African-American marriage in 1910: Beneath the surface of census data

This paper examines the quality of information about marital status, marital duration, and marriage order among African-American women in the U.S. Census of 1910. It compares the reported prevalence of widowhood to estimates of widowhood based on the mortality of black men and on the ages of women at first marriage. It also compares the reported distributions of duration of first marriage to estimates based on mortality and on age at first marriage. It concludes that census reports are subject to serious error. Widowhood is overreported, and marital turnover appears to have been faster than implied by census reports. The prevalance of "own children" is used to confirm these conclusions and to suggest motivations for misreporting.     

Connecting older grandmothers raising grandchildren with community resources improves family resiliency,social support,and caregiver self-efficacy

Custodial grandparenting can be especially challenging for older grandmothers facing age specific issues. Kinship navigator programs are social service delivery programs intended to inform grandparents and other relatives raising children about available resources and services, provide information specific to their individual needs, and help families navigate service systems. Our study utilizes self-report data from one kinship navigator federal demonstration project, which used a randomized control trial, to examine demographic characteristics for grandmothers under and over 55 years of age, whether grandmother caregivers (≥55 years) improve family resilience, social support, and caregiver self-efficacy, and which interventions improved outcomes for grandmothers (≥55 years). Each participant was randomly assigned to one of four groups: Usual Care (traditional child welfare services), Standard Care (family support and case management), Peer-to-Peer Care Only, and Full Kin Tech Care (peer navigators with computer access and interdisciplinary team). Thirty-nine percent of grandmothers (55-75 years) were mostly living in poverty, predominantly Caucasian, with 36% identifying as African American/Black, with at least one to two children at home. Repeated-measures ANOVAs for each subscale showed statistically significant within- and between-group differences for Family Functioning, Social Supports, Concrete Supports, Child Development, and Nurturing and Attachment, with the exception of Usual Care, which showed a decline in protective factors consistently across subscales. Future research with kinship families could qualitatively examine the experiences for older women in navigator programs and replication of kinship navigator programs could build capacity in data collection and maintenance systems to gain better perspective about how systems of care impact families.     

Reduction in leisure activity and well-being during the transition to widowhood

There is relatively little evidence available about how leisure involvement changes with the death of a spouse and even less about how leisure activity is associated with the health and well-being of widows during this transition. Using data from the Americans Changing Lives (ACL) dataset, this study of 154 widows investigated change in leisure involvement during the transition to widowhood and examined the relationship between leisure activity reduction and widows' well-being. Results indicated a majority of widows reduced their involvement in leisure activity. Path models revealed that depressive symptoms and recovery from spousal loss were predictors of activity reduction, providing more support for the causal relationship of well-being influencing activity involvement than for activity influencing well-being.     

The Social Environmental Context of Resilience Among Substance-Using African American/Black Men Who Have Sex With Men

ABSTRACT

Resilience theory has been suggested as a framework for research on HIV prevention among men who have sex with men. Among this population, literature indicates that African American/Black men who have sex with men experience additional health disparities including elevated HIV incidence rates, victimization, and poor physical health. Conceptualizing resilience as a part of one’s social environment, this qualitative study investigates resilience processes and HIV transmission risk among a sample of 21 substance-using African American/Black men who have sex with men. Data from in-depth interviews describe the social environmental context in which resilience is exhibited and document the influence of homophobia, expressions of agency, and access to social, economic, and cultural capital on resilience processes. Central to this are expressions of hidden resilience, in which African American/Black men who have sex with men mitigate risk and experience their lives as subjectively successful, whether or not outsiders see it as such.     

Homosexuality and the Military: A Review of the Literature

Homosexual men and women have been subjected to constant discrimination and stigma while trying to do what most heterosexual individuals take for granted, serving their country. It is somewhat paradoxical that gays and lesbians who are treated as second-class citizens by their own country and government, with limited rights, would want to risk their lives and potentially die for that same country. As the literature illustrates, many homosexual men and women have chosen such a profession in order to justify their existence and demonstrate that they are worthy of the same rights as others. Just as women and African Americans eventually earned their status as equal members of society and proved their worthiness to serve in the military, homosexuals are now trying to achieve the same.     

Wearing the Garment of Widowhood: Variations in Time Since Spousal Loss Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults

We examine how the passage of time since spousal loss varies by social and demographic characteristics, using data from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Study of Aging. In multivariate analyses, African American race, female sex, lower income, and higher risk of social isolation had significant and independent associations with variation in time since spousal loss. African American women were at highest risk for long-term widowhood. Accurate characterizations of widowhood among community-dwelling older adults must consider variation in the length of time individuals are living as widowed persons and socioeconomic concomitants of long-term widowhood.     

Second-Generation Outcomes of the Great Migration

The mass migration of African Americans out of the South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century represents one of the most significant internal migration flows in U.S. history. Those undertaking the Great Migration left the South in search of a better life, and their move transformed the cultural, social, and political dynamics of African American life specifically and U.S. society more generally. Recent research offers conflicting evidence regarding the migrants’ success in translating their geographic mobility into economic mobility. Due in part to the lack of a large body of longitudinal data, almost all studies of the Great Migration have focused on the migrants themselves, usually over short periods of their working lives. Using longitudinally linked census data, we take a broader view, investigating the long-term economic and social effects of the Great Migration on the migrants’ children. Our results reveal modest but statistically significant advantages in education, income, and poverty status for the African American children of the Great Migration relative to the children of southerners who remained in the South. In contrast, second-generation white migrants experienced few benefits from migrating relative to southern or northern stayers.     

Investigating the mechanism of marital mortality reduction: The transition to widowhood and quality of health care

While it is well known that the widowed suffer increased mortality risks, the mechanism of this survival disadvantage is still under investigation. In this article, we examine the quality of health care as a possible link between widowhood and mortality using a unique data set of 475,313 elderly couples who were followed up for up to nine years. We address whether the transition to widowhood affects the quality of care that individuals receive and explore the extent to which these changes mediate the elevated mortality hazard for the widowed. We analyze six established measures of quality of health care in a fixed-effect framework to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Caregiving and acute bereavement during the transition to widowhood appear to distract individuals from taking care of their own health care needs in the short run. However, being widowed does not have long-term detrimental effects on individuals’ ability to sustain contact with the formal medical system. Moreover, the short-run disruption does not mediate the widowhood effect on mortality. Nevertheless, long after spousal death, men suffer from a decline in the quality of informal care, coordination between formal and informal care, and the ability to advocate and communicate in formal medical settings. These findings illustrate women’s centrality in the household production of health and identify important points of intervention in optimizing men’s adjustment to widowhood.     

Widowhood and spirituality: coping responses to bereavement

Nearly half of women age 65 or older are widows and nearly 70% of these women live alone. Because older women are three times more likely than their male counterparts to be widowed, widowhood has been labeled a primarily female phenomenon. This review article has two aims: (a) to discuss the impact of widowhood on the lives of older women and (b) to discuss how religion and spirituality may be used as coping methods for conjugal loss. After reviewing the literature the authors conclude that older women use religious coping as well as religious and spiritual beliefs and behaviors to facilitate positive adjustment to the loss of a spouse.     

Widowhood and Spirituality: Coping Responses to Bereavement

SUMMARY

Nearly half of women age 65 or older are widows and nearly 70% of these women live alone. Because older women are three times more likely than their male counterparts to be widowed, widowhood has been labeled a primarily female phenomenon. This review article has two aims: (a) to discuss the impact of widowhood on the lives of older women and (b) to discuss how religion and spirituality may be used as coping methods for conjugal loss. After reviewing the literature the authors conclude that older women use religious coping as well as religious and spiritual beliefs and behaviors to facilitate positive adjustment to the loss of a spouse.     

The role of non-timber forest products in household coping strategies in South Africa: the influence of household wealth and gender

The prevalence and ranking of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) as safety-nets has been well discussed, but rarely quantified. We report on group discussions and household interviews in two South African villages to assess the frequency and nature of shocks and stresses over a 2-year period and the coping strategies employed, stratified by household wealth and gender of the de jure household head. Overall, kinship was the most widely adopted coping strategy, and NTFPs were the fifth most prevalent (employed by 70% of households). There were relatively few differences in the nature of shocks or responses between male- and female-headed households. Wealth influenced the experience of shocks or stresses as well as responses. Poorer households have fewer options with the increased use or sale of NTFPs being the second most commonly adopted strategy. Increased use and sale of NTFPs is a common manifestation of the safety-net function. To reconcile long-term economic development and biodiversity conservation, it is important to understand people??s use of natural resources and the factors that affect this use, including their responses to shocks and stresses.     

Does it Take a Village? Migration among Rural South African Youth

In a rural African context, the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child,” suggests that community characteristics are substantially important in children’s lives as they transit to adulthood. Are these contextual factors also related to youth migration? Demographers are uncertain about how community characteristics improve our understanding of an individual’s propensity to migrate, beyond individual and household factors. In many low- and middle-income country settings, youth become migrants for the first time in their lives to provide access to resources that their families need. We employ discrete-time event history models from 2003 to 2011 Agincourt Health and socio-Demographic Surveillance System in rural South Africa to test whether markers of development in a village are associated with the likelihood of youth and young adults migrating, distinguishing between becoming temporary and permanent migrants during this critical life cycle phase. We find that village characteristics indeed differentially predict migration, but not nearly as substantially as might be expected.     

Your House,Your Car,Your Education: The Socioeconomic Situation of the Neighborhood and its Impact on Life Satisfaction in Germany

This study deals with the impact of socioeconomic conditions and social integration into a local neighborhood on individual life satisfaction in Germany. While the majority of ecological studies to date are based on very broad neighborhood concepts, using large research units for defining neighborhood the present study contains micro-geographic information on a representative sample of private households in Germany, including features of their respective residential environments. The data was derived from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and enriched with data from the Micromarketing-Systeme and Consult GmbH (microm) for the years 2000–2006. Our analyses reveal neighborhood effects on various facets of life satisfaction. Controlling for several covariates at the household and individual level, life satisfaction increases when a person lives in a neighborhood with a higher socioeconomic status. In addition, the individual gap between a person’s economic status and the status of the neighborhood also affects individual well-being. However, when comparing with other neighborhood aspects, the strongest effects on individual life satisfaction have social networks.     

Relative Economic Position and Subjective Well-Being in a Poor Society: Does Relative Position Indicator Matter?

Concern for relative income (or status in general) may have important implications for poverty and individual well-being. This paper examines the impact of relative economic position on individual’s level of well-being among poor communities in rural Ethiopia. The analysis uses a self-reported measure of overall life-evaluation as a measure of individual well-being. Despite the fact that well-being is multidimensional, the impact of non-money metric measures of relative economic position on individual well-being has not been given a lot of attention in the literature. In this study, relative economic position is measured using consumption data, asset index, and respondent’s own perception of relative wealth. The asset index captures the non-monetary dimensions of economic welfare, including education, physical assets, and social capital. We use data from the 2004 and 2009 waves of the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey and employ a multilevel modelling technique to account for individual and group level heterogeneity in our empirical analysis. We find no significant relationship between individual well-being and relative economic position measured with in consumption terms. In contrast, we do find a significant negative impact of relative position on individual well-being when we use asset indices and respondent’s own perception of relative wealth to measure relative economic position. Our findings suggest that when individuals compare themselves with others, they evaluate various aspects of their life, including their financial conditions, asset holdings, and social relations, which are hardly captured by consumption or income data in many poor countries.     

Women's Autonomy in India and Pakistan: The Influence of Religion and Region

This article compares the lives of women and explores dimensions of their autonomy in different regions of South Asia—Punjab in Pakistan, and Uttar Pradesh in north India and Tamil Nadu in south India. It explores the contextual factors underlying observed differences and assesses the extent to which these differences could be attributed to religion, nationality, or north–south cultural distinctions. Findings suggest that while women's autonomy—in terms of decision‐making, mobility, freedom from threatening relations with husband, and access to and control over economic resources—is constrained in all three settings, women in Tamil Nadu fare considerably better than other women, irrespective of religion. Findings lend little support to the suggestion that women in Pakistan have less autonomy or control over their lives than do Indian women. Nor do Muslim women—be they Indian or Pakistani—exercise less autonomy in their own lives than do Hindu women in the subcontinent. Rather, findings suggest that in the patriarchal and gender‐stratified structures governing the northern portion of the subcontinent, women's control over their lives is more constrained than in the southern region.     

Measuring socioeconomic status in health research in developing countries: Should we be focusing on households,communities or both?

Research on the effects of socioeconomic well-being on health is important for policy makers in developing countries, where limited resources make it crucial to use existing health care resources to the best advantage. This paper develops and tests a set of measures of socioeconomic status indicators for predicting health status in developing countries. We construct socioeconomic indexes that capture both household and community attributes so as to allow us to separate the social from the purely economic dimensions of the socioeconomic status within a cross-national perspective, with applications to data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) fielded in five African countries in the 1990s. This study demonstrates the distinctive contributions of socioeconomic indexes measured at the household vs. community level in understanding inequalities in health and survival and underlines the importance of going beyond the purely economic view of socioeconomic status to cover the multidimensional as well as multilevel concept of economic and social inequality.     

The timing of falls into poverty after retirement and widowhood

A major concern of workers, even those financially prepared for retirement, is that a small risk of poverty may grow over time. Cross-sectional data showing that older cohorts have higher poverty rates substantiate this concern. Using data from the Retirement History Study, we analyze changes in the hazard of entering poverty as a cohort of elderly couples retire and age and the wives are widowed. The initial fall into poverty among those who were not poor before the husband retired is more closely linked to the event of retirement or widowhood than to the slowly eroding household income over the period of retirement and widowhood. The death of her retired husband puts a wife in economic jeopardy whether this shock occurs one year after his retirement or some years later.     

Does Society Matter? Life Satisfaction in the Enlarged Europe

Life satisfaction is quite heterogeneously distributed across countries of the enlarged European Union. Previous research has shown how living conditions within individual countries, such as access to material and emotional resources, are important for personal well-being, but it has been less successful in explaining differences between countries. This article investigates whether it matters in which political and economic circumstances people live, as well as whether their particular perception of the quality of their societal environment plays a role. People are well aware that the institutional and cultural settings in which their lives are embedded create opportunities and limitations: within individual countries, perceptions of society influence life satisfaction outcomes irrespective of access to resources. However, their importance for well-being differs across Europe: perceptions of societies are highly decisive in countries that provide only a minimum of social security and in which the reliability of political institutions is poor. In rich and stable countries, the impact is weaker and private social support becomes more important. In addition to these country-specific weights of life satisfaction determinants, life satisfaction variations between countries can be explained to a large extent by taking into consideration the economic performance, the social security level, and the political culture in a country—all in all, general conditions that enable people to live a respectable life.     

Measuring Wellbeing in Developing Countries: The Case of Algeria

The International Wellbeing Index (IWI) has been developed as a complementary measure to already well-known economic measures, and as a tool for cross-cultural comparisons. It comprises two subscales: the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) and the National Wellbeing Index (NWI). The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, to test the psychometric characteristics of the IWI. Secondly, to study how people of Algeria, a third world country that is yet suffering from a harsch economical and social situation, respond to questions dealing with their own lives and life in their country in general, compared to samples from more developed countries where wellbeing was previously measured. The IWI items were presented to individuals either in a questionnaire form to be self-rated or in interview sessions. The total of 1417 answers were analysed. As was expected, a very low satisfaction on both scales was found, compared to the results that were reported in countries, such as Australia or Hong Kong. Comparisons on the demographic characteristics basis show that women are significantly more satisfied than men with their personal lives, though no differences were found with regard to NWI. Eldest and youngest age groups rated the PWI significantly higher than other age groups. Education groups comparisons showed higher ratings on both subscales in favour of groups with no education and those with university levels. Marginal statistically significant differences were found with regard to the PWI in favour of the higher earning group, but no differences in the NWI. No statistically significant results were found as far as marital status, number of children, and income are concerned. The results add to the evidence of the usefulness of the scale to predict satisfaction of people with their own lives and life in their country. Its psychometric performance was proved to be very high in terms of validity, reliability and sensitivity. The results were interpreted on the light of the Homeostasis Theory and the particular situation of the Algerian society.