Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2226
The departments within the College of Education were reorganized and renamed as of July 1, 2011. This department incorporates the former departments of Counseling & Personnel Services; Education Leadership, Higher Education & International Education (excluding Organizational Leadership & Policy Studies); and Special Education.
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Item The role of communication, life role commitments, and sexist ideologies in dual-earner marriages(2008-05-31) Sullivan, Catherine Mary; Hoffman, Mary Ann; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dual earner family is now the norm among married couples of all races; yet research has shown that even dual-earner couples are not generally able to attain marital equality. This study investigated inequality in marital relationships as it related to wives' psychological distress and marital satisfaction by examining variables that appear to correspond with invisible power, namely the gendered ways men and women commit to various life roles, how they communicate in times of conflict, and the sexist ideologies that serve to shape these roles and behaviors. Participants were 287 married women who worked full-time outside the home and whose oldest child was under the age of six. The sample was predominantly White, highly educated and had a relatively high income. Participants completed a web-based survey, which included measures of relationship satisfaction, psychological distress, life role commitments, ambivalent sexism, constructive communication, and social support. Participants responded to several measures twice - once from their own perspective and once based on their perceptions of their husband's perspective. Results suggested that while the variables of interest, particularly constructive communication, predicted a large among of variance in relationship satisfaction, they only predicted a small amount of variance in psychological distress. The three variables that were found to predict unique variance in wives' reported marital satisfaction were constructive communication, wives' perceptions of their husband's commitment to the parental role, and wives' own commitment to the marital role. Findings support the importance of these variables for predicting women's reported marital satisfaction and the importance of examining these variables together. Overall, it was found that wives' perceptions of their husbands' perspective were more strongly predictive of wives' marital satisfaction than wives' own ratings. Results suggest that constructive communication is a particularly important tool for women in dual-earner marriages, a way that they are empowered to make marriage more satisfying and possibly as a protective factor or way to cope with what would otherwise be distressing. These findings can be used to inform the development of interventions to help dual-earner couples with young children.Item Factors Affecting the Generalization of "wh-" Question Answering by Children with Autism(2007-04-25) Barthold, Christine Hoffner; Egel, Andrew L; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to examine whether Relational Frame Theory (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001b) could be applied to increase generalization of "wh-" question answering (e.g., what, why, how) by children with autism. Students (N=6) from two self-contained classrooms for children with autism were taught to answer "wh-" questions in the presence of magazine pictures, pictures from storybooks, and actions in the natural context depicting a scenario related to the question asked. Generalization to novel questions was then assessed. If students were not able to answer generalized "wh-" questions to criterion, a matching-to-sample procedure with exclusion was used to increase associations between stimuli. A multiple probe design across subjects was used for this study. A baseline of "wh-" question answering, matching to sample, and receptive identification of answers to questions were conducted prior to training. In addition, students were observed in the classroom environment prior to training. A descriptive analysis of their verbal behavior, in which antecedents, student responses, and consequences were recorded, was conducted to determine the students' verbal behavior ability in the absence of a particular training program. Two students, one in each school, were able to generalize to novel "wh-" questions after training. Both of these students were able to spontaneously tact items and had a higher number of tacts in relation to mands in the descriptive analysis. Individuals who did not generalize did not acquire relations using a matching to sample with exclusion procedure. They also emitted either an equal number of tacts and mands during the descriptive analysis or more mands than tacts. Implications for practice include the consideration of waiting to include "wh-" question answering until students are able to emit a high number of spontaneous tacts and possibly early intraverbal behavior such as greetings, the elimination of visual stimuli when teaching "wh-" questions, and the expansion of matching-to-sample goals in behavioral curricula. Suggestions for future research include the continued research into the development of verbal behavior in children with autism, refinement of matching techniques to teach relations, and expansion of the descriptive analysis of verbal behavior.