For the first 200 years of American higher education, the baccalaureate program was shaped by the authority of tradition, seldom challenged, and easily accommodating new learning and changing social conditions. After the Civil War, the authority of tradition was undermined by emerging professional academicians, trained in particular bodies of…

A study examined the effect of attitude toward capital punishment on the evaluation of evidence and the determination of guilt. Subjects were 224 undergraduate students who read a description of a murder. They then received two, four, or six items of evidence relevant to the defendant's guilt. Subjects were asked to determine a verdict and…

The presentation examines the challenge of advocacy for developmentally disabled people and their family members, and stresses the importance of a grass-roots basis for advocacy; it also describes the author's experiences as executive director of the Young Adult Institute, which operates community-based programs for mentally retarded and…

Two studies investigated the validity of the Cultivation Hypothesis, which holds that the more people view television the more they will see the world as mean and violent. Specifically, the study examined whether three psychological variables affected the relationship. The variables are (1) Magic Window, the degree to which a person believes…

Current cultural attitudes toward children's sexuality resemble attitudes toward adults' sexuality; there is an emphasis on purely genital and orgasmic pleasure. Adults and children need warmth, physical contact, and a sense of belonging for which genital stimulation may be unnecessary or inappropriate. Children's sexual advances to adults, as…

A college level unit which investigates stereotypes of aging in the United States is described. The three-class unit serves as an introduction to the study of social gerontology. Its purpose is to address issues of negative stereotypes of old age reinforced by the media and by our cultural roots; the lack of knowledge about the normal changes that…

Selected personality variables of college students who reside under different living arrangements were studied to determine the effect of student's type of housing, gender, and enrollment classification. A sample of students living in residential halls at Maryville College were administered the Attitude Toward Women Scale (ATWS), the Bem Sex Role…

The issue of contempt expressed towards the aged was examined from a cross-cultural perspective. Eight reasons for expressions of contempt emerged from a study of 95 societies drawn from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and were treated as independent variables, with the overall level of contempt as the dependent variable, in a application of…

The document reports results of a study which integrated two models of political alienation--the social deprivation and the political reality models. The social deprivation model was originally conceived to measure feelings of social inefficacy and political distrust among black preadults. It is argued that the model is equally pertinent to white…

The author expresses concern about potentially damaging effects to mentally retarded persons from deinstitutionalization and normalization practices. Cited are the public's lack of awareness and the professionals' misplaced emphasis on researching the public attitude rather than improving the retardates' training. It is explained that there is a…

This study was designed to investigate the effects of male versus female deviants on the small discussion group. One hundred undergraduates were assigned to 25 discussion groups, with two male students and two female students in each group. They were presented with a decision-making task, which was presented to group members as an exercise in…

In most European languages, choice of address form classifies the relation between speakers. The first theoretical framework for analyzing address form usage was established by Brown and Gilman (1960) in their investigation of the semantics of pronoun use in a wide variety of Indo-European languages, which concluded that Europeans use the informal…

This paper describes a consciousness-raising group experience for high school students regarding male and female roles in our society. Participants are 10-12 high school students (with an equal number of male and female students) and a counselor who served as group facilitator. The program consists of 12 numbered cards on each of which is written…

This paper describes the history of women in education in America. The primary force that allowed women into the nations' colleges was economic rather than ideological, when the Civil War took many men out of college. Women have been increasingly involved in higher education since then; however, they have been subject to job discrimination, and…

In a speech delivered at a conference on "Education and Working Life," the author discusses the importance of a vocational education policy which allows for work opportunities irrespective of formal educational qualifications, and corrects the bias toward general education in the hierarchy of social values. (KC)