Luther B. Otto

Parental Influence on Young People's Career Development

The child development and socialization literatures have long recognized the pervasive influence parents have on all aspects of human development (Goslin, 1971). Although the adolescent society literature of the past two decades (Smith, 1962; Coleman, 1961) argued that young people are enmeshed in youth cultures that have little regard for parental (and school) values, recent reviews of the literature give increased visibility of the influence parents and families have on young people’s development. Michael Rutter (1980), for example, concludes that &dquo;young people tend both to share their parents’ values on the major issues of life and also to turn to them for guidance on most major concerns. The concept of parent-child alienation as a usual feature of adolescence is a myth&dquo; (p. 31).

Canonical Correlation Analysis in Family Research.

With the development of refined theory and increased measurement sophistication in family research, multidimensional concepts and multiple indicators are appearing with increased frequency in the literature. The resulting analytical challenges are especially formidable when the theoretical models require the analysis of two sets of multiple indicators. Although canonical correlation is a technique specifically designed to accommodate this problem, the technique has received little attention in family research. In this paper, we provide a nonmathematical introduction to canonical correlation analysis and three empirical examples that demonstrate the techniques applicability in family research.

Social stress and family development

Twelve papers resulting from the 1982 Annual Meeting of the National Council on Family Relations. Topics include: the convergence of family development, family stress, and family problem solvings stress in historical and family time; family development and policy issues. Annotation copyright Book N

Bringing Parents Back In

was sounded early in the 1970s in the American College Testing (ACT) nationwide study of student career development (Prediger, Roth, and Noeth, 1973) in which eighty-four percent of the eleventh-graders said they could almost always see a counselor when they wanted to, yet 78 percent said they wanted more help making career plans. One-half to two-thirds reported that school career planning services were of little or no help to them.

Social Causes of Psychological Distress.

A core interest of social science is the study of stratification--inequalities in income, power, and prestige. Few persons would care about such inequalities if the poor, powerless, and despised were as happy and fulfilled as the wealthy, powerful, and admired. Social research often springs from humanistic empathy and concern as much as from scholarly and scientific curiosity. An economist might observe that black Americans are disproportionately poor, and investigate racial differences in education, employment, and occupation that account for disproportionate poverty. A table comparing additional income blacks and whites can expect for each additional year of education is thus as interesting in its own right as any dinosaur bone or photo of Saturn. However, something more than curiosity underscores our interest in the table. Racial differences in status and income are a problem in the human sense. Inequality in misery makes social and economic inequality personally meaningful. There are two ways social scientists avoid advocacy in addressing issues of social stratification. The first way is to resist projecting personal beliefs, values, and responses as much as possible, while recognizing that the attempt is never fully successful. The second way is by giving the values of the subjects an expression in the research design. Typically, this takes the form of opinion or attitude surveys. Researchers ask respondents to rate the seriousness of crimes, the appropriateness of a punishment for a crime, the prestige of occupations, the fair pay for a job, or the largest amount of money a family can earn and not be poor, and so on. The aggregate judgments, and variations in judgments, represent the values of the subjects and not those of the researcher. They are objective facts with causes and consequences of interest in their own right. This work is an effort to move methodology closer to human concerns without sacrificing the scientific grounds of research as such. The authors succeed admirably in this complex and yet worthwhile task. This is a work that could be helpful to those in all branches of the social sciences that take up issues relating to inequality and the uneven distribution of the social goods of a nation.