Speech communication plays a significant role in a liberal arts education. Studying and practicing oral communication constitutes direct inquiry into the social and psychological features of social life and survival and presents reality phenomena more directly and emphatically than do writing or other types of communication. Such direct social…

This conference presentation describes a program designed to help counselors integrate career-development concepts with research on the needs of older people. The first part deals with the effects of loss, transition, and change on the self-concept of the older person. The second part reviews needs-assessment studies of older people and presents a…

The purpose of this study, completed with personnel who work in local disaster services, was to obtain data to test Etzioni's model of consensus and effectiveness. The data indicate that both early socialization and communication with elites are associated with consensus formation. Consensus formation and communication have direct and significant…

The extent to which the social maladjusted female role among the Eastern Band of Cherokees is a consequence of cultural ambivalence is investigated. The 28 problem families were examined in light of the adolescent/accommodative perspective whereby Federal paternalism is viewed as perpetuating a dependent adolescent behavioral life style among…

Resilience is a universal capacity that allows a child to prevent, minimize, or overcome the damaging effects of adversity. The construct of resiliency, the combination of protective factors that result in resilience, was addressed by the International Resilience Project (IRP), which set out to explore what parents, caregivers, teachers or…

Social adjustment of 46 children with and 199 children without learning disabilities (LDs) who were integrated full time in third grade team approach to mastery (TAM) classrooms were examined. Children with LDs, particularly boys, were well-integrated socially in TAM classes. The mixture of students may enhance acceptance of children with LDs.…

This paper is a description and an evaluation of the Families First program in Sydney, Australia. The Families First program was set up to provide innovative family-centered early intervention services to families with young children with disabilities from birth to school age living within the South-Western Metropolitan Health Region. The program…

This paper explains that Grotberg (1995) has developed two measures of child resilience, one eliciting children's responses to vignettes depicting difficult situations and the second a checklist completed by an adult. Two studies examined the validity of these methods of assessing child resilience. Study 1 focused on the validity of vignettes and…

This case study describes the separation distress experienced by Mei Mei, a 2-year-old Chinese-American female toddler at a midwestern university laboratory preschool. The toddler, who could not speak English, was undergoing the first substantial separation from her parents. The toddler was observed over a 9-week period, during which behaviors…

Impression management refers to the concept that people engaged in interaction will attempt to control the image of themselves that others form. This provides a foundation for social interaction, giving others information about who we are and what to expect from us. A central concern of impression management is the manner in which we are evaluated…

The paper presents an observational system for use in evaluating preschool handicapped children's social integration in mainstreamed classrooms. An adaptation of LeBlanc, Etzel, and Tyler's observational system, this model also employs White's system of evaluating affective tone. The method entails choosing a handicapped child in a classroom and a…

Available research in the area of transracial adoptions is surveyed, emphasizing the programs and services which could be developed based on this accumulated knowledge. It is argued that, because of the implications for the growing number of lives involved, the area of cross cultural adoptive placements needs further research, thoughtful program…

To understand how computer conferencing can be used to meld communication and education among remotely located high-level professions, an ongoing exploratory study started to collect data from participants in an advanced adult education course conducted primarily via computer-mediated communication in the area of top level management. The…

Almost 300 non-migrant, migrant, return migrant, and circulatory migrant high school students participated in a study of the relationship of the level of adjustment to mainstream Puerto Rican society and the frequency of migration. No direct relationship between reading achievement and physical adjustment was found. However, as the level of…

Research has identified high school and college students as the groups experiencing the greatest severity of loneliness. The manifestations of loneliness in adolescents and young adults were examined in a group of college (N=192) and high school (N=98) students. All subjects completed the Revised Loneliness Scale and a questionnaire about…