Social indicators of marital instability,U.S.A., 1920–1969

A social indicators model which included demographic variables (birth rate and aged child ratio), economic variable (unemployment) and marriage rates (control variable) was utilized in explaining changes in divorce rates over time. Analysis of time series data for two distinctive periods in the U.S.A. (1920–1940 and 1946–1969) revealed the following significant results:

1. Demographic changes in the age structure of the population while controlling for marriage rates explains significantly larger amounts of the variance in marital instability than economic changes alone (unemployment).
2. In the post-World War II era unemployment was not found to be a statistically significant predictor of marital instability when control for demographic changes were established.
3. In the post-World War II era marriage rates appear to be a significant predictor of divorce rates when control for demographic changes were maintained.
4. In the post-World War II era marriage rates were found to be more sensitive to changes in economic conditions than marital instability (divorce rate).

     

Ageing, Leisure, and Social Connectedness: How could Leisure Help Reduce Social Isolation of Older People?

This study investigates the relation between leisure activities and the social status of the elderly based on a heterogeneous sample of the Dutch population. Close relationships are also analyzed to identify which people could serve as successful stimulators of leisure participation. The social profile confirms that older people have fewer social contacts and often feel lonely. This study shows that leisure activities explain a significant part of older people’s social connectedness. Voluntary work, cultural activities, holiday, sports, reading books, hobbies and shopping are found to be successful predictors for social connectedness of older people. Watching TV, listening to the radio, and spending time behind the computer (passive activities) were not associated with social connectedness. Friends correlate positively to participation in leisure activities. Partners play a role in participation in cultural activities and sports; parents play a role in participation in voluntary work and holidays; siblings play a role in voluntary work and sports; and children play a role in cultural activities, reading books, and shopping. Local communities can use these close relationships and develop special programs to increase social connectedness and hence improve quality of life for older adults.     

Social Capital or Social Cohesion: What Matters For Subjective Well-Being?

The theoretical analysis of the concepts of social capital and of social cohesion shows that social capital should be considered as a micro concept whereas social cohesion, being a broader concept than social capital, is a more appropriate concept for macro analysis. Therefore, we suggest that data on the individual level should only be used to analyze the relationship between social capital, social cohesion indicators and subjective well-being and that they do not allow commenting on the level of social cohesion in a society. For this last type of analyses aggregated indicators of social cohesion have to be computed which is not the issue of this paper. Our empirical analysis is based on individual data for Luxembourg in 2008. In general, our results suggest that investments in social capital generate monetary returns (increased income) and psychic returns (increased subjective well-being) even in a highly developed and multicultural country like Luxembourg. When we are adding on the micro level variables representing the economic domain of social cohesion following Bernard (1999), then we observe that this domain also has an effect on income and on subjective well-being. Therefore, we recommend including the economic domain in any future analysis using the concept of social cohesion.     

Housing,Housing Stratification,and Chinese Urban Residents’ Social Satisfaction: Evidence from a National Household Survey

Social Indicators Research - In 20 years, housing reform in China has transformed its urban housing system from housing welfare into a housing market, which has led to a unique housing...     

Economic,Social, and Cultural Determinants of Life Satisfaction: Are there Differences Between Asia and Europe?

This paper investigates the influence of the economic, social, and cultural variables on life satisfaction in Asia and Europe. The second section sets a unifying theoretical framework for all three domains by defining life satisfaction as a function of aspirations and expectations which in turn are affected by micro- and macro-level variables. On the micro-level, economic capital is a resource for the actor. On the macro-level, societal economic capital improves the opportunity structure for the individual under certain conditions. Thus, economic capital on both levels positively affects the perceived chances of fulfilling aspirations. As long as the latter remain unchanged life satisfaction will increase. Social and cultural factors partially follow the same logic, as indicated by the terms social and cultural capital. Under a set of assumptions, the hypotheses derived are that personal and societal economic capital, national pride and national integration, religiosity, and societal religious integration, all positively affect the life satisfaction of the individual. A multi-level analysis of data from the European Values Study and the AsiaBarometer confirms the micro-level hypotheses. The economic macro-level indicators also display the theoretically expected positive effect on life satisfaction in the multivariate analysis of Asian and European data. By contrast, the direct cross-level effects of a society’s national integration and particularly of religion do not become significant in Europe, yet they are highly significant in Asia. This strong influence of the social and cultural context in Asia can be interpreted in two different ways.     

Money, Sociability and Happiness: Are Developed Countries Doomed to Social Erosion and Unhappiness?

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. Inaugurated by Putnam??s pioneering studies, the debate on social capital trends has been recently revived by Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) contending Easterlin??s assessment. Present work is aimed at finding evidence for the relationship between changes in social capital and subjective well-being in western Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan between 1980 and 2005. In particular, I would like to answer questions such as: (1) is social capital in western Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan declining? Is such erosion a general trend of modern and richer societies or is it a characteristic feature of the American one? (2) can social capital trend help explain subjective well-being trend? Therefore, present research considers three different set of proxies of social capital controlling for time and socio-demographic aspects using WVS-EVS data between 1980 and 2005. Present results are encouraging, showing evidence of positive correlation between several proxies of social capital and both happiness and life satisfaction. Furthermore, results show that during last twenty-five years people in some of the most modern and developed countries have persistently lost confidence in the judicial system, religious institutions, parliament and civil service.     

Social Development Trends in the Middle East, 1970–1997: the Search for Modernity

The nations of the Middle East have arrived at a historic crossroad.Anchored in centuries-old political and economic systems, bitterethnic rivalries, recurrent intra-regional warfare, and risingfundamentalism, the majority of the regions countries haveremained largely apart from the transformative processes that areshaping development in other world regions. Indeed, the impressionexists that no development miracles are occurring in theMiddle East and that, to a very great extent, the region isseeking to remain on the sidelines of modern history. And,yet, if the countries of the Middle East are to flourish in thenext century they, too, must restructure themselves for dealingwith the complex realities associated with increasing globalizationand internationalization. This paper reports on the socialdevelopment successes and failures of 22 Middle Eastern countriesbetween 1970 and 1997. Also identified are the regions SocialLeaders (SLs), Socially Least Developing Countries (SLDCs),and Middle Performing Countries (MPCs). The social, political,and economic factors most closely associated with each countrysdevelopment classification are identified.     

Trends in U.S. adult chronic disease mortality, 1960–1999: age,period, and cohort variations

In this paper, I examine temporal changes in U.S. adult mortality by chronic disease cause of death and by sex over a 40-year period in the second half of the twentieth century. I apply age-period-cohort (APC) analyses that combine conventional approaches and a new method of model estimation to simultaneously account for age, period, and cohort variations in mortality rates for four leading causes of deaths, including heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and breast cancer. The results show that large reductions in mortality since the late 1960s continued well into the late 1990s and that these reductions were predominately contributed by cohort effects. Cohort effects are found to differ by specific causes of death examined, but they generally show substantial survival improvements. Implications of these results are discussed with regard to demographic theories of mortality reductions, differential cohort accumulation of health capital and lifetime exposures to socioeconomic and behavioral risk factors, and period changes in diagnostic techniques and medical treatment.     

Social Support Schemes

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Ethnic Intermarriage and Social Cohesion. What Can We Learn from Yugoslavia?

Social cohesion theory is tested using data on ethnic intermarriage in former Yugoslavia. Before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the proportion of marriages outside the own ethnic group was generally low, but in this respect large differences among the groups existed. The proportion of mixed marriages with a Serbian partner was much higher among the Montenegrins and Hungarians than among the Muslims, Slovenes, or Albanians. The findings are largely in line with the predictions of social cohesion theory that intermarriage reduces the probability of violent conflict among social groups. Besides proportions of mixed marriages, loglinear parameters are presented. These parameters show that percentages not always give a good indication of the social distances among groups. The boundaries of the largest ethnic groups, the Serbians and Croatians, were less closed than their rather low intermarriage rates suggested. The social distance between the Hungarians and the Serbians, on the other hand, was larger than expected on the basis of their intermarriage rates. The findings stress the importance of including information on ethnically mixed marriages into models of ethnological monitoring and early warning systems for ethnic conflicts.     

“You get old. You get invisible”: Social isolation and the challenge of communicating with aging women

Social isolation is a problem facing many older women. Isolation can contribute to poor health as adults age without social support. Increased and tailored communication offers service organizations more opportunities to provide social support to these adults. This research examines perceptions of aging to explore communication behaviors, barriers, and opportunities for improved communication and service provision for aging women. Using data from focus groups and interviews, this study finds that participants from community organizations rely on word of mouth and traditional media to communicate with their aging constituents, despite opportunities to use digital communication and to develop communication plans for this population.     

Multi-Dimensional Analysis of International Social Indicators – Education,Economy, Media and Demography

Using multi-dimensional analysis methods, it ispossible to uncover a structure representing therelationship between multiple internationaleducational, social and economic indicators. In thisstudy, we applied Smallest Space Analysis to datacollected by international agencies for 138 countriesand 20 indicators. A preliminary structure was foundand replicated for different data sets. Thisstructural interrelationship shows that these variousindicators are part of a larger field called welfare.This structure can be further expanded and refined tobe used as a tool for indicator selection.     

Incarcerating death: Mortality in U.S. state correctional facilities, 1985–1998

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.     

Metamorphosis Afloat: Pirate Ships,Politics and Process,c.1680–1730

Abstract

This paper follows some late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century pirate ships, focusing upon the moments when these most enigmatic and elusive of ocean-going vessels were appropriated and inhabited by mutinous mariners who literally risked their necks to take charge of them. This paper builds upon recent work in mobilities and oceanic studies which is developing more materialist perspectives as a means for better understanding the seas and ships as lived, dynamic spaces. By exploring some of the ways that pirate ships were crafted and modified, and then occupied, at the turn of the eighteenth century, this paper contributes new perspectives on the formation of piratical spaces and identities, and in the process, the role of mobilities and spatialities in creating spaces afloat. The paper argues for a greater acknowledgement of the role of process in the making of space and mobility at sea as a means of better understanding the complex geographies of the pirate ship and the experiences of those who sailed aboard them.