Daniel Solomon

Dimensions of Children’s Classroom Behavior, as Perceived by Teachers

Teachers described the classroom behavior of 205 3rd- and 4th-grade children with a 30-item rating scale. Factor analysis of the scale produced four factors, which were called: democratic, cooperative behavior; autonomous intellectual orientation; responsible perseverant striving behavior; and involvement in class activities. Correlations of factor scores with measures of achievement test performance, creativity, inquiry skill, and various orientations, motives, attitudes and values were investigated. Patterns of correlations with the two achievement-related factors suggested that teachers can validly discriminate between “perseverant” and “autonomous, intellectual” approaches to achievement.

Influence of Verbal Content and Intonation on Meaning Attributions of First- and Second-Language Speakers

Summary Perceptions of a series of recorded verbal evaluation statements comprising all combinations of three levels of content (positive, neutral, negative) and three levels of intonation (pleased, indifferent, displeased) were obtained from groups of adolescents in America and India. The recorded statements were all in English, a second language for the Indian subjects. The major finding was that the Indians were more likely to rely on content for judgments of affective meaning, while the Americans relied relatively more on intonation for judgments of affective meaning. This finding was attributed to differences in amount of experience with the language. It was also found that the American girls were generally more responsive to intonation than the American boys, while the Indian boys were more responsive to intonation than the Indian girls.

Developing an empirical socioeconomic typology of counties in five western states

Abstract County-level data representing a broad range of socioeconomic variables were obtained for the 190 counties in five western States-California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. A factor analysis of these variables produced eight orthogonal factors: (1) Urbanism, (2) Poverty vs affluence, (3) County tax revenues and services, relative to population, (4) Proportion of aged population, (5) Social stability vs instability, (6) New housing development vs cattle ranching, (7) Crop farming, welfare and unemployment, and (8) Small business activity vs level of federal employment. Several ways of examining scores on these factors were explored and demonstrated: distributions of scores on individual factors across counties were displayed graphically; individual county profiles, comprised of scores on all eight factors, were produced and examined; and groups of counties with similar profiles (representing county “types”) were identified through cluster analysis, and their average profiles and geographic distributions displayed and discussed. Groupings of clusters which were similar in some respects and varied in others were also presented. The utility of these methods for planning activities which may involve individual counties and/or groups of counties is discussed.