by Lewis R. Aiken (1996)
In the late 1900s Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, introduced what is now considered the first rating scale. Over the next several decades various landmark tests appeared - most notably, the Binet-Simon, Army Alpha and Beta, Rorschach, and TAT tests. With the outbreak of World War II and the U.S. War Department's large-scale investment in the development of reliable instruments with which to measure inductees' personalities and aptitudes for various task, rating scales and checklists came into their own. Since then, rating scales have been used regularly in government, education, and industry, and an array of "paper and pencil" tests has been developed to quantify and qualify people's attitudes, aptitudes, performances, and personalities. Rating Scales and Checklists is the first comprehensive guide to constructing, scoring, validating, and applying these potent investigative and diagnostic tools. Written by a well-known authority in the field, it provides many valuable insights into the theoretical/psychometric aspects of measurement and scaling, as well as helpful practical guidelines for test construction and administration in a wide range of research and applied situations. In addition, the enclosed DOS-formatted computer diskette contains several dozen programs concerned with the construction, analysis, and applications of checklists, rating scales, attitude scales, and other psychometric instruments accompanying the text. Rating Scales and Checklists is an important tool for practitioners in the behavioral and social sciences as well as for market research professionals, attitude and product researchers, and political pollsters. It is also an excellent supplemental text for upper level courses in psychology, education, sociology, political science, and other related disciplines.
Richard A. Posner
"The most exciting development in legal thinking since World War II has been the growth of interdisciplinary legal studies - the application of the social sciences and the humanities to law in the hope of making law less formalistic, more practical, better grounded empirically, better tailored to social goals. Judge Richard A. Posner has been a leader in this movement, and his new book explores its rapidly expanding frontier."--BOOK JACKET.
David B. Morris
We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness has changed in the postmodern era--roughly the period since World War II--as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, David B. Morris tells the fascinating story, or stories, of what goes into making the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique. Even as he decries the overuse and misuse of the term "postmodern," Morris shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism illuminate one another in late-twentieth-century culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease--an objectively verified disorder--from illness--a patient's subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, Morris says, can make no such clean distinction instead, it demands a biocultural model, situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture. Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for investigating both biology and culture. In many ways Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age leads us to understand our experience of the world differently.
Penelope Lively
"Story-telling is an ingrained habit; I wouldn't know what else to do. But the mythology that is intriguing today is that of imagined alternatives. Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as the person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climatic moments when things might have gone differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome". In this fascinating new piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks "what if" she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married someone else? If she taken a different job? If she had lived her life abroad? In this highly original work, Penelope Lively examines alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path....
Howard Waskow & Arthur Waskow
This is a book for brothers - and for sisters, too; for the feelings to which these brothers testify - fear, envy, anger - are familiar to almost everyone who has a sibling. They are heightened and dramatized in the tale of Cain and Abel, which like other stories in the Bible speaks to us of universal themes in human life. Howard and Arthur Waskow grew up as brothers in a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore during the 1940s. In this unusually honest book they demonstrate that powerful emotions such as these do lie beneath the surface of everyday family life. As with many siblings, behind a superficial layer of civility their relationship was distant, competitive, antagonistic; their conflict extended well into their adult years. Eventually their divorces, their mother's final illness, and their own desire to change brought them toward one another.^ Wary at first, they set out on a journey of discovery and recovery that was helped to completion by the need to care for their aging father, and by the collaborative writing of this book. Becoming Brothers is uniquely both a record and an instrument of this deliberate and painful reconciliation. In alternating chapters, these brothers reconstruct their struggle piece by piece, crossing back through years of conflict to the roots of their estrangement - often wrestling with contested bits of memory, enlightening and enlivening each other, doing the hard but necessary work of intimate relationship. Theirs is a universal story about the way in which people grow apart and how they can discover one another, and themselves, by acknowledging their similarities and accepting their differences. In the end, the brothers find that only through understanding who they were as sons and brothers can they fulfill their mature roles as husbands and fathers.^ Their search for wholeness requires them to cooperate and finally to forgive. This beautifully written, humane, and intelligent book reminds its readers not only that everyday life can be deeply significant, but that fundamental change is always possible.