Mobility ratios and association in mobility tables

In the late 1940's a similar problem occurred in the work of three sociologists, working in three countries, on three similar sets of data. Natalie Rogoff, David Glass and G6sta Carlsson all faced the problem of making sense of data on intergenerational occupational mobility. A matrix of frequencies of occupations of respondents by occupations of fathers could be converted, in an obvious and straightforward fashion, into matrices of inflow and outflow percentages. Their joint problem arose in comparing inflow percentages across rows or outflow percentages across columns. The problem was that, as sociologists, concerned with the extent that origins in socially meaningful categories influenced destinations in the same socially meaningful categories, they were stuck with occupational categories that differed from one another dramatically in size. A secondary (though hardly trivial) problem was the fact that, in all their data, the two marginal distributions, the respondents' generation and the fathers' ‘generation’, were notably dissimilar — a consequence of both differential fertility and a general upward shift in the occupational distributions of the three countries. All sought a technique that would ‘make the two time periods comparable with respect to occupational structure’.     

Mobility ratios and association in mobility tables

Abstract In the late 1940's a similar problem occurred in the work of three sociologists, working in three countries, on three similar sets of data. Natalie Rogoff, David Glass and G6sta Carlsson all faced the problem of making sense of data on intergenerational occupational mobility. A matrix of frequencies of occupations of respondents by occupations of fathers could be converted, in an obvious and straightforward fashion, into matrices of inflow and outflow percentages. Their joint problem arose in comparing inflow percentages across rows or outflow percentages across columns. The problem was that, as sociologists, concerned with the extent that origins in socially meaningful categories influenced destinations in the same socially meaningful categories, they were stuck with occupational categories that differed from one another dramatically in size. A secondary (though hardly trivial) problem was the fact that, in all their data, the two marginal distributions, the respondents' generation and the fathers' 'generation', were notably dissimilar - a consequence of both differential fertility and a general upward shift in the occupational distributions of the three countries. All sought a technique that would 'make the two time periods comparable with respect to occupational structure'.     

What types of occupations are women entering? : Determinants of changes in female representation: 1970–2000

Although a consistent body of research has demonstrated that occupational segregation is highly consequential for women's economic standing, we know little about the processes that contribute to changes in levels of sex segregation. In this study, we examine those factors that contribute to changes in the percent of women in detailed occupational categories in the United States. Since we are most concerned with the economic consequences of this type of segregation, we analyze a group of high-paying, male-dominated occupations that, if better integrated, would contribute most to earnings equality. We find that occupations to which relatively high percentages of women aspired and occupations that are growing have been experiencing above-average increases in the percentage of women, while occupations characterized by male-stereotyped task profiles have been witnessing below-average increases. Additionally, our results suggest the presence of a ceiling effect: it is easier for women to break into male-dominated occupations initially than to sustain growth. Our analysis suggests that both supply and demand-side explanations provide insight into the processes contributing to increases in the occupations that we examine, although it can be very difficult to distinguish between supply and demand-side elements; indeed they may occur simultaneously.     

Why is their picture on the wedding page?: A rural community responds to a union announcement

On August 17, 2003, two women placed a union announcement in the Grand Forks Herald and became the first same-sex couple in North Dakota to do so (Lee, 2003). This announcement generated a flood of letters, both pro and con, that appeared in on the editorial page in the Herald over the next several weeks. In this exploratory study, I conduct a content analysis of those letters. Through this analysis, the three primary thematic categories emerged upon which writers based their arguments. They include those grounded in issues of tolerance, arguments based on Christian values and Scripture and those that focused on normalization. Additionally, the letters reveal something about rural versus urban sensibilities in that relatively more urban Grand Forks residents were less likely to write negative letters than their counterparts from neighboring small towns. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings and suggestions for future research.     

Gradients of metropolitan dominance in turkey: Alternative models

The dominance or influence of metropolitan centers in the developing country of Turkey, as measured by gradients of population characteristics (population density, percent urban, sex ratio, percent over five years of age, and percent literate) by distance from the nearest metropolitan center for 1960 and 1965, is found to decrease sharply from the central zone to the next zone (25–49 kilometers from the center), and then change very little with increasing distance from the center, for both urban and rural populations. None of several alternative mathematical models describes the form of the influence of metropolitan centers on the population characteristics of their hinterlands very well, but the best fitting models suggest that population density declines by distance according to an exponential function to the base e, percent urban declines according to a function to the one-fourth power, sex ratio declines for about 100 kilometers and then increases according to a quadratic function, and percent under six years increases and percent literate declines according to a linear function. These results suggest that dominance of a metropolitan center over its hinterland beyond 25 or 50 kilometers in Turkey is not very strong, possibly because of the relatively poorly developed transportation and communication systems. Although metropolitan dominance in Turkey in 1960 and 1965 seems to diminish more sharply with distance and to extend less far from the metropolitan center than in developed countries or than it may as Turkey develops economically and technologically in the future, additional comparative data over time in Turkey and in developed countries at the same time are needed for a rigorous test of this apparent finding.     

Deadly Cities? Spatial Inequalities in Mortality in sub‐Saharan Africa

We investigate whether sub‐Saharan African countries are affected by an “urban mortality penalty” repeating the history of industrialized countries during the nineteenth century. We analyze Demographic and Health Surveys from several sub‐Saharan African countries for differences in child and adult mortality between rural and urban areas. For the first decade of the 2000s, our findings indicate that child mortality is higher in rural than in urban areas for all countries. On average, child mortality rates are 13.6 percent in rural areas and 10.8 percent in urban areas. In contrast, average urban adult mortality rates (14.1 percent) have exceeded rural adult mortality rates (12.4 percent). Child mortality rates are on average 65 percent higher in urban slums than in formal settlements. Child mortality rates in slum areas are, however, still lower than or equal to those in rural areas for most countries in our sample.     

Bridging 1990 and 2000 census race data: Fractional assignment of multiracial populations

In contrast to previous censuses, Census 2000 permitted individuals to mark more than one race. Because the new race tables include both single-race and mixed-race categories, measuring change during the 1990s requires some method of bridging between the two data sets.To accomplish this bridging, we first identified biracial populations as of 1990 through the race and ancestry responses of individuals in the PUMS file. With race responses assumed to represent a person's primary race identity, we then determined the percentage of each biracial group that preferred each race as the primary identity. The same percentages can be used to assign biracial persons from Census 2000 into single-race categories. We also provide fractional assignment percentages for selected states and for the larger specific nationality groups of mixed-race Asians.Comparison of our 1990 estimates of the numbers in leading biracial groups with those reported in Census 2000 suggests that our fractional assignment values are reasonable for biracial groups other than those involving American Indians and Alaska Natives. For the latter biracial groups and for all groups representing three or more races, we recommend equal fractional assignment into the appropriate single-race categories.     

CharacteriStics and utilization of midwives in a selected rural area of East Pakistan

The purpose of this study was to obtain information about the utilization of midwives (dais) by village women and to learn more about the characteristics and practices of those dais. Two interview schedules were prepared. The first was used to interview 632 village women to determine who performed or assisted with their last two deliveries. The second was used to obtain information from 21 dais.The results of the first phase may be summarized as follows: (a) 38 per cent of the women were delivered by relatives; (b) 33 per cent of the women delivered their own children; (c) 14 per cent were delivered by neighbors; (d) 6 per cent were delivered by dais; (e) 2 percent were delivered in hospitals; and (f) the remaining 7 per cent were accounted for by several minor categories.The results of the interviews with dais are summarized as follows: (a) they are mainly widows and older women; (b) they have no formal training; (c) they work for friends, neighbors, and relatives and receive a sari as compensation; (d) they cannot handle complicated deliveries; (e) they deliver 3-4 children a year; (f) their sterilizing procedures depend upon soap, water, and folk beliefs; (g) most think midwifery is a worthwhile service; (h) about one-half have a general understanding of the reproduction process; (i) most do not know how to prevent conception; and (j) about half think that it is a good idea to participate actively in a family planning program.     

Some models of agreement and disagreement in repeated measurements of occupation

Measures used by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to assay misclassification and correct marginal distributions—the net difference rate and the index of inconsistency—may produce misleading results and do not fully use information about inconsistency in repeated measurements. We show how multiplicative models of classifications of repeated measurements can be used to locate sources of inconsistency in marginal classifications, sources of discrepancies in classification, and differences between categories in levels of agreement and disagreement. The models are illustrated with an occupational classification from the 1970 CPS-Census Match. Some of our results differ from those reported earlier by the Bureau of the Census.     

Tobacco smoking and the sex mortality differential

This paper examines the effects of tobacco smoking on the sex mortality differential in the United States. It is found that all forms of smoking combined account for about 47 percent of the female-male difference in ₅₀ e ₃₇ (life expectancy between ages 37 and 87) in 1962,and about 75 percent of the increase in the female-male difference in ₅₀ e ₃₇over the period 1910–62. When these percentage effects of smoking are decomposed each into a sum of contributions by age and immediate medical cause of death, the degenerative diseases acting at the older ages are found to be of primary importance. The above results appear in large part to explain why the degenerative diseases also account for most of the 1910–65 increase in the female-male difference in life expectancy at birth. The analysis assumes that spurious effects due to the correlation of tobacco consumption with other mortality-related factors are small compared to the causal effects of tobacco consumption itself.     

The distribution of pollution and environmental justice in Puerto Rico: a quantitative analysis

This research quantifies the distribution of toxic releases in Puerto Rico to determine whether environmental inequality exists. We calculate an environmental Gini coefficient using Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data from 2000 to 2008. Our findings suggest Puerto Rico has a relatively constant and unequal distribution of releases over this time period. Based on this result, we investigate linkages between toxic releases and several socioeconomic and demographic indicators. We apply a quantile regression model using TRI data and American Community Survey data from 2005 to 2008 to identify important indicators across the distribution of releases. We find municipios (legal division equivalent to US counties) that have a higher percent of non-Puerto Rican Hispanic origin or high school educated population experience higher releases to all media. This also is true for unemployment, but only for municipios with the largest releases (i.e., highest quintile). The results also reveal municipios that are more densely populated or that have a higher percent of college degrees experience lower releases to all media. Higher proportions of certain age groups also suggest lower releases. These results are not constant across the distribution of releases; they are most significant in those municipios with the largest releases. This is even more obvious when we only examine releases to air.     

A probability model applicable to the study of inter-live birth intervals and random segments of the same

Abstract This paper deals with an analytical study of two types of birth intervals, viz. 'closed intervals' and 'open intervals' through the application of simple probability theory. The 'closed interval' stands for the time interval between two successive live births of a woman, and the 'open interval' denotes the interval between the date of last live birth and the date of survey for a married woman in the reproductive age group surveyed at a point of time. The study considers the 'closed interval' as the sum of independent random variables, each representing a particular component like post-partum amenorrhea, waiting time in the susceptible state, etc. Approximations to the patterns of distributions of these component random variables are made from the available data collected in fertility surveys at Gandhigram. The 'open interval' for any parity is studied separately for two different (mutually exclusive) categories of women, viz. those who have at least one more live birth at some time or other during their reproductive period and those who cease childbearing. In the first case the 'open interval' is considered as a random segment or partition of the corresponding 'closed interval'; in the second as a random segment of the interval between the date of birth of the last child and date at which the woman attains 45 years of age. The mean and variance of the 'open interval' is obtained separately in each case, and the moments of the 'open interval' distribution for women chosen at random from the population are obtained as an appropriate mixture of the two types.     

The number of Israeli immigrants in the United States in 1990

In this paper we estimate the size of several categories of “Israeli” immigrants in the United States. According to the 1990 U.S. census, there were about 95,000 Israeli-born immigrants in the United States in that year. Using the language and ancestry information available in the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 1990 census, we estimate that of this total, about 80,000 are Jews and 15,000 are Palestinian Arabs born in Israel. In addition to the Israeli-born, we present a range for the number of Jewish immigrants from Israel who are not Israeli-born (about 30,000-56,000). Thus our estimate for the total number of Jewish immigrants from Israel in the United States in 1990 is between 110,000 and 135,000. Fertility information available in the PUMS, also enable us to provide estimates for the number of second-generation Israelis in the United States in the 1990 (about 42,000). Finally, using both the 1980 and 1990 PUMS, we provide estimates for the rate of return migration among Israeli-born Jewish immigrants in the United States.     

The Stern Review on the Economic Effects of Climate Change

In a study of the economics of climate change commissioned by the British government, released on 30 October, the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern presents a vigorously argued case for early curtailment of greenhouse gas emissions and proposes mitigation strategies that appear to offer highly favorable benefit‐cost ratios. An excerpt from the Executive Summary of the Stern Review, concerned with the nature and magnitude of the deleterious economic consequences of anticipated climate change, is printed below. The principal scientific reviews of knowledge of climate change, its consequences, and mitigation strategies are the (roughly) quinquennial reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the work of hundreds of lead authors, subjected in turn to elaborate peer review and line‐by‐line scrutiny by interested governments. They represent a broad, though not total, expert consensus. The third IPCC assessment was issued in 2001; the fourth, already in draft, will be released next year. The Stern Review draws heavily on this scientific underpinning, but goes further than the IPCC exercise in computing economic values for the projected changes and costing out remedial policy responses. More forthright in style and emphatic in its conclusions, it reads as a resounding call to international action. The Review explores the implications of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being capped at 550ppm (parts per million), double the preindustrial level, an objective it argues is feasible. That concentration would be reached by 2050 at current emission rates, or by 2035 if emissions rise as expected. The resulting warming, it believes, would be 2‐5°C, roughly in accord with the IPCC's third‐assessment estimates (see the Documents section of PDR 27, no. 1 for the IPCC projections). The positive feedbacks identified in some recent studies, generated by processes such as release of methane from permafrost, could lead to still higher temperatures. The forecast effects described are by now familiar, though no less grim for being so: species extinctions, expanding disease zones, reductions in surface water availability, coastal flooding, ocean acidification, and so on. The Review translates these effects into economic losses, adjusting for risk, using Monte Carlo simulation applied to an integrated assessment model (the so‐called PAGE 2002 model). The exercise, requiring many heroic—and often contestable—assumptions, produces the most quoted figures in the report: that climate change “will reduce welfare by an amount equivalent to a reduction in consumption per head of between 5 and 20%”—now and into the future. The absolute magnitude of those projected economic losses is made arbitrarily large by their permanence. Typical benefit‐cost calculations applied to appraisal of development projects convert such long‐term trajectories into a present value using a discount rate comparable to a market interest rate or some (lower) assumed rate of time preference. The Stern Review, however, argues that any discounting is ethically inappropriate for this global issue: “if a future generation will be present, we suppose that it has the same claim on our ethical attention as the current one” (p. 31). The only exception is an allowance for the possibility that future generations are not present—through human extinction—which is held to justify a minuscule discount rate of 0.1 percent per annum (p. 161). The percentage economic losses from climate change appear less daunting if set against the recent pace of expansion in the world economy. Real per capita income growth since 1990 has averaged about 1.5 percent per year worldwide, and about 3 percent in developing countries. In such a regime, a 5 percent one‐time drop to a lower expansion path is no more than a two‐ or three‐year delay in attaining a given income level. For China and India, whose economies are doubling in size each decade, even a 20 percent reduction in income would be a mere hiccough on the path to affluence—hardly enough to motivate major shifts in lifestyle ambitions. The dire repercussions on global environments of a greenhouse warming at the upper end of the forecast range are poorly captured by those percentages. Demography has a marginal place in the Review. The underlying IPCC emission scenarios incorporate expected population growth, using the UN medium projections. Many of the climate‐change effects incur costs that are similarly magnified by population growth. One‐sixth of the world's population is “threatened” by water scarcities; 1 in 20 people may be displaced by a rising sea level; mortality may increase from vector‐borne diseases and from malnutrition linked to income losses. The later part of the Review is concerned with mitigation and adaptation strategies. It lays out an ambitious set of policies for transition to a low‐carbon economy that could stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations over the next several decades. By 2050, emissions would have to be 25 percent below today's and emissions per unit of GDP 75 percent below. In perhaps the most problematic part of the exercise the Review asserts that such cuts could be achieved at a cost of only around 1 percent of annual global GDP—implying that investment in mitigation should be strongly favored on straightforward economic grounds. (This figure, like others in the Review, is acknowledged to lie within a substantial envelope of uncertainty—here a range of ?1.0 percent to +3.5 percent of global GDP (p. 212), or, drawing on a wider range of models, ?4 percent to +15 percent (p. 241).) In the decades before the investment pays off, adverse consequences of the warming trends already underway must be dealt with by adaptation, such as through better disaster preparedness, lessening the vulnerability of infrastructure, and risk‐pooling measures. The excerpt is from pp. iii–iv and vi–xi. The full Stern Review (579 pages), the executive summary, and the commissioned background papers are available online at « http://www.hm‐treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm ». A hard copy of the Review will be issued by Cambridge University Press.     

The japanese americans: Comparative occupational status, 1960 and 1950

This paper uses 1950 and 1960 census data on the demographic, educational, and occupational distributions of Japanese Americans, after the enforced migrations of the Second World War, in order to compare the achievement of the urban Japanese Americans to that of their white counterparts.First, the data show that the Japanese-American population has increased in all regions of the nation, especially in the representative West (from 71 percent in 1950 to 82 percent in 1960). Second, educational attainment, which was about equal to that of whites in 1950, was better for males, and increasing at a faster rate or better for females, in 1960. Third, while in 1950 the differences in the occupational distributions of Japanese Americans and whites showed concentrations unfavorable to overall Japanese-American occupational structure, by 1960 the Japanese Americans had approached the levels of the white majority.The data, then, permit the author to conclude that if "minority" means full exclusion from participation in the life of society, the Japanese Americans cannot be called a minority. In conclusion, the author suggests that it would be useful to investigate the migration patterns of the Japanese Americans, for if redistribution has resulted in integration, will integration promote greater mobility to attain better integration?     

Measuring Temporal Dimensions of the Intensity of Violent Political Conflict

Violent political conflict shows patterns of varied intensity and persistence. These patterns may induce changes in human behavior in various temporal dimensions. In order to study these effects, empirical research needs a suitable way to measure conflict intensity. This paper suggests and illustrates a method of aggregating raw data on violence incidence into complementary temporal categories, in order to enrich empirical insights. We construct short-, medium-, and long-term measures based on daily fatality counts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 1997 and 2011. We show that these dimensions, although constructed from the same set of raw data, contain complementary information since they are only weakly correlated. As an example, we illustrate how several such categories can be useful in modeling the dynamics of food prices. This demonstrates that such aggregations provide complementary temporal perspectives. They therefore can potentially enrich the analysis of the effects of conflict on human behavior beyond commonly employed measurements of daily or yearly frequency.     

Kognitive Prozesse und Antwortverhalten in einer Internet-Befragung

So far, certain problems of web surveys have received great attention: Coverage problems, sampling issues and response rates as well as screen design and usability issues. With some of the disadvantages mentioned diminishing, web surveys are increasingly adopted by survey researchers. In terms of the validity of web surveys early studies suggested that — controlling for other sources of survey error — little differences are to be expected in terms of response distributions. However, little insight is available regarding the cognitive processes at work in a respondent’s mind when answering a survey question on the internet. We assume that the cognitive capacity available when answering a survey question is impaired by the respondent’s navigational efforts when working through the questionnaire. Comparing the navigational tasks in a paper and pencil survey and a web survey, the later is considered to be more demanding compared with a paper questionnaire. Reading and flipping through pages is a task that can be done with little distraction from the question answer process. By contrast, browsing through an online form using mouse and buttons while reading is more demanding and distracting for the respondent. Thus, working through an online survey reduces the respondent’s attention for the question answer process. In this paper we present results from a large scale field experiment (n = 5,000) on measurement error in mixed mode survey (p&p and online) among the German youth conducted in spring of 2001. In this survey, 5 experiments on measurement error were incorporated: 1 experiment on question order, 2 experiments on response categories, and 1 experiment on response order in long lists and 1 experiment on social desirability. The results suggest that measurement effects are generally smaller in the web portion of the survey. In the conclusions the paper discusses the question whether or not we need to worry about the respondent’s redued atteniton to the survey questions under web conditions.     

Methodological problems and policy implications in sexual harassment research

This paper argues that the ability of social research to influence legal arguments and policy decisions on sexual harassment in the workplace has been stymied by several methodological problems which are shared by most major studies on the topic. Determination of the incidence of harassment and its major sub-types is difficult because of problems with sampling (e.g., response rate, sample size) and instrument construction (e.g., number or variety of harassment categories). Additionally, severity of harassment is rarely treated as a variable. Several resolutions to these problems are presented. First, estimates of the proportion of women who have experienced harassment, as well as the proportion having experienced the major sub-types of harassment, are derived. Second, a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of sexual harassment categories, which includes harassment types that have evolved recently from legal decisions and policy developments, is discussed. Finally, an outline of factors which might be used to assess harassment severity is presented. Resolving these issues will provide social scientists and non-scientists alike with clearer answers to the ‘How much?’, ‘Which types?’ and ‘How serious?’ questions about harassment.     

Calculation of age-specific fertility schedules from tabulations of parity in two censuses

The mathematics of stable populations recently has been generalized to cover populations with time-varying fertility and mortality by a modification incorporating the sum of age-varying growth rates in place of the fixed growth rate of a stable population. Equations that characterize nonstable populations apply to any cohort-like phenomenon with a measurable property that cumulates gains or losses through time. In particular, the equations fit the relation between a population's average parity at a given age and age-specific fertility rates previously experienced at lower ages. Techniques devised to derive an intercensal life table from single-year age distributions in two censuses are adapted to estimate accurate intercensal fertility schedules from distributions of parity by age of woman in two censuses. Birth-order specific fertility schedules are also estimated.     

Ethnic Diversity and Health Outcomes

This study hypothesizes a relationship between ethnic diversity and health outcomes. We explore the effects of ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity (measured by indices of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization) on various health outcomes in a cross-section of 91 countries. We explore outcomes relating to four major categories of health: (1) immunization rates, (2) prevalence of diseases, (3) life expectancy and mortality rates, and (4) health related infrastructure and staff. Across all dimensions examined, evidence suggests that higher heterogeneity is bad for health outcomes. We explore several potential mechanisms which could explain the observed negative effects of ethnic and linguistic diversity on health.