Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Introduction To The Five-Factor Model And Its Applications, Robert R. Mccrae, Oliver P. John

Public Health Resources

The five-factor model of personality is a hierarchical organization of personality traits in terms of five basic dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. Research using both natural language adjectives and theoretically based personality questionnaires supports the comprehensiveness of the model and its applicability across observers and cultures. This article summarizes the history of the model and its supporting evidence; discusses conceptions of the nature of the factors; and outlines an agenda for theorizing about the origins and operation of the factors. We argue that the model should prove useful both for individual assessment and for the elucidation …

Review Of Aspen, A Documentary Film By Frederick Wiseman, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Frederick Wiseman's most recent documentary was heralded in the New York Times (December 29, 1991, pp. 27,36) with considerable fanfare, but for this reviewer Aspen is a sociological disappointment. Wiseman's unusually keen documentary grip on the subtleties and institutional complexities of Western society has momentarily slipped in his presentation of the collage of institutionally disjointed images offered in Aspen. Visually excavating the social nexus of community life as a whole is a worthy objective for filmmakers of Wiseman's stature and experience, but sociology instructors who hope that Aspen might serve as an institutionally sophisticated community study will have to …

The Gunman Downstairs, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

EXACTLY 24 HOURS ago, in this building, nearly two dozen of your fellow students fled from Room 112, downstairs, in mortal terror of being murdered by a classmate in a senior-level actuarial science class. Newspaper accounts of this event present a particularly vivid example of the frame concepts that Erving Goffman explicates in Frame Analysis. In particular, Arthur McElroy’s entrance into Room 112 was a “guided doing” by which he willfully intended to kill at least a few, if not all, of his classmates.

“For a second,” said a student in the class, “I just sat there in a daze.” …

The Americanization Of Ritual Culture: The ‘Core Codes’ In American Culture And The Seductive Character Of American ‘Fun.’, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Modern life in the USA is driven by four “core codes” of oppression and repression which structure a wide range of cultural patterns, from fleeting, face-to-face interactions to enduring, large scale social institutions. The four codes (sex, class, bureaucratization, and the commodification of time) also give recognizable contours to modern American cultural rituals (participatory as well as media-constructed) and contribute to the seductive character of “fun” which these rituals typically generate. American “fun” provides short-lived, incomplete escapes from mundane routine, and simultaneously strengthens and reproduces the core oppression and repressions of everyday life.

American “fun” provides its consumers with ritual …