A study used an interpersonal goals approach to investigate the impact of normal communicative activity upon the attitude similarity and social attraction relationship of 90 undergraduate students. It was hypothesized (1) that there would be a main effect upon perceptions of social attractiveness and communication competence due to aligning…

The argument undergirding this essay is that the new environmental movement in the United States is partly a symbolic issue. Some liberal or radical members of key strategic elites who are alienated from the social and political system are drawn to concrete issues which serve as a surrogate for a real criticism of the hegemonic structure. The…

Three papers by the president of the National Federation of the Blind are presented. The first, "A Definition of Blindness," examines definitions of blindness, asserting the advantages of a functional or sociological definition over a physical or medical definition. He cites harm in legal distinctions between partial and full blindness and between…

A total of 42 middle-class preschool children (23 boys and 19 girls) ranging in age from 33 to 68 months were studied to determine whether facial attractiveness was related to level of social participation (i.e., the degree to which children played near and interacted with each other). According to a time-sampling procedure, each child was…

The history of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) is examined. ACA is the parent organization of the American Association of University Women and the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors. ACA played a crucial bridging role in the history of higher education for women by simultaneously supporting conventional and radical…

Three procedures were used to elicit information from children 9-10 and 13-14 years old on their conceptions of war: (1) children were asked to give at least 10 answers to the question, "What is war?"; (2) each child was interviewed individually; and (3) children were asked to respond to magazine pictures of war scenes. The detailed and…

The use of polling is partly responsible for a change in the relationship between government and public opinion. There is a range of public opinion from little or no concern to very intense concern about an issue. Polls translate personal beliefs into collective public opinions, often losing the strong feelings at the one end and the moderate…

This study investigated whether readers of newspaper crime reports make assumptions about the racial identity of criminals from news accounts that make no explicit race references. Simulated crime stories given to respondents were experimentally varied on the factors of (1) urban character of the crime location (urban versus suburban), (2) ethnic…

Following a series of events which had made pornography a controversial issue in the community, a public opinion survey of 350 adults was conducted in Lexington, Kentucky. Respondents were asked about the recent events, their perceptions of "sex" in different media and how it should be regulated, their views on pornography in general and…

Rhetorics of death and dying have created socially constructed realities of death since primitive times. Although the denial of death has been common, the twentieth century has seen a rhetoric of denial unique in its absoluteness and its primary form, silence. A stance of total alienation toward death has been taken, separating people from…

Work and play are parts of the same whole and the detachment of the notion of effort from the idea of play has had confusing and dangerous consequences--dangerous, because the opportunities for children to engage in vital, self-selected play have been diminished in our society. This has been done partly through deliberate, conscious choice on the…

Experimental research on social perceptions of rape victims has been conducted within the framework of two different models. The first, a naive observer model, is oriented toward how the average person perceives a rape victim and how her character and aspects of her behavior affect these perceptions. The second, a jury process model, is directed…

A survey of New Yorkers deprived of residential telephone service for 23 days validates previous discursive research on the social role and psychological functions of the medium. Respondents who said they enjoyed and needed the telephone were found to feel isolated, uneasy, and less in control without it. While 33% used more media during the…

The author questions why intelligence and intelligence testing have been so lightly treated in recent years. The topic has been in disfavor, and citizens and educators have tended to swing from one extreme to another in their evaluations of such matters of social concerns. This virtual dismissal of intelligence has been followed by great…

To examine the effect of various activities and interactions on the attitudes of members of co-cultures toward each other was the purpose of this study. The research was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, semantic differential scales were developed for the measurement of attitudes toward co-cultures. Each of five sets of scales was used…