Much scholarship suggests that racism--belief in out-group inferiority--is unrelated to contemporary attitudes. Purportedly, a new form of racism, one which relies upon a belief in cultural difference, has become a more acceptable basis for such attitudes. The authors argue that an appropriate empirical assessment of racism (both 'old' and 'new') depends upon (1) clear conceptualization and operationalization, and (2) attention to both mean-level expression and explanatory value in structural equation models. This study assessed the endorsement of racism and belief in cultural difference as well as their association with a measure of general attitude in a secondary analysis of parallel representative surveys of attitudes toward different ethnic out-groups in France, The Netherlands, Western Germany and Britain (N = 3242; see Reif & Melich, 1991). For six of the seven out-group targets, racism was strongly related to ethnic majority attitudes, despite low mean-level endorsement. In a pattern consistent with a 'new', indirect racism, the relationship between British racism and attitudes toward Afro-Caribbeans was mediated by belief in cultural difference.

This study examined the relationships among job performance, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory scores, self-perceived stress, and supervisory-perceived stress for female police officers. Thirty full-time female officers from 19 small-town departments served as subjects, representing 91% of all full-time female municipal officers in Vermont. A comparable group of 30 full-time male officers from the same departments and matched for experience was used as a control group. Results showed that, to a large extent, male and female officers experienced the same stressors in small-town policing. One exception was for task-related stressors, with women reporting more stress when exposed to tragedy, and feeling more stress associated with responsibility for the safety of the public and their professional colleagues. Women also reported stress associated with working in a male-dominated occupation. The increased stress did not affect job performance, however. Performance evaluations by supervisors indicated that female and male officers do the job equally well.

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