Aimed at social scientists, this book discusses family policy in general and the New Federalism in particular, and experimental implementation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA) in the United States. Here, emphasis in family policy is shifted from a centralized entitlement approach to an exchange of personal responsibility, work, and training for better support services.

There is a growing consensus in the human factors/ergonomics community that human factors research has had little impact on significant applied problems. Some have suggested that the problem lies in the fact that much HF/E research has been based on the wrong type of psychology, an information processing view of psychology that is reductionistic and context-free. Ecological psychology offers a viable alternative, presenting a richer view of human behavior that is holistic and contextualized. The papers presented in these two volumes show the conceptual impact that ecological psychology can have on HF/E, as well as presenting a number of specific examples illustrating the ecological approach to human-machine systems. It is the first collection of papers that explicitly draws a connection between these two fields. While work in this area is only just beginning, the evidence available suggests that taking an ecological approach to human factors/ergonomics helps bridge the existing gap between basic research and applied problems.