A study investigated whether the interactive behaviors of elderly individuals were significantly influenced by their environment. The key to the investigation was the notion that human interaction can function to aid elderly individuals as they adapt to aging. Subjects were individuals over 65 years of age living in one of three separate…

After describing scenes that reveal a pattern in which whites regard blacks' speech behavior as threatening, aggressive, or hostile, and in which blacks disagree with their interpretation, this paper explores differences between black and white cultural assumptions, values, and conventions of aggressive behavior to account for the different…

The family communication course at Arapahoe Community College attempts to acquaint students with the central role of communication in the maintenance and enhancement of family relationships and to equip them with knowledge that can produce a greater flexibility in their communication within their own family units. The course is built around two…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether differences in verbal interaction existed between study teachers and first, second, and third year teachers with preservice instruction in Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC) and a comparison group without such instruction. (TIAC is a system of 10 categories which classifies verbal…

The research reported in this paper is concerned with the social and psychological implications of everyday interaction between graduate students and faculty in the sociology department of a small university. The researchers assumed that form of address is problematic for subordinates in social interaction and is a dilemma whose solution…

Statistical procedures are presented for determining ordinal and disordinal aptitude-treatment interactions with linear and curvilinear data. The paper presents a method for testing the homogeneity of group regressions for a single aptitude and provides models for expanding this test to linear and curvilinear regression planes. Procedures are…

The purpose of this paper is to improve knowledge of the interaction between the learner, the teaching arrangement, and the content. For practical purposes the combination of the teaching arrangement and the content has been called the task, as these cannot successfully be treated separately in the teaching-learning process. Through analysis of…

In this chapter, a path to learning about individuals interacting with settings is proposed. Settings may be places where individuals work, live, care, become committed, or engage in any type of living. The path consists of observational and reflective techniques that may be fruitfully used by educators or any persons interested in enhancing the…

This study, involving four staff members in an institution for people with mental retardation, found that a computerized system of prompts to improve staff-client interactions produced more positive statements, improved distribution of interaction among clients, and resulted in delivery of more positive reinforcement than a traditional…

Coding systems have become popular methods of cataloging the verbal and nonverbal interaction occurring during marital and family therapy. One such system, Pinsof's (1981) Family Therapist Coding System (FTCS), was the first designed explicitly to identify and differentiate specific verbal behaviors of family therapists independent of their…

Three brief instructional programs for beginning counselors are described for the purpose of inducing entry-level social skills that support effective counseling interaction. Implications for a competency-based counselor education format are discussed. (Author)

This paper presents a model for a message-centered theory of human conflict based on the assumption that conflict will result from the pairing of any two functional messages that share a common antecedent but contain different consequences with oppositely signed affect. The paper first shows how to represent conflict situations diagrammatically…

The implications of the dialectical perspective for research methodology are reviewed and illustrated with examples from research on memory and memory development. Three conversations or dialogues are described: within the researcher, between the researcher and the research participants, and between the researcher and social-historical context. It…

This paper contends that the rationality of the logic of good reasons is constituted in its use. To support this claim, the paper presents an analysis of the relationship between being reasonable and being rational. It then considers how following the logic of good reasons leads to rationality in the behavior of individuals and groups; the latter…

Three secondary school teachers (A, B, and C) participated in a study to determine if teachers use a repeating pattern of verbal instructional techniques and if there are common instructional patterns among teachers. Sixteen observation records of interaction sequences for each teacher showed that teacher A exhibited the most complex system of…