From newspaper accounts it appears that when women were attacked and bystanders did not intervene, frequently the bystanders justified their inactivity by stating that they thought it was a "lovers' quarrel." In the first study subjects witnessed a violent fight between a man and a woman. Subjects intervened more frequently in the fight between strangers than between a married couple. In additional experiments it was found that the stranger condition was perceived as being more damaging to the woman although the fights themselves were identical. The woman in the stranger condition was seen as wanting help more frequently than the married woman. In addition the attacker was perceived as likely to run in the stranger condition and to stay and fight in the married condition. If subjects know little about the conflict, they are likely to perceive the protagonists as dates, lovers, or married couples rather than as strangers, acquaintances, or friends. The results were discussed in terms of their implication for social control.

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The most common methods of assessing degree of obesity in humans are reviewed. These include anthropometry, somatotyping, bodyweight, Skin fold calipering, densitometry, and several nondensitometric procedures. The evidence suggests that bodyweight may often be an unreliable and invalid index of obesity. The parameters influencing its inaccuracy are discussed. These include age, height, sex, muscularity, and degree of obesity or amount of recent weight loss. The most reliable and valid measures of human bodyfat are generally the most complicated and impractical. Compromise assessment procedures involving nonintrusive measurement of subcutaneous fat and selected anthropometric dimensions may offer an incomplete but welcome improvement over sole reliance on bodyweight as an index of obesity.

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is one of the largest nonprofit organizations and one of the largest membership organizations in the United States. This article describes the development of a new volunteer program at AARP and illustrates the role that focus group research played in that program development. Although the development of a new program is a relatively rare phenomenon at AARP, the use of focus groups described here is fairly typical of the role they play in the broader evaluation research efforts of the Association.

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