Is Mothers’ Work Related to Childhood Weight Changes in the United States?

Taking family structure, father’s work intensity, and children’s developmental stages into consideration, this study examined the effect of a mother’s previous and contemporaneous work (employment and weekly work hours) on their children’s weight and their likelihood of having weight problems such as obesity, overweight, and underweight. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), this study adopted a fixed effect model and found that for 3rd to 5th graders, an increase in mothers’ previous work hours among two-parent families below the federal poverty level (FPL) increased the risk of the child being obese, while the current employment of single mothers below the FPL reduced the risk of the child being obese. Surprisingly, the employment of single mothers below the FPL increased the risk of the child being underweight, especially for 1st to 3rd graders.     

Lessons from Adoption of Children＇s Outdoor Bill of Rights by the United States

美国各州颁布实施儿童户外权利法案是民间组织积极推动和政府大力支持的结果,目的是鼓励儿童改变久坐的习惯,到户外和大自然中游戏和学习,以利于身心的健康发展。各州的研究人员、教育工作者、社区组织、设计人员和政府都在共同努力创造环境,让儿童多接触自然。美国开展儿童户外活动的经验告诉我们,户外活动不仅有利于儿童身心的健康发展,也有利于儿童智力、人格、社会能力的发展和环境意识的培养,大自然是宝贵的教育资源,值得我们格外重视,充分利用。     

Separation,Connection, and the Ambiguous Nature of Émigré Houses in Rural Highland Madagascar

ABSTRACT

The houses that educated migrants from highland Madagascar build in their home villages are generally large in scale and modern in style. They are also usually empty and in a very poor state of repair. This article is about how these houses articulate the ambivalent relationship of migrants to their ancestral land and the family they have left behind there. The argument goes beyond analyses of émigrés' houses that simply see such constructions as ways of maintaining links to their point of origin and suggests that they also act as means of attenuating such connections. In fact, they embody and symbolize a range of contradictions and tensions typical of the migrant experience, such as presence and absence, connection and separation, individual ambition and communal obligation.     

From Welfare to Work? Social Policy for Disabled People of Working Age in the United Kingdom in the 1990s

Disabled people of working age have been at the heart of recent welfare restructuring in the United Kingdom, but this has received little attention from mainstream social policy analysis. Both Conservative and Labour governments have introduced measures to promote labour force participation among disabled people, whilst discouraging dependence on welfare benefits. Whilst this new approach has been justified in terms of reducing poverty, its underlying imperatives are essentially inegalitarian. The welfare reform process has been driven by a number of official concerns including a perception of unsustainable fiscal pressures and a belief that perverse incentives in the social security benefit system have undermined economic efficiency. Moreover, it has been legitimated by an ideology of citizenship, which has shifted the moral responsibility for needs satisfaction away from the state to the individual. The paper concludes by identifying a better approach to welfare reform for disabled people of working age.     

Race of the Future: Mixing of Colors in the United States Leading to One Race?

This article examines the impacts of the race of the future theory on the U.S. population. By and large, the theory posits that the mixing of different races—due to the process of miscegenation, especially in marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations—will blend all races, so much so that, in the future, the end result of this mixing will be a panracial formation (i.e., one race). In this analysis, the authors attempt to determine whether the mixing of colors currently happening in the United States will lead to one race and what the race of the future in the United States will “look” like. One of the major conclusions is that, although the possibility of the existence of the race of the future has yet to be established, the degree of multiraciality in the U.S. population is rapidly growing (based on data and statistics from the U.S. Bureau of the Census).     

Sexual Health Interventions for Black Women in the United States: A Systematic Review of Literature

Objective: The purpose of this systematic review was to identify and evaluate approaches used in sexual health interventions targeting Black women in the United States. Methods: We conducted a review of 15 sexual health intervention studies for Black women published between January 2000 and May 2017 in the United States. Results: Each intervention focused on HIV/sexually transmitted infection prevention, incorporated an asset and deficit-based approach, primarily used individual-level assets, and was effective in achieving the stated sexual health-related outcomes. Conclusions: Comprehensive sexual health interventions require further development and refinement to include more community and institutional-level assets to improve long-term sustainable change and empower Black women.     

The Impact of Parenting Style on Children’s Educational Outcomes in the United States

This paper examines the causal link between parenting style and children’s educational outcomes. The existing literature seems to lack any effort to use a nationally representative data from the United States, to properly address endogeneity, or to examine educational outcomes beyond high school level. This paper attempts to mitigate these shortcomings. Drawing upon the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, it first used OLS and logit regression. It then applied the maximum simulated likelihood approach to get rid of endogeneity, thereby isolating the causal impact of parenting style on children’s educational outcomes. Findings suggested that parenting style mattered for children academic performance. Authoritative parenting style was found to be the best among all types of parenting style. Particularly, relative to uninvolved parents’ children, authoritatively reared children were predicted to have 1.1 more years of schooling and be 18.5, 13.6, and 16.3 percentage points more likely to obtain at least bachelor’s degree, associate’s degree, and high school diploma, respectively. Also, they had 5.5 percentage points less likelihood of being high school dropouts than children reared by uninvolved parents.     

Married Women’s Labor Supply and Spousal Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: Results from Panel Data

This paper investigates the effect of spousal insurance coverage on married women’s labor supply. This effect was hypothesized to be negative, since married women have an incentive to seek employment in jobs that will provide insurance when their husbands do not provide coverage. Panel data from the 1996–2004 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys was used to control for the potential correlation between unobserved characteristics and spousal insurance. The findings suggest that spousal coverage does have a negative effect on married women’s labor supply, and that most of the reduction in labor supply seems to derive from shifts out of the labor force rather than between part-time and full-time work.

“Nobody’s paying me to cry”: the causes of activist burnout in United States animal rights activists

ABSTRACT

We examine the causes of activist burnout – a condition in which the accumulative stress associated with activism becomes so debilitating that once-committed activists are forced to scale back on or disengage from their activism – in 17 United States animal rights activists. Following a phenomenological qualitative approach, analysis of interview data revealed three primary categories of burnout causes: 1) intrinsic motivational and psychological factors, 2) organizational and movement culture, and 3) within-movement in-fighting and marginalization. Implications for understandings of activist burnout and the AR movement are discussed.     

Crossing the finish line? A review of college completion inequality in the United States by race and class

Although most students graduate from high school and enroll in college the following fall, rates of entry into higher education and completion of a bachelor's degree continue to be stratified by race and class. Because of the potential returns that accrue to individuals and society overall when students complete their 4‐year degree, these disparate trends should motivate more policy‐relevant research in this area. In this review, I show how a longitudinal perspective of the path to a BA degree helps to reconcile competing theories of college completion by race and class across disciplinary boundaries. Both human capital theory and status attainment theory largely examine college completion as the long‐term process of BA attainment, although they differ in their focal stages and mechanisms. In contrast, the theory of categorical inequality, as applied in this review, focuses on the years in higher education and describes the ways in which colleges and universities as organizations create, legitimate, and reinforce categorical distinctions in postsecondary schooling and how these processes independently shape college completion inequality. As public interest grows in holding colleges accountable for their graduation rates, more research is needed on how the formal and informal organizational policies and practices of colleges produce inequality.     

From ‘temporary migrants’ to ‘permanent residents’: Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States

Literature on international migration from India in the past has focused on the formation and development of ‘Indian diasporas’; that is, Indians who have moved to various parts of the world and maintain socio-economic, cultural and political lives in India as well as other countries. However, little attention has been paid toward ‘temporary migrants’ who have migrated to different countries with a temporary visa and in the course of time extended their visas to become ‘permanent residents’. Temporary migration from India has become a common trend over the last two decades, especially since the acceleration of globalisation and the developments in the fields of information and communication technologies. Although it is argued that this type of migration took place in the past – for instance, Indians migrated to British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries as indentured labourers for a period of three to five years and later extended their stays – what is new about the current trend is the new state policies of different host countries and the socio-economic and cultural background of the immigrants. This paper is an exploratory study of this contemporary phenomena of movement from ‘temporary migrant’ to ‘permanent resident’, a phenomena which has not been given much attention by academicians and policy makers in India. The present paper outlines this trend with an illustration of Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States.     

“The Motherhood Wage Gap for Women in the United States: The Importance of College and Fertility Delay”

One of the stylized facts from the past 30 years has been the declining rate of first births before age 30 for all women and the increase rate of first births after age 30 among women with four-year college degrees (Steven P. Martin, Demography, 37(4), 523–533, 2000). What are some of the factors behind womens decision to postpone their childbearing? We hypothesize that the wage difference often observed between like-educated mothers and non-mothers (Jane Waldfogel, Journal of Labor Economics, 16, 505–545, 1998a; Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(1) 137–156, 1998b) may be affected by the postponement of childbearing until after careers are fully established. Hence, we focus on college-educated women because they are typically more career-oriented than their non-college educated counterparts and also the group most often observed postponing maternity. We use individual-level data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) in order to control for individual-level unobserved heterogeneity as well as human capital characteristics, such as actual work experience, in our empirical analysis. We estimate wage equations, first producing base-line results to compare to the existing literature. Then, we expand the basic wage equation model to address fundamental econometric issues and the education/fertility issue at hand. Our empirical findings are two-fold. First, we find that college-educated mothers do not experience a motherhood wage penalty at all. In fact, they enjoy a wage boost when compared to college-educated childless women. Second, fertility delay enhances this wage boost even further. Our results provide an explanation for the observed postponement of maternity for educated women. We argue that the wage boost experienced by college-educated mothers may be the result of their search for family–friendly work environments, which, in turn, yields job matches with more female-friendly firms offering greater opportunities for advancement.JEL Codes: J13 and J3     

From salons to the native reserve: reformulating the “native question” through pictorial photography in 1950s South Africa

The article provides a critical reflection on the practice of photographic salon exhibitions in the 1950s. In South Africa and abroad, there was a resurgence of photographic societies from the early 1950s that encouraged amateur photographers to create images based on a distinct visual grammar, thereby offering them not only an opportunity to display their work but to compete amongst each other. Subsequently, salon exhibitions produced work that would be judged on its pictorial rather than strict representational value thereby depoliticising the exhibition space. On the other hand, this article seeks to place this practice in the realm of racial segregation under apartheid by considering the deployment of the “black subject” in the native rural reserve in Joseph Denfield’s (1911–1967) work. Through a study of his ethnographic photographs which were exhibited internationally in this period as pictorial work, as well as his intellectualisation of his practice as native photography, it argues that the space of the salon allowed him to pose the “native question” pictorially, that is, provided a discourse through which the “native” could be “known” and ordered.     

What Explains the Decline in First Marriage in the United States? Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1969 to 2013

Rates of entry into first marriage have declined sharply in the United States during the past half century, and there is evidence of broad gaps in marriage entry by race and education. Although a large literature explores the influences on marriage for single cohorts, there is little research that tests explanations for this decline across multiple cohorts. The authors use individual and contextual measures of employment and incarceration to predict transitions to first marriage in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1969–2013). They test two prominent theories of why marriage rates have declined: the decreased availability of “marriageable” men and the increased economic standing of women. They find that men's reduced economic prospects and increased risk of incarceration contributed to the decline in first marriage rates during the past 45 years in the United States, although these basic measures of economic and carceral conditions cannot explain the entire decline.     

Salvadorian Migration to the United States in the 1980s. What can we learn about it and from it?1

This study investigates "why and how Salvadorian migrants came to the United States, and the implications of their migration....First, it presents evidence that the dichotomy used to distinguish economic and political migrations may not be adequate for examining current migration trends....Second, it illustrates the importance of social networks in international migrations from politically conflictive regions....Third, it points out that assumptions regarding the viability of social networks as sources of support among immigrants may also need revision." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

Is It the Government’s Responsibility to Reduce Income Inequality? An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Public Opinion toward Redistributive Policy in the United States, 1978 to 2016

This study examines age, period, and cohort (APC) effects on changing opinions among the American public toward the federal government’s responsibility for income redistribution. More specifically, we use the hierarchical age–period–cohort (HAPC) model to analyze time periods and birth cohorts as contextual variables and age as an individual-level variable to address the identification problem inherent in APC analysis. Our results show that while cohort effects on public opinion toward redistributive policy exist, such effects are explained by individual-level compositional differences among cohorts, and while period effects are evident, particular trends in that regard are difficult to discern. What our results make abundantly clear, however, is the significant impact of age on opinions toward redistributive policy. As people age, they become significantly less supportive of federal redistribution policies, a relationship that is robust in the presence of cohort and period effects as well as a full range of controls. In the context of a rapidly aging population, the implication is that more conservative policy preferences linked to older age provide little reason to believe that mass support for government redistribution is in the offing.