The five lectures reprinted in this monograph were presented at the past five national conventions of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. They offer messages concerning future needs and goals to leisure professionals and students seeking entry into the field. Part I contains: (1) "The Mild Blue…

To investigate how values influence parenting beliefs and practices, a test was made of Kohn's hypothesis that parents valuing self-direction emphasize the supportive function of parenting, while parents valuing conformity emphasize control of unsanctioned behaviors. Participating in the study were 65 mother-infant dyads. Infants ranged in age…

S. Jackson and S. Jacobs's criticism of "single message" designs in communication research served as a framework for a study that examined the differences between various sequential request paradigms. The study sought to answer the following questions: (1) What were the most naturalistic request sequences assured to replicate…

This review of literature on teacher educators points out that much of the literature divides the professoriate into two groups: those who see education as an academic field, and those who see it as a professional field. The professoriate has also been classified into three categories based upon their traditional professional orientation: (1)…

In applying a social structural analysis of stereotyping to people's beliefs about gender, two issues must be confronted: (1) What is the content of stereotypes about men and women? and (2) What are the major differences in the ways that men and women are distributed into social roles? In part, the distribution of females and males into social…

The lack of uniform definition of child abuse has caused researchers and practitioners to center debate on whether abuse should be defined according to the characteristics of the parental act or its consequences to the child. To examine how the situational context and the characteristics of the individual applying the label of abuse affect…

A study compared people's reactions to different types of assertions concerning social issues. For purposes of the study, assertion was defined as having three components: a reference to the issue itself, an attribute having evaluative implications and a verb phrase linking the issue with the attribute. Eight types of messages were composed…

The paper traces the apparently conflicting trends toward elimination of special classes for handicapped students (mainstreaming) and the movement toward special programs for gifted and talented students. Issues related to identification and labeling are examined, and the importance of flexible definitions for both retardation and giftedness is…

The Victorian concept that women would sacrifice their femininity by participating in vigorous sports has to some extent been ameliorated, but vestiges of the bias remain today. This attitude was not based on hostility toward women but on overprotectiveness and concern for imagined dangers for the health of women, whose prime function in society…

There have been few studies comparing personal future perspectives across wide sectors of the life span and none comparing societal future perspectives. Age groups, each consisting of 41 women and 10 men who were elderly (over 60), in middle adulthood (26-45), or adolescence (14-16) were asked to list events they expected to happen in their future…

Many research efforts have demonstrated relationships between the experience of mental health volunteers and their attitudes toward mental illness. Questionnaire surveys were completed by adult volunteers in psychiatric and nonpsychiatric programs in order to assess general attitudes toward mental patients and to control for the potential effects…

A framework for family impact analysis, developed at the Minnesota Family Study Center as part of the NIMH training program for family impact analysis, is presented. The four sections of the accompanying training manual are described as: (1) a set of questions which orient the reader to what family impact analysis is, its particular timeliness,…

The physical and interpersonal contexts within which rapes occur were investigated. The physical context, defined in terms of observers' perceptions of the likelihood of rapes occurring in a particular setting, produce variations in the degree of responsibility assigned to the victim. Women raped in high probability of rape settings were held as…

The determinants of widows' attitudes toward women were investigated, using social and personality variables known to discriminate attitudes in other marital status groups as well as variables reflecting the unique experiences of widowhood. The subjects were 118 urban widows, aged 29-78. Over 40 potential attitude predictors were assessed in…

The effects of short-term consciousness-raising instruction on the sexist attitudes of preservice teachers toward women was examined. To test the ability of teacher education institutions to lessen the level of sexist attitudes, 70 students were divided into three groups, a control group and two treatment groups. Each group was pretested and…