achievement. The model would use peer groups for peer tutoring and cooperative learning. (JB)

Anthropologists have indicated that the need to act politically and to avoid the appearance of such action is marked in egalitarian societies. The perils of confrontation in such societies often foster indirect and highly allusive speech. This paper invesitgates the relationship between direct and indirect speech in an Indo-Fijian community which presents a case of the association of oblique oratory with an egalitarian social order. Two varieties of public performance are analyzed: (1) the "parbachan" or religious speeches which ostensibly deal with sacred topics but which carry a second, political message as well; and (2) the "panchayat," an ad hoc arbitration session organized to deal with a specific conflict in the community. Here issues, events, and individuals are discussed openly. While there is a range of political performances in this community, the dominant mode of conflict communication is indirection. Public political messages are deeply buried in religious speeches, and individual speakers cannot be held responsible for the secondary meanings. This accords with the notion that oblique reference is characteristic of political talk among equals. (AMH)

This collection focuses on research topics in physical education and athletics and includes the following papers: Methodological Problems in the Assessment of Personality from the Psychoanalytic, Behavioral and Cognitive Positions; Some Factors Affecting the Performance of Women in Sports and Activity; Multivariate Considerations in Children's Physical Education (competence in movement, research designs, social interaction, typology, self-esteem, planning physical education for children); Least Squares Analysis: Application to Experimental and Descriptive Research Designs; Least Squares Analysis in Experimental Design with Disproportionate Subclass Numbers; Nonorthogonality and Type I Errors--Implications for Research Designs and Analysis; Epidemiological Analysis of Ski Injuries, Steamboat Springs, Colorado 1977-1978; Opinions of Safety Professionals Regarding the Preparation of High School Driver Educators; A Study of Physical Education Injuries Among Handicapped and Non-Handicapped Children; and Tort Law: Negligence and Liability in Physical Education with Reference to Higher Education. References are included with each article. (DS)

The paper presents the view that opening up learning beyond school walls and age barriers, although a positive extension of human potential, has left the learners of this open learning to be exposed to the toxic meta-context of a "culture of 'fear'" with its attending violence/hurting that pervades the cultural landscape. Evidence is presented that challenges the current dominating W. psychological conception that "fear" is a "feeling/emotion" and therefore is located only within the individual mindscape (psyche). This apolitically theorized "fear" within mainstream psychology has led to a preoccupation with the hundreds of individuals' "fears" ("phobias") and virtually no research on the phenomenon of "fear" itself in a sociopolitical context. "Fear" is recently being articulated in academic and popular literature as a social and political context. The author calls for a deconstructruction and reconstruction of "education," "Love" and "fear" as core aspects to understanding a new ethical base for education and its practitioners in the future. (Contains 2 figures and 2 footnotes.)

The paper proposes a comprehensive model of career development in early adulthood and addresses some of the theoretical and research issues central to furthering knowledge of how and why young adults enter and adjust to their jobs. The disciplines of vocational and organizational psychology, adjustment and developmental psychology, and industrial and occupational sociology are invoked to identify and enumerate the theoretical salient variables. Then, relationships among these variables are explicated and hypotheses for research are deduced. Procedures are outlined by which these variables might be operationally defined and measured. Finally, there is a consideration of the applicability of the model to interventive programs designed to facilitate the job-entry process. Included is the "Career Adjustment Inventory," constructed to assess the effectiveness of these interventions and to measure relevant vocational behaviors. A three-page bibliography is also included. (Author/NJ)