India’s ‘Missing Women’ and Men’s Sexual Risk Behavior

Although scholars and policymakers have long been concerned with the ??missing women?? of India, little rigorous research has examined the consequences of India??s sex ratio imbalance for young men??s sexual risk behavior and reproductive health. We use data from the third wave of India??s 2005?C2006 National Family and Health Survey to examine the influence of the community female-to-male sex ratio at ages 10?C39 on men??s likelihood of marrying early in life, of engaging in premarital, multi-partnered, and commercial sex, and of contracting a sexually-transmitted disease. We estimate logistic regression models that control for respondents?? demographic and socioeconomic status and that adjust for the clustering of observations within communities. Net of the effects of other characteristics, the female-to-male sex ratio is positively and significantly associated with the likelihood that men marry prior to age 18 and inversely and significantly associated with the odds that men have had intercourse with a commercial sex worker. However, no significant net associations are observed between the sex ratio and the other outcomes. Education, wealth, religious affiliation, caste, and geographic region emerge as significant predictors of Indian men??s sexual risk behaviors.     

Men’s Migration and Women’s Fertility in Rural Mozambique

Labor migration profoundly affects households throughout rural Africa. This study looks at how men’s labor migration influences marital fertility in a context where such migration has been massive while its economic returns are increasingly uncertain. Using data from a survey of married women in southern Mozambique, we start with an event-history analysis of birth rates among women married to migrants and those married to nonmigrants. The model detects a lower birth rate among migrants’ wives, which tends to be partially compensated for by an increased birth rate upon cessation of migration. An analysis of women’s lifetime fertility shows that it decreases as the time spent in migration by their husbands accrues. When we compare reproductive intentions stated by respondents with migrant and nonmigrant husbands, we find that migrants’ wives are more likely to want another child regardless of the number of living children, but the difference is significant only for women who see migration as economically benefiting their households. Yet, such women are also significantly more likely to use modern contraception than other women. We interpret these results in light of the debate on enhancing versus disrupting effects of labor migration on families and households in contemporary developing settings.     

Mothers’ Sexual Identity and Children’s Health

Sexual minority women face a plethora of structural, socioeconomic, and interpersonal disadvantages and stressors. Research has established negative associations between women’s sexual minority identities and both their own health and their infants’ birth outcomes. Yet a separate body of scholarship has documented similarities in the development and well-being of children living with same-sex couples relative to those living with similarly situated different-sex couples. This study sought to reconcile these literatures by examining the association between maternal sexual identity and child health at ages 5–18 using a US sample from the full population of children of sexual minority women, including those who identify as mostly heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian, regardless of partner sex or gender. Analyses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N?=?8978) followed women longitudinally and examined several measures of their children’s health, including general health and specific developmental and physical health conditions. Analyses found that children of mostly heterosexual and bisexual women experienced health disadvantages relative to children of heterosexual women, whereas the few children of lesbian women in our sample evidenced a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. These findings underscore that to understand sexual orientation disparities and the intergenerational transmission of health, it is important to incorporate broad measurement of sexual orientation that can capture variation in family forms and in sexual minority identities.

     

Social Relationships and Children’s Subjective Well-Being

The quality of relationships is now recognised as an important aspect of children??s subjective well-being. This article focuses on both positive and negative quality of relationships. It includes six areas of children??s relationships??family, neighbourhood adults, positive affect friendship, negative affect friendship, experiences of being bullied by other young people, and being treated unfairly by adults and analyses their association with children??s subjective well-being. Data for this study were obtained from a national survey among 4,673 children in secondary schools across England. Children??s relationships with their family, friends (positive affect) and neighbourhood adults appear to increase their well-being, whereas, negative aspects of friendship relations, experiences of being bullied and treated unfairly by adults is proved to decrease young people??s well-being. Relationships with family, positive relations with friends and experience of being bullied appear to have respectively the first, second and third highest effect on children??s subjective well-being. Although the influence was low, children??s relationships with neighbourhood adults, their experiences of being treated unfairly by adults and their negative relations with friends contributed significantly to explaining variations of their subjective well-being. These findings are discussed in the context of previous empirical studies and theories on social relationships and subjective well-being. Suggestions for future research are also put forward.     

Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women’s and Men’s Housework

Married women continue to spend more time doing housework than men and economic resources influence women’s housework more strongly than men’s. To explain this, gender theorists point to how gender figures into identities, family interactions, and societal norms and opportunity structures. The extent of this configuration varies culturally and, in the United States, by race-ethnicity because of how race-ethnicity conditions access to resources and influences gender relations within marriages. Housework levels and gender differences may be lower in Black married couples compared to other couples because of Black women’s higher historical levels of employment and consequently long-standing need to balance work and family responsibilities. Race-ethnicity also likely conditions the symbolic meaning and thus association of economic resources and housework. We use pooled time diary data from the 2003 to 2007 American Time Use Study from 26,795 married women and men to investigate how and why race-ethnicity influences housework. Our results indicate Hispanic and Asian women do more cooking and cleaning compared with White and Black women and the inverse relationship between women’s earnings and housework is steeper for Hispanic women compared with other women. We find no evidence that married Black men devote more time to housework than White men, either core or occasional, unlike earlier studies.     

Women’s and men’s negative experience of child birth—A cross-sectional survey

Background

A negative birth experience may influence both women and men and can limit their process of becoming a parent.

Children’s educational attainment,occupation, and income and their parents’ mortality

Using data from Finland, this paper contributes to a small but growing body of research regarding adult children's education, occupation, and income and their parents' mortality at ages 50+ in 1970–2007. Higher levels of children's education are associated with 30–36 per cent lower parental mortality at ages 50–75, controlling for parents' education, occupation, and income. This association is fully mediated by children's occupation and income, except for cancer mortality. Having at least one child educated in healthcare is associated with 11–16 per cent lower all-cause mortality at ages 50–75, an association that is largely driven by mortality from cardiovascular diseases. Children's higher white-collar occupation and higher income is associated with 39–46 per cent lower mortality in the fully adjusted models. At ages 75+, these associations are much smaller overall and children's schooling remains more strongly associated with mortality than children's occupation or income.     

Young Children’s Developmental Ecologies and Kindergarten Readiness

Children enter the crucial transition to school with sociodemographic disparities firmly established. Domain-specific research (e.g., on poverty and family structure) has shed light on these disparities, but we need broader operationalizations of children’s environments to explain them. Building on existing theory, this study articulates the concept of developmental ecology—those interrelated features of a child’s proximal environment that shape development and health. Developmental ecology links structural and demographic factors with interactional, psychological, and genetic factors. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), this study conducts latent class analyses to identify how 41 factors from three domains—namely, household resources, health risks, and ecological changes—cluster within children as four overarching developmental ecologies. Because it documents how numerous factors co-occur within children, this method allows an approximation of their lived environments. Findings illuminate powerful relationships between race/ethnicity, parental age, socioeconomic background, and nativity and a child’s developmental ecology, as well as associations between developmental ecology and kindergarten cognition, behavior, and health. Developmental ecology represents a major pathway through which demographic characteristics shape school readiness. Because specific factors have different implications depending on the ecologies in which they are embedded, findings support the usefulness of a broad ecological approach.     

China’s Tibetan Population and Population in Tibet

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Addictive Substances,Users’ Health,and the Government’s Perceived Responsibility: French People’s Perspective

This paper uses a semiparametric latent variable transformation model for multiple outcomes to examine the effect of education and maternal education on female multidimensional well-being and proposes a procedure to build a well-being index that is less susceptible to functional form misspecification. We model multidimensional well-being as an unobserved common factor underlying the observed well-being outcomes. The semiparametric methodology allows us to alleviate misspecification bias by combining multiple indicators into a latent construct in an unspecified, data-driven way. Using data from female participants of the 1974–2010 waves of the US General Social Survey, we find that education, intelligence, and maternal education contribute positively to multidimensional well-being. However, the effects of education and maternal education on female multidimensional well-being declined steadily between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, and have not rebounded since.     

Family size and children’s education in Vietnam

Data from the nationally representative 1994 Inter-Censal Demographic Survey are used to examine the association between family size and children s schooling in Vietnam. The data provide information on several education measures for all children over age 10, including children no longer residing in the household. Although a clear inverse bivariate association between family size and children s school attendance and educational attainment is evident, multivariate analysis controlling for urban/rural residence, region, parents’ education, household wealth, and child’s age, reveals that much of this association, especially that predicting educational attainment, is attributable to these other influences. Moreover, much of the effect that remains after statistical adjustment for the other influences is seen mainly at the largest family sizes. We consider the implications of these findings for current population policy in Vietnam and the possible features of the Vietnamese context that might account for the modest association.     

Family Planning and Women’s and Children’s Health: Long-Term Consequences of an Outreach Program in Matlab, Bangladesh

We analyze the impact of an experimental maternal and child health and family planning program that was established in Matlab, Bangladesh, in 1977. Village data from 1974, 1982, and 1996 suggest that program villages experienced a decline in fertility of about 17 %. Household data from 1996 confirm that this decline in “surviving fertility” persisted for nearly two decades. Women in program villages also experienced other benefits: increased birth spacing, lower child mortality, improved health status, and greater use of preventive health inputs. Some benefits also diffused beyond the boundaries of the program villages into neighboring comparison villages. These effects are robust to the inclusion of individual, household, and community characteristics. We conclude that the benefits of this reproductive and child health program in rural Bangladesh have many dimensions extending well beyond fertility reduction, which do not appear to dissipate rapidly after two decades.     

Nature’s Experiment? Handedness and Early Childhood Development

In recent years, a large body of research has investigated the various factors affecting child development and the consequent impact of child development on future educational and labor market outcomes. In this article, we contribute to this literature by investigating the effect of handedness on child development. This is an important issue given that around 10% of the world’s population is left-handed and given recent research demonstrating that child development strongly affects adult outcomes. Using a large, nationally representative sample of young children, we find that the probability of a child being left-handed is not significantly related to child health at birth, family composition, parental employment, or household income. We also find robust evidence that left-handed (and mixed-handed) children perform significantly worse in nearly all measures of development than right-handed children, with the relative disadvantage being larger for boys than girls. Importantly, these differentials cannot be explained by different socioeconomic characteristics of the household, parental attitudes, or investments in learning resources.     

Japan’s changing fertility mechanisms and its policy responses

This paper discusses Japan’s decline in fertility over the past 50 years. The change in Japan’s postwar fertility is analysed using formal demographic tools such as parity progression ratios and decomposition methods. The analytical results show that before the oil crisis of 1973, the reduction in marital fertility played a dominant role, while the delayed timing of marriage has been a principal factor since the mid-1970s. The delayed timing of first and second births has also played a relatively important role in determining actual fertility levels in the 1990s. The paper examines various socio-economic factors contributing to these demographic shifts over time in postwar Japan. A number of policies and programs implemented over the past decade by the Japanese government to boost fertility are briefly described, together with their limitations.     

Witnessing a body in decline: Men’s and women’s perceptions of an altered physical appearance

ABSTRACT

There has been a tendency within the literature to ignore how men and women who are very ill and at the end of life perceive and experience their visibly altered bodies. This article aims to provide new insights about this matter. A qualitative research approach was adopted. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 hospice patients, 20 family members, and 20 members of hospice staff. Findings reveal that because of masculine and feminine norms, physical appearance is more a matter of concern to women than to men who are close to death. This contradicts theories that suggest that patients experience a disinvestment on their sense of masculinity and femininity alongside the process of bodily deterioration and decay prior impending potential death.     

Cohabiting and marriage during young men’s career-development process

Using recently released cohabitation data for the male sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, first interviewed in 1979, I conducted multinomial discrete-time event-history analyses of how young men's career-development process affects both the formation and the dissolution of cohabiting unions. For a substantial proportion of young men, cohabitation seemed to represent an adaptive strategy during a period of career immaturity, whereas marriage was a far more likely outcome for both stably employed cohabitors and noncohabitors alike. Earnings positively affected the entry into either a cohabiting or marital union but exhibited a strong threshold effect. Once the men were in cohabiting unions, however, earnings had little effect on the odds of marrying. Men with better long-run socioeconomic prospects were far more likely to marry from either the noncohabiting or cohabiting state, and this was particularly true for blacks.     

Parental Divorce and Children’s Schooling in Rural Malawi

A growing body of literature has examined the impact of different types of family structures on children’s schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. These studies have investigated how living arrangements, gender of the household head, parental death, and paternal migration are related to schooling. Although many sub-Saharan African countries have high divorce rates, very few studies have explored the impact of parental divorce on children’s schooling. The present study uses three waves of data from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) to investigate the effect of parental divorce on children’s schooling and the possible mechanisms driving this relationship. Unlike prior studies, this study uses child-level fixed-effects models to control for selection into divorce. Results show that parental divorce is associated with lower grade attainment and a larger schooling gap, defined as the number of years a child is behind in school (among children currently attending school). Although no association exists between parental divorce and current school attendance, girls affected by divorce are significantly less likely to be attending school. Differences in economic resources, maternal coresidence, or maternal psychological well-being do not explain the relationship between parental divorce and children’s schooling.     

Socioeconomic background and war mortality during Vietnam’s wars

To understand the experience of North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians during the American war, I explore the paths leading Vietnamese men into battle by considering the relationship between socioeconomic status and war mortality. I use data obtained from retrospective information on kin survival and other socioeconomic characteristics given by respondents in the 1995 Vietnam Longitudinal Survey conducted in Vietnam’s Red River Delta. My findings are opposite to those often cited to describe the experience of young Americans who fought in the Vietnam war. In Vietnam, sons of better educated fathers bore the burden of war disproportionately in relation to sons of fathers with less education, both in proportion serving in the military and in diminished survival chances in combat. The Vietnamese experience during the American war testifies to the ability of a nation to reorder society temporarily and to persuade higher-status groups to contribute fully to the war effort. An appreciation of the meaning of this social reshuffling during the American war is critical for understanding the war, Vietnam, and that country’s political outlook.     

Ecological Instability and Children’s Classroom Behavior in Kindergarten

We engage the concept of ecological instability to assess whether children’s exposure to frequent change in multiple contexts is associated with teacher reports of students’ overall behavior, externalizing behavior, and approach to learning during kindergarten. We operationalize multiple dimensions of children’s exposure to repeated change—including the frequency, concurrency, chronicity, timing, and types of changes children experience—in a nationally representative longitudinal cohort of U.S.-born children (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, N ~ 4,750). We focus on early childhood, a period of substantial flux in children’s family and neighborhood contexts. Predicted behavior scores differ by approximately one-fifth of a standard deviation for children who experienced high or chronic exposure to ecological change compared with those who experienced little or no change. These findings emphasize the distinctiveness of multidomain ecological instability as a risk factor for healthy development that should be conceptualized differently from the broader concept of normative levels of change in early childhood environments.     

The Robustness of China’s Migration and Heihe-Tengchong Line

Migration has been most active among three major population movements and affective to population distribution.However,this paper first finds that the pattern of China’s inter-provincial migration is robust since China’s reforming and opening based on the analysis on the distribution of inter-provincial migration scale,intensity and population flow.Therefore,the continual migration in the past 80 years,especially since China’s reforming and opening,has not changed the basic feature of China’s population distribution and has no effective influence on the robustness of Heihe-Tengchong Line.The basic pattern of China’s population distribution and Heihe-Tengchong Line mainly depend on the constant geographic position as shown in the First Nature Rule.Without any change of the First Nature Rule,China’s population distribution and Heihe-Tengchong Line remain highly stable,and the migration is unlikely to lose the robustness.