U.S. Immigration Policy at a Crossroads: Should the U.S. Continue Its Family‐Friendly Policy?

An ongoing debate is whether the U.S. should continue its family‐based admission system, which favors visas for family members of U.S. citizens and residents, or adopt a more skills‐based system, replacing family visas with employment‐based visas. In many ways, this is a false dichotomy: family‐friendly policies attract highly‐skilled immigrants regardless of their own visa path, and there are not strong reasons why a loosening of restrictions on employment migrants need be accompanied by new restrictions on family‐based immigration. Moreover, it is misleading to think that only employment‐based immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy. Recent immigrants, who have mostly entered via kinship ties, are economically productive, a fact hidden by a flawed methodology that underlies most economic analyses of immigrant economic assimilation.     

Jessie Bernard: The Unfolding of the Female World*

This article reviews Jessie Bernard's work on families and family relationships over a forty-year period and identifies her paradigmatic shift from a functionalist orientation to a strong feminist perspective. Through chronicling women's relationships over the years she found a new way of viewing family and women's issues. This article argues that Bernard is one of the first sociologists who can be called a feminist.     

Disability,partnership and parenting

Partnerships and parenthood can have important effects on economic, social and psychological well-being. We provide new long-term analysis of how disability affects both parental status and partnerships. Analysis of the new Life Opportunities Survey, which is based on social model approaches, demonstrates that disabled people are more likely than non-disabled people to face disadvantages in terms of family formation. Disabled people are more likely to remain single over time, although there is less evidence for any differences in rates of relationship breakdown for those who enter them. Allied to these conclusions, disabled adults are less likely to form households where there are dependent children. These conclusions are supported by longitudinal results from the British Household Panel Survey.     

Pregnancy,work and women's well-being: A review

Abstract

Pregnancy is potentially a stressful period for working women for ergonomic, psychological and organizational reasons, yet the well-being of women is seldom the focus of research on working during pregnancy. This paper reviews the literature on women's experience of being pregnant at work. It concludes that, while working conditions are usually not well suited to pregnant women, the majority of women encounter only minor difficulties and regard working in a positive way. However, for a minority of women working during pregnancy adversely affects their well-being. These are likely to be women working during pregnancy adversely affects their well-being. These are likely to be women who are most at risk from work-related stress at other times. The literature suggests that working during pregnancy has still to be accepted and accommodated by employers and colleagues.     

Balancing parents' and very young children's rights in care proceedings: decision-making in the context of the Human Rights Act 1998

This paper explores whether the Human Rights Act 1998 has influenced the approach a range of professionals, including social workers, managers and children's guardians adopt when they examine and seek to balance the potentially competing rights of parents and children involved in care proceedings. Drawing on findings from an empirical study of the decision‐making process that influences the life pathways of very young children in care, it also explores some of the dilemmas professionals face in their day‐to‐day practice and examines whether parental rights are prioritized over children's rights in certain instances.     

Model Averaging in Microbial Risk Assessment Using Fractional Polynomials

The alleviation of food-borne diseases caused by microbial pathogen remains a great concern in order to ensure the well-being of the general public. The relation between the ingested dose of organisms and the associated infection risk can be studied using dose-response models. Traditionally, a model selected according to a goodness-of-fit criterion has been used for making inferences. In this article, we propose a modified set of fractional polynomials as competitive dose-response models in risk assessment. The article not only shows instances where it is not obvious to single out one best model but also illustrates that model averaging can best circumvent this dilemma. The set of candidate models is chosen based on biological plausibility and rationale and the risk at a dose common to all these models estimated using the selected models and by averaging over all models using Akaike's weights. In addition to including parameter estimation inaccuracy, like in the case of a single selected model, model averaging accounts for the uncertainty arising from other competitive models. This leads to a better and more honest estimation of standard errors and construction of confidence intervals for risk estimates. The approach is illustrated for risk estimation at low dose levels based on Salmonella typhi and Campylobacter jejuni data sets in humans. Simulation studies indicate that model averaging has reduced bias, better precision, and also attains coverage probabilities that are closer to the 95% nominal level compared to best-fitting models according to Akaike information criterion.