Bernice T. Eiduson

Symposium: Children of the children of the 1960s: An introduction.

The aims of the Family Styles Project, set up to study the effects on child development of the counter-cultural life styles that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, are reviewed. Background data on the project are presented as an introduction to papers dealing with child-rearing practices, maternal employment, and interpersonal conflict in alternative families.

PROBLEMS FROM AN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

The tasks involved in implementing a primary prevention effort in an organizational setting are complex, challenging and sensitive. They involve certain logistic strategies, such as obtaining and maintaining funding; recruiting needed personnel and physical facilities; supplying expert consultants and interdigitating their contribution with that of the staff. The implementation strategy also involves building and maintaining a psychological and motivational support system that powers the project, i.e., develops working relationships with administration and staff; builds effective two-way communication channels for regular feedback and feed forward; clarifies roles, functions and expectations; and generally maintains the intervention strategy in the face of countervailing forces that threaten to cancel out hoped for gains. A great deal of study has been devoted particularly to these psychological factors because solution of even logistic problems, which should theoretically be based on rational considerations, have a way of being invaded and distorted by personal and professional strains among organization decision-makers.l, Conflicts inevitably arise and are escalated at those points where new programs are proposed, designed and implemented. Sometimes, these are old and chronic conflicts that have been suppressed or shunted off and become rearoused under the new pressures that implementation presents.3 Also, new conflicts arise as individuals and units within the organization are assigned new roles and responsibilities and have to initiate new ways of practice. In addition, there are inevitably conflicts that arise because the implementation strategy has not been completely and accurately planned or sufficiently insightful to anticipate all the difficulties involved. Conflict per se, although troublesome, is not necessarily bad. Like anxiety, an optimal amount of conflict, neither too little nor too much, can serve as the motivational force for resolving difficulties. Too little conflict obviously obviates some of the motivational forces that can be truthfully generated; too much conflict becomes disabling and destructive. In order to achieve the amount of conflict that is optimal for the organization, it is necessary to understand its genesis. In the recent past, diagnostic efforts directed toward identifying pressure points and tension-producing conditions have mainly looked toward differences in the orientation, philosophy, investment, and style of the researcher on the one hand, and the administrator and staff on the other.4 It was felt that only understanding what was at stake personally and professionally for each would make the resolution of problems possible and promote effective working relationships. If the administrator had a tremendous stake in maintaining the status quo, for example, and saw change as indicating failure in what he was currently doing and was responsible for, as Campbell has discussed, it was important to find ways to provide him with recognition, power and prestige for the new endeavor.5 If the staff felt that intervention was manipulation rather than change, as Mann and Weiss have discussed, it is important to separate the fears and fantasies from the real

An Introductory Lecture on Personality Assessment

Summary The role of personality assessment is minimized in many introductory psychology presentations for a variety of reasons. Personality assessment is an area of great breadth and is understandably formidable to those whose training has been outside this area of specialization. The following lecture was designed to digest at least some parts of the area of personality assessment in as non-technical language as possible for use of instructors introducing its basic concepts.