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Talking With Young Children About Social Ideas, Carolyn P. Edwards, Mary Ellin Logue, Anna Sargent Russell

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

During the early childhood years, children’s understanding of many social and moral issues undergoes immense changes. We became interested in learning more about these changes and supporting them through our laboratory preschool curriculum. One major change, for example, is that children come to classify themselves and others into sex, age, and kinship categories and to learn social role expectations. Children also show greatly deepened understanding of such moral issues as fair sharing, obedience, authority, and friendship.

These areas of development are part of what can be called social cognition, or “children’s understanding of social behavior—what children think about their own …

A Reexamination Of Elementary School Teacher Expectations: Evidence Of Sex And Ethnic Segmentation, Helen A. Moore, David R. Johnson

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Earlier conclusions of "no significant bias" for teacher expectations have been based on regression analyses of occupational continua. In contrast, this paper utilizes discriminant techniques to demonstrate significant categorical differences for Anglo, Hispanic, black, and Asian students, based upon sex, ethnicity, and SES, which reflect the segmented structure of the labor market. Occupational expectations of teachers cluster around traditional dimensions of "male" and "female" occupational categories, showing significant differentiation by ethnicity as well.

Dryland Agriculture: Sociology, J. Allen Williams Jr., Lynn K. White, David R. Johnson

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The physical environment of the Great Plains region in the USA is unique to the nation. It presents a set of climate and land conditions so extreme that for many years it was known as the "great American desert." As late as 1823, Major Long of the Army Engineers reported that most of the land between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains "is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence." Today, by adapting techniques to fit a semiarid location and through the development of new technologies, the Great …

The Desegregated School And Status Relationships Among Anglo And Hispanic Students, Peter Iadicola, Helen A. Moore

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Desgregated elementary school students display verbal and non-verbal indicators of status relationships in a structured, videotaped interaction game. Both Hispanic and Anglo third grade student responses are analyzed across ten schools for a case study of factors that influence racial/ethnic integration outcomes. Variance in student outcomes are primarily explained by socioeconomic dimensions of the schools. These findings suggest that school desegregation poses a contradiction for Hispanic students.

Review Of Contexts Of Behavior: Anthropological Dimensions, By Robert J. Maxwell, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This book is a massive disappointment. The well-designed dust jacket indicates that Maxwell, "Describes the interaction between humans and their environments, drawing upon a wide range of ethological and anthropological research to form a comprehensive, integrated picture of human cultural ecology." This is only partially true. Maxwell describes a substantial amount of research, but his review is neither comprehensive nor well-integrated.

Maxwell throws out a bibliographic fishing net and cleans his variegated catch in slip-shod fashion. Unfortunately, his net also has gaping, unexplained holes. The best that one can say about this book is that the bibliography would have been …

The Social Context Of Pedestrians’ Rights, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Pedestrians' rights are now problematic only as a result of the relatively recent socio-technological development of motor vehicles and their widespread socioeconomic adoption as a transportation mode. Prior to the advent of motor vehicles, the “pedestrian problem” as we know it today did not exist, This is not because pedestrians did not exist, but because it was not yet politically necessary to define pedestrians and their behavior as a “Problem”. To drive home the point, a survey of state statutes in this country reveals that the legal definition of a “pedestrian” is uniformly found within the Motor Vehicle Code of …

Hispanic Women: Schooling For Conformity In Public Education, Helen A. Moore

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The educational experiences of Latinas are tied to norms of an Anglocentric and androcentric school system. Based on a sample of 1,000 male and female Hispanic and Anglo elementary school students, we analyze teacher expectations for three dimensions: behavioral, social and academic achievements. Teachers do rate Hispanic females as more conforming to the behavioral norms of the school. Regression analyses indicate that higher teacher ratings are assigned to Hispanic females who combine high academic scores with low scores on behavioral conformity norms. These findings indicate that teachers reward assertiveness, leadership and action when considering future student success. The dilemmas of …

The Relative Contribution To Meaning Of Verbal And Nonverbal Channels Of Communication: A Meta-Analysis, Jeffrey S. Philpott

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The current study is grounded in the psychological approaches to the mechanics of communication, somewhere between cybernetics and attribution.

The integration of information available in different channels is the focus of the present study. To what extent do people rely on the different channels of communication to assign meaning to their world? More specifically, what is the relative importance of the verbal and nonverbal channels of communication in the meaning creation process?

This question of channel reliance is of central import to the study of the role of information in social/psychological systems. If it can be assumed that meaning is …