Religion, religiosity and educational attainment of immigrants to the USA

This paper quantifies the association between religions, religiosity and educational attainment of new lawful immigrants to the US. This paper considers a broad set of religions that includes most of the major religions of the world. Using data from the New Immigrant Survey (2003), we show that affiliation with religion is not necessarily associated with an increase in educational attainment. Muslim and “Other religion” immigrants have less education compared to the immigrants who are not affiliated with any religion. However, affiliation with the Jewish religion is associated with higher educational attainment for males. With regard to religiosity, our results show that high religiosity is associated with lower educational attainment, especially for females. We also outline alternative frameworks that provide insight about the mechanisms that link religion and religiosity with educational attainment.     

Domestic Violence,Gun Ownership,and Parental Educational Attainment: How do They Affect the Aggressive Beliefs and Behaviors of Children?

This article explores the relationship between and effects of domestic violence, rates of gun ownership, and parental educational attainment on the aggressive beliefs and behaviors of elementary and middle school children in the state of South Carolina. The results of the current study’s statistical analyses are interpreted using a multi-theoretical framework. Recommendations to decrease rates of domestic violence and firearm accessibility, as well as methods to increase educational attainment in this state’s unique environment and the nation as a whole, are presented.     

Do parental assets matter for children's educational attainment?: Evidence from mediation tests

This study investigates (1) the effects of parental assets on children's educational attainment from high school completion to college degree attainment, and (2) mediating roles played by parental involvement, child's educational expectations, and child's self-esteem. The study sample (N = 632) is drawn from the Child and Young Adult data supplement to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. Results indicate that parental assets are associated with children's later educational attainment. Financial assets and home-ownership are significantly associated with high school completion and college attendance. In addition, family income becomes non-significant when specific measures of assets and liabilities are taken into account. Non-financial assets and income are significant predictors of college degree attainment. Children's educational expectations mediate the effect of financial assets on high school completion. Empirical evidence provides support for asset-building programs and policies designed to promote long-term educational attainment.     

Parallel play in medical anthropology and medical sociology

In recent years, the disciplinary emphasis in the social sciences has been challenged, but barriers remain to multidisciplinary discourse. Scholars may examine similar problems or even use the same concepts, and neglect or overlook the work in sister disciplines. Developmental psychologists have identified a stage in child development called parallel play, characterized by children playing side-by-side but not interacting with one another. This article employs parallel play as a metaphor to describe the relationship between medical anthropology and medical sociology. Using recent Medical Anthropology Quarterly articles on “medicalization” and “the experience of illness” as illustrations, this article analyzes the causes and consequences of this disciplinary parallelism and suggests a rationale and mechanism of moving beyond this stage.     

Maternal understanding of child discipline and maltreatment in the United States,South Korea,and Japan

The purpose of this study is to examine American, Korean, and Japanese mothers' perceptions of maltreatment, and the factors influencing those perceptions in the context of general parenting and discipline. Through a cross-cultural comparative approach, we hope to identify potential universalities as well as cultural specific perceptions of parenting behaviors. For this purpose, a total of 153 mothers with a child aged 3 to 6 years participated in the current study. Participants came from East Coast of the United States (N = 48); Seoul, Korea (N = 65); Japan (Tokyo and Saitama) (N = 40). A modified version of a previously established questionnaire (Ahn, Park, & Lee, 1998) assessed mothers' attitudes toward multiple disciplinary behaviors. This questionnaire presented 17 specific vignettes describing disciplinary scenarios that could occur while disciplining children in everyday life, some of which could be perceived as physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. Results of the study suggest significant differences between groups in terms of maternal perceptions of maltreatment and the factors influencing maternal perceptions. American mothers reported the highest mean score among the three countries in perceiving discipline centered on corporal punishment as physical abuse. Korean mothers displayed a dual attitude of perceiving the scenario as maltreatment, but also rating it as likely to occur in everyday life. Japanese mothers showed the most permissive attitude toward harsh parental behaviors among the three countries on the grounds that they considered a strict and punitive attitude as a method of discipline. Overall, mothers of all three countries had the lowest scores for perceiving the vignette corresponding to neglect as maltreatment.     

Seen but unseen: Part-time faculty and institutional surveillance and control

This article examines surveillance techniques utilized by several metropolitan community colleges to manage part-time faculty. We find that with the increased use of part-time faculty, administrators at these organizations are relying less on direct, personal supervision of these instructors and are instead using more “remote” surveillance practices to certify that “acceptable educational standards” are being maintained. The use of these practices not only signals a decline in the professional status of college instructors, but also points to differences in social control techniques used in “productive” institutions versus those used in “disciplinary” institutions. We find that while surveillance techniques employed at these community colleges make the education process visible and controllable, they simultaneously render part-time faculty invisible but controlled.     

Childhood parental loss and adult depression

Previous research demonstrates convincingly that childhood parental deaths and parental divorces have implications for adult well-being as defined by levels of depression, educational attainment, early age at marriage, and risk of divorce. What this research has failed to examine are the interconnections among these outcomes. Specifically, are the socioeconomic and marital outcomes of parental loss implicated in the observed higher levels of depression? This analysis takes a first step in answering this question. Using data from a sample of 1,755 married men and women, I estimated regression models which examine the extent to which adult socioeconomic status and current marital quality mediate and/or modify the loss-depression relationship. Parental divorce was strongly related to socioeconomic and marital outcomes. Furthermore, current marital quality contributed importantly to understanding the higher levels of depressed mood observed among persons from divorced homes. Parental death was much more weakly related to socioeconomic and marital outcomes, and these outcomes played little role in explaining its relationship to depression. Finally, all of these relationships were stronger among women than men. These findings support the utility of life-course approaches to understanding adult mental health.     

The Money–Happiness Relationship in Transition Countries: Evidence from Albania

With an empirical analysis on a panel of individuals living in a transition country (Albania) we document that the impact of money on happiness does not depend only on the pecuniary outcome but also on aspirations and conditions leading to its determination. Additional factors which matter are the self perceived economic status and the share earned from remittances (and, more weakly, from social assistance). By looking at different sides of the phenomenon we find that these factors affect levels, changes in income and the probability of being “frustrated achievers”. Finally, unlike what happens in developed countries, higher income levels are negatively and not positively correlated with the probability of frustrated achievement thereby supporting the hypothesis that individuals in transition countries are not in the upper side of a concave happiness-income relationship.     

Sex Role Attitudes and the Employment of Married Women: the Direction of Causality*

The causal relationship between the employment status of married women and their attitude toward sex roles is investigated for a cohort of women approximately thirty years in age, using data collected in 1970 from a national sample. Two-Stage Least Squares is employed to estimate the components of the proposed bidirectional relationship between attitudes and employment. Husband's income, age of children, educational attainment, the employment of the respondent's mother, and religious orthodoxy are hypothesized as predetermined variables affecting either sex role attitudes or employment, or both. Employment status has some influence on attitudes toward women's roles but no effect in the opposite direction is evident. The relationships found between other variables in the model confirmed the results of earlier studies. The implications for research and theory on the relationship between attitudes and employment are discussed.     

“The Littlest Science” Revisited

I revisit Allan Mazur’s 1968 claim that sociology is “The Littlest Science.” In doing so, I review four decades of disciplinary battles on how sociology might raise its scientific profile. I examine data on public attitudes toward sociology as a science and how sociology is perceived by the larger scientific community. I conclude that taking a more interdisciplinary perspective will improve the scientific status of sociology.     

“This Ain’t My School!” Criminality,Control, and Contradictions in Institutional Responses to School Truancy

While previous research has explored the causes and consequences of school truancy, few studies have considered the meanings of institutional responses. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of a pilot program promoted as a “progressive” form of truancy intervention. Midvale Truancy Center claimed to focus on education, rather than punishment. In practice, however, the crime control tactics used to capture, isolate, and discipline truants often overshadowed the Center’s educational objectives, locating the Center in a liminal space between school and detention facility. The Center’s competing goals—revenue creation, truancy deterrence, and organizational survival—resulted in rehabilitation being pushed aside in favor of normalization and behavioral control. These findings illustrate a recent larger cultural turn toward control and punishment (Garland 2001), and the encroachment of crime control tactics into the civil sphere.     

In Vino Pecunia? The Association Between Beverage-Specific Drinking Behavior and Wages

The positive association between moderate alcohol consumption and wages is well documented in the economic literature. Positive health effects as well as networking mechanisms serve as explanations for the “alcohol–income puzzle.” Using individual-based microdata from the SOEP for 2006, we confirm that this relationship exists for Germany as well. More importantly, we shed light on the alcohol–income puzzle by analyzing, for the first time, the association between beverage-specific drinking behavior and wages. In our analysis, we disentangle the general wage effect of drinking into diverse effects for different types of drinkers. Mincerian estimates reveal significant and positive relationships between wine drinkers and wages as well as between multiple beverage drinkers and wages. When splitting the sample into age groups, the “drinking gain” disappears for employees under the age of 35 and increases in size and significance for higher age groups. We also find a “beer gain” for the oldest age group and male residents of rural areas as well as a “cocktail gain” for residents of urban areas. Several explanations for our empirical results are discussed in view of the likelihood that the alcohol–income puzzle is a multicausal phenomenon.

Inequality, new directions: full ethical foundation and consequences

Deriving comparisons and measures of inequality from full ethical foundations was a main innovation of the 1960s and pursuing it is still a most fruitful direction. This implies using “equal equivalents” and some principles particularly rich in meanings. Multidimensional inequalities can be measured and compared thanks to the “equal-equivalent manifolds”. The “equal-equivalent utility function” defines individual “welfare” cleaned of differences in sui generis individual tastes and hedonic capacities deemed irrelevant for “macrojustice”. Then, equal allocation is a deeper end-value than equal welfare but has to be complemented by free choice for freedom, Pareto efficiency and a demanded partial self-ownership. The result is the richly multi-meaning “equal-labour income equalization”.     

Charitable conservatism, poverty radicalism and inequality aversion

In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “charitable conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference with respect to transfers above the poverty line.” This contrasts with the perspective of poverty indices, which give zero weight to those above the poverty line, which we call “poverty radicalism,” and with standard “inequality aversion” where the weights decline smoothly as we move up the income scale. The object of this paper is, first, to clarify the interrelationships between charitable conservatism, poverty radicalism and inequality aversion. We do this by showing how the patterns of welfare weights to which each of these gives rise are related to each other. Secondly, we are concerned to demonstrate the implications of these different views for optimal income taxation. In terms of levels and patterns of marginal tax rates, we show that charitable conservatism and poverty radicalism are on a continuum, and by choice of low or high inequality aversion one can approximate either outcome fairly well.     

Couple Relationship Status and Patterns in Early Parenting Practices

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,003), we examine the role of parental relationship status at birth on maternal adherence to current recommendations regarding breastfeeding, corporal punishment, and well‐child visits. At the bivariate level, parents’ union status is almost linearly related to adherence to recommendations. Multivariate models, however, reveal that much of the association stems from the selection of more advantaged individuals into more serious relationships. The results suggest that, although relationship status may be an accurate indicator of parents who are at risk of not adhering to recommended parenting behaviors, the underlying causes of nonadherence are more complex.     

Gender Differences in College Students' Attitudes Towards Divorce and Their Willingness to Marry

This study compared the attitudes about divorce between young adults (college students) who had experienced parental divorce in their chilhood and those from intact homes. While there were no overall group differences, a significant two-way interaction was found for parents' marital status and sex of their respondent. In the intact group, females had a slightly more positive attitude, but in the divorced group, males were considerably more positive in their attitudes towards divorce. The only relationship between the two groups that was near significance in terms of their readiness to marry was the divorced group's more favorable attitude towards pre-marital cohabitation. These young adults were also significantly more actively dating than the intact group. Intergenerational marital instability was also greater for college students who experienced parental divorce.     

Inequality comparisons when the populations differ in size

This paper considers the problem of comparing two income distributions with different numbers of income recipients. The approach eschews the “replication of populations” of Dalton’s Population Principle which has been a fixture of the literature on income inequality since its inception. We start from a preorder which is a generalization of majorization, construct the “better-than” set and characterize the order-preserving welfare functions in a unified framework. The fixed population case falls off as a particular case.     

On Becoming a Good Enough Stepmother

Studies have shown that conflict over parent–child relationships are frequently at the root of stepfamily dissolution and that the stepmother/daughter relationship is the most problematic stepfamily relationship. This paper explores the stepmother–daughter relationship in the family where the biological mother is an active parent and discusses the unique challenges and internal conflicts that the stepmother confronts on entry into the family and its web of preexisting relationships and transferences. “An internal parental stance” which underlies “good enough” stepmothering is conceptualized and the complex psychological processes which underlie this achievement are explored in this paper along with implications for clinical strategies. The term good enough stepmothering is a play on Winnicott’s concept of the good-enough mother—the maternal figure whose attunement to her child enables her to adapt appropriately to her child’s stage of life thus allowing an optimal environment for the child’s development.     

Economic hardship in the family of origin and children's psychological well‐Being in adulthood

Past research consistently indicates that poverty and economic hardship have negative consequences for children. Few studies, however, have examined whether these consequences persist into adulthood. This study addresses this gap by assessing whether economic resources in the family of origin have long‐term effects on psychological well‐being in adulthood. Specifically, we test two processes—one involving interpersonal processes in the family of origin, and the other involving children's socioeconomic attainment—that may help to explain the link between early economic factors and later well‐being. Using 17‐year longitudinal data from two generations (N= 589), we find evidence that economic hardship in the family of origin predicts later adult well‐being through the parents’ marital relationship, the parent‐teen relationship, children's educational attainment, and children's earned income. Supplementary analyses suggest that economic hardship is particularly problematic when it is of long duration or when it occurs during adolescence.     

Education and health in late-life among high school graduates: Cognitive versus psychological aspects of human capital

Just as postsecondary schooling serves as a dividing line between the advantaged and disadvantaged on outcomes like income and marital status, it also serves as a dividing line between the healthy and unhealthy. Why are the better educated healthier? Human capital theory posits that education makes one healthier via cognitive (skill improvements) and noncognitive psychological resources (traits such as conscientiousness and a sense of mastery). I employ the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (1957-2005) to test the relative strength of measures of cognitive human capital versus noncognitive psychological human capital in explaining the relationship between education and health outcomes among high school graduates. I find little evidence that noncognitive psychological human capital is a significant mediator, but find a relatively significant role for cognitive human capital, as measured by high school academic performance. It is not just higher educational attainment; academic performance is strongly linked to health in later life.