In an experimental evaluation of a “friendly visitor” type of program in which adolescents visited senior citizens, it was found that general attitudes toward elderly people (measured by the Semantic Differential developed by Rosencranz and McNevin) improved following weekly contact with specific elderly persons. One of the weaknesses in research on this type of intervention has been the assumption that the quality of the contact was uniform, and the impact of quality was rarely assessed. In the present study, the perceived quality of the experience was found to have a significant impact on improving attitudes. Programs such as the one evaluated here can, therefore, have two outcomes: the provision of service to elderly individuals and the change of negative attitudes toward elderly people.

This paper reports on a project aimed at creating support groups for caregivers of the frail elderly and assessing their impact on participants. The effect evaluation was based on a quasi-experimental design with repeated measures (n = 120). The results show that participation in support groups did not lower the caregivers' subjective burden, and indeed contributed to its increase. Conversely, such participation appears to have had a stabilizing effect on their level of depressive symptoms. Both these effects, reported at the end of the support group experience, persisted three months later. Various possible explanations of these contradictory results are discussed.

A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies.