Huynh, Michelle

                                                                                            Health, Per 5

                                                                                                2/23/05    

                                     Decision-Making Model

       Have you ever had a problem that took a lot of time of thinking? Well, there is a method that can help you make your decision called decision-making model. A decision-making model is a series of steps that helps a person make a responsible decision. Those steps include stating the problem, listing the options, imagining the benefits and consequences, considering you values, weighing the options and deciding, act it, and lastly evaluating the results. Each step helps people come closer to making the right, responsible decision. For example, a girl name Evelyn is having a boring time at a party because she barely knows anyone there. Finally, when someone talks to her they offer her to drink alcohol. Evelyn now has to make a decision. By using the decision-making model Evelyn will be able to make a responsible decision.

        The first step is to “state the problem”. Stating the problem means to figure out what your problem is. Back to the example, Evelyn’s problem is state as “Should I drink the alcohol?” The second step is to “list the options”. Listing the solutions to your problems may not be an easy thing to do, but as you list your options you may come up with other ones. Also, talking to other people like parents, friends, family, or teachers can help make new options. In Evelyn’s problem, her options could be: 1. Take the offer; 2. Say no to the offer; or 3. Try to avoid the question. These steps help a person confront their problem.

      Imagining the benefits and consequences come as the third step. This is one of the most important step in the decision making model. This step shows all the possible pros and cons of each option. It also shows the short and long term of the negative consequences. Example, Evelyn’s option’s benefits are: 1. having a friend to talk to; 2. not having to smoke; 3. won’t have to answer the question. Evelyn’s consequences are: 1. she could become a alcoholic and ruin her future or she could feel guilty drinking; 2. Her friend might think she isn’t cool because she doesn’t smoke or she would continue to be bored at the party; 3. she might continue to avoid questions that she doesn’t want to answer for the rest of her life and people might think she is a coward. After listing the benefits and consequences, you think about your values. Your values are your strong beliefs and ideals. Your values allow you to choose between good and bad, and between right and wrong. Some values that most people have are honesty, trustworthiness, responsibility to oneself and others, self-control, and social justice. Those values are called “universal values”. Evelyn’s values include being responsible to herself, being true to your self, and not be something different because of someone else. Her views on drinking are also important. She dislike like alcohol because her grandmother died because of drinking. These steps help build the body of your decision.

      The last three steps are where you make your decision base on steps 2-4. These three steps include weighing the options and decide, acting it, and evaluate the results. To decide, carefully examine the consequences and benefits of each option. Decide which on is better and fits with your values. To solve Evelyn’s problem she chooses to just say no to drink the alcohol. It shows that she is honest and responsible to herself. Next it is where the solution to the problem takes action. Evelyn solution to say no is acted out when she tells her friend that she doesn’t want to drink. Lastly, the step is to evaluate the results. Questions that are asked to help the evaluation are: how well the decision works out; or how can it improve the way you make decisions in the future. After Evelyn said no her friend said it was cool and they just talk about a different subject. To Evelyn the decisions work well because she had someone to talk to and she didn’t have to change herself to be like them. That’s how the decision-making model works.

     The decision-making model can help you make the right decision. Going through steps like stating the problem, listing the options, imagining the benefits and consequences, considering you values, weighing the options and deciding, act it, and evaluating the results can direct you to your solution. Most of the questions can use the decision-making model. Some questions that are not suitable for this method are work problems, eating choosing problems and basically question that don’t need that much thinking. The decision –making model can stir you into the right pathway in life because sometimes a wrong decision can cost you your life.

Why Do American Like To Divorce So Frequently?
Americans don't like to divorce any more than Indochinese do. However, Americans' rapidly changing, heterogeneous society makes high divorce rates inevitable. When a man and woman marry they may be truly close emotionally and intellectually. But the husband and wife are most often not together for large parts of the day as they are on a family farm or in a family business in Indochina. Even that would probably not be of too great consequence in Indochina, but the situation is different in America. Here the environment may be quite different for a husband working in one place and a wife working at home or somewhere else. In the U.S. every section of the country, city, every profession, every class, even every individual and family has its own character, values, ethics and philosophy. In Indochina everyone's values are more or less the same so wherever a husband or wife works there's no influence to change. But in the U.S. a husband going to school or working in an inner city social service agency may be pulled in one philosophical, emotional direction whereas the wife staying at home or perhaps working in a suburban doctor's office may be pulled in other directions. The once close couple grows apart. There is less social pressure in the U.S. for the couple to conform to each other, because, as mentioned, independence and individuality are highly respected in a technological society. Furthermore, a woman in an advanced industrialized nation is more likely to be better educated and better able to find a job and live independently than in an agricultural society. The woman is economically freer to make her own independent decision as to whether she wants to stay with her spouse.

http://www.boloji.com/family/00126.htm

Arranged marriage is obviously unique human invention. It is mating arranged by third party. All animals go through natural courting and mating process except some human society. Only domesticated animals do not have much chance for such natural process because human controls their reproduction and selects straits desirable for human not for animals themselves. It is selective breeding controlled by human. Domesticated animals might well have lost their courtship skills. Of course, slavery treats human like domesticated animal. However, slavery in history never was long enough to make such impact on our human biology.

Arranged marriage is selective breeding for human. We human are subject of selective breeding. Match makers and parents are the breeders. Young couples are selected together by pure calculating intellectual process. Such arranged marriage or selective breeding of human are only exist in well-developed society or civilization. Arranged marriage should be considered as civilized product. In primitive society, tremendous amount of time and energy are spent on natural courting rituals like dancing, socializing, ect. In modern societies, such rituals are transformed into nightclubs, parties, other social gathering with such courtship and mating potentials.

However, in certain societies, I suspect, long civilized history with arranged marriage (human breeding) have deemed their citizens weak in natural courtship skills. In a way, they are inadequate in such natural skills like domesticated animals compared to wild animals. Such highly civilized people will be at loss when they are thrown back to natural dating and courtship environment. In such societies, abandon of match making and arranged marriage might not be good idea in the name of freedom. This might explain the weak romantic or courtship skills observed in some East Asians living in West. Maybe, arranged marriage is better idea for them.

Even in China, ethnic minorities living at peripheries of Chinese territory have better dating skill than that of ethnic Han. Such observation further supported that civilized history suppress such natural or primitive (depend on how you perceive)mating skill.

People are products of their long society and history. Their way of life and social organization should be compatible with psychological profile which might have been shaped by genetic traits as result of evolution. Blind applications of morale value, social structure, political believes and way of life from one society to another often lead to disastrous consequence.

Such disastrous or harmful consequence can be seen daily around world. So there is no absolute idea about what is good or bad. It is about what is working for you. If you are good at courtship and romance, you should find love on your own. If you are weak in romantic skill, yet strong in other aspects as civilized citizen, arranged marriage might not be bad thing for you.

No-fault divorce caused already-climbing divorce rates to jump further. As the preceding statistics reveal, divorce rates in America zoomed to new heights under no-fault. Though not all of the increase can be attributed exclusively to the changes in the law, a significant portion can. In a 1989 study by Justec Research in Virginia on the effects of no-fault divorce in 38 states, the findings revealed "very strong evidence" that no-fault increased divorce in eight states and "some lesser evidence" for increases in eight more. The study's author, lawyer and sociologist Thomas B. Marvell, concludes that "on the average, the no-fault laws increased divorces by some 20 to 25 percent." In none of the states studied did no-fault decrease divorce."
Brian Willats, Breaking Up is Easy To Do, available from Michigan Family Forum, citing Thomas B. Marvell, "Divorce Rates and the Fault Requirement," Law and Society Review 23 (1989), p. 544. Cited in Bryce J. Christensen, "Taking Stock: Assessing Twenty Years of 'No Fault' Divorce", The Family In America, September 1991 , p. 4.

Family scholars debate whether no-fault regimes have influenced rates of divorce at all. However, a recent analysis has suggested that "for most of the 32 states that implemented no-fault divorce during the divorce boom (1965-1974)our resultssupport the interpretation that no-fault laws resulted in a substantial number of divorces that would not have occurred otherwise."
-- Sean E. Brotherson and Jeffrey B. Teichert, "Value of the Law in Shaping Social Perspectives on Marriage", 3 U. of Utah Jnl. L. & Fam. Stud. 23, at 47, citing Joseph Lee Rodgers, et al., "Did No-Fault Divorce Legislation Matter? Definitely Yes and Sometimes No," 61 J. Marriage & Fam. 803, 804 (1999).

"One researcher estimated the impact of no-fault divorce legislation may have accelerated state divorce rates upward by twenty to twenty-five percent."
-- Sean E. Brotherson and Jeffrey B. Teichert, "Value of the Law in Shaping Social Perspectives on Marriage", 3 U. of Utah Jnl. L. & Fam. Stud. 23, at 47, citing Thomas B. Marvell, "Divorce Rates and the Fault Requirement", 23 L. & Soc'y Rev. 543, 544 (1989).

"It is likely that some of this [increase in divorce ca. 1965-85] was due to a shift in the normative cultural message accompanying changes in the law of divorce. Kevin Andrews, a member of the Australian Parliament, has written:
'Under previous legislation, the concept of fault determined the outcome of the divorce application. In cultural terms, partners who walked away from a marriage or caused their spouse to leave risked the consequence of social opprobrium. The introduction of unilateral no-fault divorce law changed this cultural norm, allowing partners to leave a marriage on the premise that a short period of separation constitutes the irretrievable breakdown of the relationship. Hence society rightly concludes today the spouses can leave a marriage at will.' -- Sean E. Brotherson and Jeffrey B. Teichert, "Value of the Law in Shaping Social Perspectives on Marriage", 3 U. of Utah Jnl. L. & Fam. Stud. 23, at 47, citing Kevin Andrews & Margaret Andrews, Rebuilding a Culture of Marriage, 18 Australian Fam at 20, 29 (1997).

http://www.bena.com/sherpa1/bpa/Marriage/bCompati.htm

THE DIVORCE RATE

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