Gene F. Summers

The Adequacy of Student Reports of Parental Ses Characteristics

In this study, the reliability and validity of student reports of parental SES characteristics was investigated. Using panel data for student reports and independent surveys of both mothers and fathers, it was found that student reports were relatively stable over time and were more reliably measured for parental education than for either fathers income or occupation. The validities of the reports were, for all but income reports, moderate. The validity of income reports was very low. It was concluded that student reports should be utilized with some caution, and, where possible, direct measures of parental SES should be used.

Toward an interpretation of items used in field studies of mental illness

Abstract Data from 1003 rural, Illinois heads of households are used toward three ends: (1) giving a plausible interpretation to items previously used in field studies of mental illness; (2) describing the level of two symptom types among subgroups in a rural population; (3) considering the importance of status variables and physiological malaise as factors in producing psychological stress. The interpretation given previously used “mental illness” items is that they measure psychological stress and physiological malaise. Both status and physiological variables are important for predicting psychological stress in individuals.

Validation of Reputational Leadership by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix

The preparation of this paper was supported by PHS Research Grant 1Rl1 MH-02592-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health and Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) Project 05-396, contributing to NC-80. Lauren Seilers participation was supported (in part) by National Institutes of Health Fellowship 1-F1-MH-41983-01 BEH from the National Institute of Mental Health. We wish to express appreciation to the editors for making available

Locating Community Boundaries: an Integration of Theory and Empirical Techniques

Utilizing the Kaufman (1959) and Sutton-Kolaja (1960a, 1960b) conceptualization of community, empirical techniques are developed to identify community boundaries. These techniques are unique because they allow simultaneous consideration of boundary and interaction aggregation problems. A sociological conceptualization of community is coordinated with layman respondents perceptions so empirical data, faithful to both perspectives, may be gathered from community residents. Community boundaries are identified from conditional probability matrices applied to residents identified as business, education, and government leaders in ten rural areas of Illinois. Township boundaries regularly coincide with community boundaries. Techniques developed here appear widely applicable to identifying community and other boundaries.

Social Status and Personality Factors in Predicting Interviewer Performance

Results are reported from an investigation of the predictive power of three interviewer social status and five personality factors in a multiple regression . analysis with four interviewer performance criteria. Personality factors are found to be more predictive of performance than social status. Clearly, one can improve the probability of hiring quality interviewers by collecting and evaluating social status and personality characteristics of applicants.