INTRODUCTION

Both in clinical and in developmental psychology, there seems to be clear evidence that experiences of violence in childhood lead to a heightened risk of parents later using violence toward their own children. In general, beaten children are the beating parents of the next generation. Although this insight has not been confirmed as direct causal evidence, the postulated relationship is not really disputed. Straus (1980b) was able to prove this linear positive relationship between the frequency of experiences of violence and the probability of one's own use of violence: In his study, mothers who were victims of domestic violence as teenagers showed – with nearly 30% – the highest rate of active child maltreatment. Other empirical studies have also shown a link between an adult's acceptance of violence and his or her own early violence experience. Bower and Knutson (1996) questioned approximately 1,359 students and ascertained that the participants with experiences of violence in their childhood were inclined to play down the severity of the violence suffered.

Some of the results of research on intergenerational transmission of violence suffer from methodological difficulties because they are based only on clinical findings with a small sample size, which does not allow inferences to be made in favor of or against the general theoretical assumptions. One of the main weaknesses in clinical findings is that a control group is often lacking. These methodological problems have been avoided in some studies by including control groups and through prospective study designs with risk groups.

Many human actions in everyday life occur in settings where actions are highly constrained and organized. Some years ago I started research on how newcomers adapt to such novel, unfamiliar, and coercive settings: The work was done in libraries and university career planning and placement centers (cf. Fuhrer, 1988, 1989a, 1990b). Questions were asked about the experience and behavior of newcomers to the settings, about the structure and dynamics of settings when invaded by the uninitiated, and about the reconciliation between the novices as individual persons and the settings as extra individual systems of activity. These questions are of both practical and theoretical importance: practical, because modern societies expose people to unfamiliar settings very frequently due to technological change, organizational developments, easy migration, and so forth; theoretical because answers to these questions require advancement in our understanding of the regulation of individual or collective actions as part of sociophysical or cultural environments.

A general theme that lies behind the discussion of research in this chapter is that learning (or knowledge acquisition) is inevitably situated. Learning takes place in real-life settings, under real performance requirements on actual individuals, and is vulnerable therefore to social influences that may arise at any time. Both retrospective verbal protocols and data of a behavioral path analysis were gathered (among other data; see Fuhrer, 1989a) from newcomers who learned to prepare a job application in a career planning and placement center.

Here is a typical situation: Imagine a freshman who comes into a career planning and placement center to look for a part-time summer job opportunity at a southern Californian public transport company.