Despite increasingly egalitarian attitudes toward women in the Middle East and North Africa, nations in this region continue to rank among the lowest in measures of gender equality. Using survey data, we examine the relationship between educational attainment and support for women. We find that increased educational attainment is predictive of…

Three studies examined whether a social norm message (SNM) to Girl Scouts who had completed an energy conservation program would impact behavior and attitudes. Studies 1 and 2 were conducted with girls recently completing the program, study 3 was conducted with girls completing the program one year earlier. Results suggest that the SNM may impact…

California's Smoke-Free Workplace Act--CA Labor Code Sec. 6404.5(a)--was extended to bars in 1998. This article analyzes changes in normative beliefs and behaviors related to bar smoking in the decade following the adoption of the Act. In a series of studies evaluating the smoke-free workplace law in bars, researchers conducted extensive…

Three experiments were conducted in the United States and Germany to test whether women and men endorse sexist beliefs because they are unaware of the prevalence of different types of sexism in their personal lives. Study 1 (N = 120) and Study 2 (N = 83) used daily diaries as a method to encourage individuals "to see the unseen." Results…

Religious denominations vary in both their approach to the roles that men and women play in familial contexts, as well as their approach to homosexuality. This research investigates whether gender attitudes, informed by religious tradition, predict a person's support for civil liberties extended to gays and lesbians. Using data from the 1996 and…

Reducing HIV/AIDS-related stigma is critical in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Although national campaigns and prevention programs have been implemented across South Africa to address this critical concern, assessing the impact of these initiatives is difficult as it requires that measurement of HIV/AIDS-related stigma is uniform and comparable…

Human-wildlife conflicts are common in agricultural communities and mountainous villages in Japan. Tochigi prefecture has one of the highest amounts of agricultural damage caused by wildlife in the country. To reduce conflicts, the Nature Preservation Division of Tochigi Prefecture launched a wildlife damage prevention program. We evaluated the…

Conducting a barriers analysis is an important first step when designing proenvironmental behavior change interventions. Yet, detailed information on common barriers to energy conservation campaigns remains unavailable. Using a pair of original surveys, we leverage the theory of planned behavior to report on the most important barriers for…

In recent years, many universities across the United States have instituted "ally" programs that have been designed to promote awareness and support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) persons. While such ally programs have emerged at many colleges and are certainly publicly visible, little empirical…

It has been theorized that feminist movements have failed because they focused on legal and political reforms and ignored the influence of domestic roles. Five hundred thirty persons completed a 125-item questionnaire which generated "desire for change" scores on two scales: (1) sex roles "in the home" and (2) sex roles "out of the home." A…

Recently collected data from a survey of the attitudes of 1,843 elite members of both traditional and new institutions towards abortion indicate that, barring a major religious revival, a relatively permissive abortion policy will probably continue whether or not the Supreme Court curtails or overturns Roe vs. Wade. (FMW)

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…

This research examines adolescents' perceptions of marriage and marital roles, as measured by a variation of the Kuhn-McPartland Twenty Statements Test. Differences in the meanings given by dating and engaged students suggest that courtship may serve as a process of socialization to married roles. Results also reveal that the perceptions of…

Reported attitudes of the public towards disabilities and disabled persons in Pakistan were studied. Responses to interviews and questionnaires completed by 286 men, women, and school children were analyzed to investigate awareness of the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons, recall of media items on disability, and acquaintance or…

Attitude toward marijuana shifted from strongly negative to strongly positive as frequency of marijuana use increased. With frequency of use controlled, attitude toward marijuana was even more favorable when other drugs had been tried, and also among students who were religiously inactive. (Author)