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Interactionist Perspective (interactionist + perspective)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	71%

Selected Abstracts

Dispositional and Organizational Influences on Sustained Volunteerism: An Interactionist Perspective

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 3 2002
Louis A. Penner
Community service often involves sustained prosocial actions by individuals. This article focuses on one kind of such actions, volunteerism. Volunteerism involves long,term, planned, prosocial behaviors that benefit strangers, and usually occur in an organizational setting. A selective review of the literature on the correlates of volunteerism is presented. One part of the review concerns the relationship between dispositional variables and volunteerism; it includes new data from an on,line survey that show significant relationships among personality traits, religiosity, and volunteer activities. The other part concerns how organizational variables, alone and in combination with dispositional variables, are related to volunteerism. A theoretical model of the causes of sustained volunteerism is presented and the practical implications of this model are discussed. [source]

Children's Language Learning: An Interactionist Perspective

THE JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY AND ALLIED DISCIPLINES, Issue 1 2000
Robin S. Chapman
This review of children's language learning considers historical accounts of acquisition and individual variation, recent advances in methods for studying language learning, research on genetic and environmental input that have contributed to the interactionist perspective, and the relevance of cross-disciplinary work on language disorders and the biology of learning to future theories. It concludes that the study of children's language development is converging on an interactionist perspective of how children learn to talk, incorporating the contributions of both nature and nurture to emergent, functional language systems. Language learning is viewed as an integration of learning in multiple domains. [source]

Maternal distancing and event memory at 20 months

INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2003
Nathalie Prudhomme
Abstract Maternal distancing strategies (Sigel, 1993 in The Development and Meaning of Psychological Distance, Cocking R, Renninger KA (eds). Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ; 141,158) with 20-month-olds were analysed during a mother,child interaction in a free play situation. Then, they were related to memory performance of the children as assessed by the elicited imitation paradigm with 4 three-step sequences of actions (Bauer, Hertsgaard, Child Dev. 1993; 64:1204). The aim of this work was to (1) confirm that the Sigel's model of distancing could be used with very young children under two; (2) study relationships between maternal distancing that stimulate representational competence of the child and memory performance of the children. Results showed two different patterns of correlations depending on the sequence type: for enabling sequences, significant positive correlations were obtained for the first two distancing levels whereas for arbitrary sequences no correlation was found whatever the distancing level. As discussed, the first pattern brings new arguments in support of declarative memory before the age of 2 years and reframes the memory development in a Vygotskyian interactionist perspective. The second pattern of correlations calls for replication and more investigation about the processes implied in memory of very young children for different sequence types. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

If Language Is a Complex Adaptive System, What Is Language Assessment?

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2009
Robert J. Mislevy
Individuals' use of language in contexts emerges from second-to-second processes of activating and integrating traces of past experiences,an interactionist view compatible with the study of language as a complex adaptive system but quite different from the trait-based framework through which measurement specialists investigate validity, establish reliability, and ensure fairness of assessments. This article discusses assessment arguments from an interactionist perspective. We argue that the familiar concepts and methods of assessment that evolved under a trait perspective can be gainfully reconceived in terms of the finer-grained perspective of interactionism, and we illustrate how key ideas relate to familiar practices in language testing. [source]

"It's Just Black, White, or Hispanic": An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 4 2008
Philip Goodman
This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on "institutional ethnography." I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a "negotiated settlement" regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ,race'/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ,race' is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, "the main machine for ,race making'" (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine,a series of patterned, negotiated settlements,happens in real time, "on the ground," and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators. [source]

EMOTION HELPERS: THE ROLE OF HIGH POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY AND HIGH SELF-MONITORING MANAGERS

PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
GINKA TOEGEL
Who provides help to employees suffering anxiety and emotional pain in organizations? From an interactionist perspective, we anticipated that increasing levels of managerial responsibility would unlock discretionary helping behavior related to differences in self-monitoring and positive affectivity. Results from a study of 94 members of a recruitment firm confirmed that those active in providing emotional help to others in the workplace tended to possess a combination of managerial responsibility and a high self-monitoring or high positive affectivity disposition. By contrast, when members were low in positive affect or self-monitoring they provided less emotional help to others, irrespective of the level of managerial responsibility. These interaction results remained significant after taking into account centrality in friendship and workflow networks, as well as significant effects of gender. [source]