Words and Deeds: Social Science and Social Policy

The Role of Trust in Low‐Income Mothers' Intimate Unions

“…In this line of reasoning, general attitudes provide little insight on the courses of action individuals choose to take. Knowledge of the situational processes that influence social acts, according to Blumer (1955, p. 63) is “of far greater predictive value than is any amount of knowledge about general attitudes.” Moreover, a reliance on general attitudes as bellwethers of human actions underscores a problematic tendency to assume that what people say is an accurate predictor of what they will actually do (see Deutscher 1966; Schuman & Johnson, 1976). While a general attitude may have some bearing on the actor’s decision to behave in one way or another, it represents, as Blumer (1955, p. 63) cautioned, “merely an element that enters into the developing acts - - no more than an initial bid for a possible line of action.”…”

Federal Funding and Policing Research

“…In this view, sponsorship is need induced, and knowledge becomes an instrument, a tool in the hands of specialists who employ it to meet specific human needs (e.g., Kreidler, 1964;Gans, 1971;Hall, 1972;Wohlstetter, 1964;Brodie, 1964;Vandervelde and Miller, 1975). Others have misgivings about private and federally sponsored research because it is too conservative (D. Horowitz, 1969aHorowitz, , 1969bHorowitz, , 1969cLindeman, 1970), dangerously politicized (Deutscher, 1966;Gouldner, 1968;Raskin, 1971;Broadhead and Rist, 1976;Hoult, 1968;Nicolaus, 1972), or an instrument of class domination (Aptheker, 1966(Aptheker, , 1972D. Smith, 1974;Schulman et al, 1972), ineffective (Dror, 1971), or even too radical (Orlans, 1973;Wormser, 1958).…”

Goals and Behaviour

“…Pospisil 1958;Scheffler 1956] at the same time, as Deutscher shows, the relation between stated behaviour, between assertions of what "one does under certain circumstances" and between actual behaviour, i.e. what actually occurs, is highly problematic [Deutscher 1966]. It seems that norms should be treated more as apart of the "relevant stock of knowledge" of the actors.…”