Sociology, Theory and Methods

The issue of domestic violence, referring to violence between intimate partners, has been extensively studied the last two decades and has, much thanks to the women's movement, also become a public awareness issue. Several different theories and perspectives have attempted to explain the occurrence of domestic violence and although they have greatly contributed to our understanding, there is an articulated need for a more comprehensive model. Thus study provides a cross-disciplinary review of existing research as well as creates an outline for a holistic model connecting different theories and levels of analyses. This study also demonstrates the importance of incorporating race and gender hierarchies into the analyses of domestic violence.

This study examined the validity of Hersey and Blanchard' s Situational Leadership Theory (SLT). The meta-analytic techniques of Hunter, Schmidt, and Jackson were used to investigate two research questions: (1) Does the matching of leadership styles and follower maturity influence outcome measures? (2) Can any of the remaining variance be attributed to moderator variables? A literature search from January, 1968 to April, 1990 produced 26 acceptable studies with 52 separate effects. A correlation coefficient was reported for each study. In studies with multiple effects the correlation was computed from an aggregation of those effects. A mean and variance were tabulated, and corrections were made for sampling error and attenuation. The corrected mean was.0498 with a variance of.0076. This was not significant. The criterion for significance was that the mean must be more than two standard deviations greater than zero (Hunter, Schmidt, & Jackson, 1982, p.28). An analysis of residual variance justified a search for moderator effects. Length of study proved to be the only influential moderator (.4343 mean and 0.0 standard deviation) when the Vertiz, et al. outlier was removed. With the exception of increasing the length of treatment, no evidence was obtained to support the Situational Leadership Theory. Future research should include longer durations, and more designs should incorporate outcome measures. Finally, measurement precision needs to improve for both leadership and maturity.

Patterns of settlement are examined using a number of fractal and scaling techniques. Existing methods of spatial analysis are reviewed and evaluated, showing a need for additional methods for the analysis of spatial and geographical data. Fractal methods are introduced as candidates for such uses. They are applied in a variety of ways to analyze patterns of population and settlement: in an exploratory fashion, to test hypotheses, to determine correlations, to validate settlement models, and to explore the dynamics of population. Scaling properties of population and settlement patterns averaged over different regions are found to be non-uniform, allowing comparisons to be made between them. Correlations are discovered between the scaling behavior of settlement patterns and physical factors such as proximity to coastlines and the ruggedness of the landscape. Popular stochastic and central place models are shown to be inadequate for explaining the scaling behavior of real settlement patterns. Finally patterns of population change are examined, compared and described in terms of their scaling properties. This paper demonstrates how fractal and scaling methods can be usefully applied in the social and spatial sciences. Such an exploratory analysis of the scaling behavior of patterns of human population and settlement constitutes a necessary first step toward a detailed understanding of these phenomena.