This research is an ethnographic study of literacy as a socially constructed process, literacy viewed as a part of the acquisition and transmission of culture. The focal population was a group of low SES high school students, most of whom were African American, and their children (ages 7 weeks to 4 years), several of whom were enrolled in a day care center housed within the large, urban high school their parents attended in a midwestern U.S. city. The research was an attempt to understand the kinds of literacy, specifically the types and amounts of reading and writing, that were a part of the home and school lives of the student/parents, and their parents, and a part of the home and day care lives of their children.
A viscometer for liquids of low viscosity was built to be used at temperatures up to ca. 1000°C with the liquid maintained under a vacuum or inert gas atmosphere. The viscometer follows the method first suggested by Helmholz (8) and later successfully developed by Chiong and Andrade (4). In this method, the liquid is enclosed in a sphere; and the sphere is set in rotatory oscillation about a vertical axis. From measurements of the damping of the oscillations and the period and moment of inertia of the rotating pendulum, absolute values of the viscosity are calculated using the equations derived by Chiong and Andrade (4).
In recent years, the spectrum of stress phenomena, ranging from the tragic to the mundane, has received a great deal of attention in the research literature. Research has found that exposure to a broad range of stress phenomena increases the risk for subsequent psychopathology (Kanner, Coyne, Schaefer, & Lazarus, 1981; Lewinsohn, Mermelstein, Alexander & MacPhillamy, 1985). The assumption that stress phenomena vary along a continuum from mild to severe underlies much of this research (Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend, 1978). Trauma has been understood to constitute the class labelled severe, life event stress (LES) the moderate, and daily hassles (DH) the mild. In empirical studies, these classes have thus been assumed to vary in terms of degree (i.e., quantity) rather than in terms of qualitative differences.