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Cartoons are used as indicators of the social meanings, especially personality traits and emotional states, typically assigned to men and women. Single-frame cartoons relevant to sex roles were randomly sampled at five-year intervals, beginning in 1952, from Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, and Playboy. Statistical trend analysis on 430 cartoon people in 195 cartoons reveals more trait stereotyping for females than for males. Five dominant, general stereotypes were found: the seductive female, the sexually assertive male, the disconsolate man, the incompetent woman, and the angry woman. There has been a decline in the occurrence of the angry woman stereotype and reciprocal sex role conflict in humorus drawings over the past two decades.

The use of graphical humor as an indicator of social and psychological attitudes is reviewed. A novel method for assessing attitudes using cartoons as projective devices is introduced. Analysis of responses from 275 students who were given both discursive, sentence items and graphical humor, projective items, demonstrates the potential of cartoons as stimuli for attitude measurement. The results suggest that graphical humor might be developed successfully in constructing alternative methods for measuring attitudinal ambivalence. Greater attention should be given to the ambivalence dimensions of social attitudes because ambivalence is a common and expected outcome of the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in social life.

2 related propositions are examined: whether the proportion of the electorate construing pol in ideological terms remains fairly constant from one election to the next - ie, whether ideological thinking is influenced by characteristics of the voter more than by characteristics of the pol'al environment: & whether the 1964 election, defined by B. Goldwater as an ideological plebiscite, was recognized as such by the public. The analysis, based on Survey Res Center data, suggests that, indeed, many people understood Goldwater only too well, & casts doubt on the hypothesis that ideological thinking is an invariant attribute of voters. In addition, an attempt is made to assess the direction of ideological sentiment in the US pop. AA.

Draws on an experiment conducted in four education centers for nontraditional & low-performing secondary students in greater Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, in 1996 to determine whether adolescents are more honest about sensitive self-disclosure in computerized or paper-&-pencil self-administrated questionnaires. Subjects (Ss)(N = 368 adolescents, age 12+) answered items about drug use, sexual activity, criminal behavior, self-harm, family substance abuse, domestic violence, & sexual abuse/violence via either computer or paper. Analysis finds that Ss using paper reported more of most behaviors/circumstances than did those on computers. This effect was complicated by a distance effect for computer users: those sitting very close to other students made the fewest reports. It is concluded that the lack of privacy available in most computer laboratories may cause adolescent survey Ss to underreport sensitive information. 2 Tables, 21 References. E. Blackwell