The practice of student evaluation of college faculty is discussed in terms of the literature on social ritual. The following arguments that critics have raised are considered: student ratings of professors are neither scientific nor objective; feedback needed by professors to improve the quality of their work and data needed by administrators to…

What is meant by saying that reality is socially constructed or that writing is a social process must be thought about carefully. Advocates of a social constructivist view of writing have been able to challenge dominant cognitivist and expressionist paradigms surprisingly quickly. However, such a swift victory needs to be examined. When tested in…

Sociologically, the implications of the concept of interdependence are contrary to the explicit aims of education. Interdependence implies that if changes are brought about in one social institution, then the functional interdependence of society may be destroyed. Education is seen as a means to reinforce the status quo. The aims of adult…

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to develop a working model to explain medical specialty decision-making. Using Social Cognitive Career Theory, we examined personality, medical specialty preferences, job satisfaction, and expectations about specialty choice to create a conceptual framework to guide specialty choice decision-making.…

This research uses critical race theory (CRT) as a conceptual perspective to study and analyze the experiences of ten students of African descent who enrolled in several African studies courses or related courses in an Ontarian university. The students, two females and eight males were interviewed between June and August 2005, using…

The behaviorist world view, influential in many social-science disciplines, is challenged by theories of action. With steady developments in nonbehaviorist thinking and related social-action conceptions, the study of school organizational structure can be transformed into a field centered about the dynamics of individuals' practical actions. This…

The ambivalent relationship between political theory understood as a sub-discipline within political science and political theory as an interdisciplinary theoretical activity with a long-standing historical tradition has been well documented. The schism between political theory and political science is seen by some as a recent tragedy within…

Focusing on the consideration of societal and developmental contexts in interpersonal communication research, this essay addresses two common problems: (1) that studies of dyadic communicative interaction do not refer to the larger issues of social change and stability, as if the macro- and micro-levels of analysis can be treated in isolation; and…

Using Jean Baudrillard's postmodernist theories, this paper analyzes how the television program, "Miami Vice," operationalizes his theory through its attention to surfaces and style. The paper notes that Baudrillard proposes life as a surface comprised of animated models indistinguishable from the reality these models represent and…

Seven school superintendents in the state of Washington with varying levels of exposure to Iannacone and Lutz's dissatisfaction theory of democracy as well as varying degrees of experience with electoral conflict in their careers were interviewed to determine the level of their understanding of the theory, their acceptance of it, their ability to…

In comparative studies of homicide, many theories compete. This study examined two established theories, stress theory and culture of violence theory, in terms of their ability to explain state-to-state differences in the rate of highly specific types of homicides. The separate and joint effects on homicide committed by handguns, shoulder guns,…

Traditionally, social psychology has conceptualized sex and gender as subject variables with sex as a biological substrate and gender as a sociocultural consequence of sex. These ideas rest on the assumption of two distinct biological categories. However, gender is better thought of in dialectical rather than oppositional terms. Gender is both…

A conceptual framework for studying the role of social support in explaining family caregivers' psychological well-being is developed in this paper. In particular, the framework presented emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing caregiving as a social status, and drawing upon the broader literature on status acquisitions, social support, and…

Sport has been widely discussed, by conservatives who argue that sport operates within the realm of freedom, and so lies outside the deterministic nexus of capitalist economics and policies, and leftists who argue that sport reproduces the repressive features of capitalism and serves as an ideological tool of the latter. The purpose of this study…

Social theories (beliefs about relationships between variables in the social environment) are often used in making judgments, predictions, or decisions. Three experiments on the role of explanation processes in the development and use of social theories were conducted. The first experiment assessed the effects of explaining a hypothetical…