Gaydar: visual detection of sexual orientation among gay and straight men

Currently, American gay people believe they have a unique ability to pick each other out in a crowd (often termed "gaydar" ["gay" + "radar"]). This was established through a nationwide Internet-mediated survey (n = 460). To test for the presence of this ability in gay men, the researcher asked self-identified gay and straight male participants to view a series of unfamiliar men on videotape and determine the sexual orientation of each. The higher overall accuracy of gay men demonstrated a trend level difference from their straight cohorts although falling short (primarily due to small sample size) of the p < 0.05 level. A theory for the emergence of this skill (termed "Adaptive Gaydar" by the author) as a unique perceptual ability/coping mechanism uinique among gay people is also presented.     

Demographic event history analysis: a selective review

This is a selective review of the literature concerning demographic event history analysis. "We have attempted to emphasize work that we consider to be particularly important or innovative, to note some of the difficulties that may arise with the use of event history analysis, and to point to several substantive areas where research is still poorly developed."     

Mundane intermodality: a comparative analysis of bike-renting practices

ABSTRACT

Bike rental systems have been introduced as a sustainable urban mobility alternative. This paper analyses the social practices that emerge as part of these systems. We specifically focus on the interactions and street-level performances at a bike rental station. We argue that the bike-sharing service is a pivotal device that enables its users to transform (to re-configure from pedestrians to cyclists and vice versa), hence creating intermodality. The bike rental system ensures the technical standardization of behaviour while simultaneously revealing differences between those familiar with the system and those who are not. Thus, competences and meanings of the station are not subordinate to materials – they are interdependent, entwined and enacted in and through the practice itself.     

Orphans and schooling in africa: a longitudinal analysis

AIDS deaths could have a major impact on economic development by affecting the human capital accumulation of the next generation. We estimate the impact of parent death on primary school participation using an unusual five-year panel data set of over 20,000 Kenyan children. There is a substantial decrease in school participation following a parent death and a smaller drop before the death (presumably due to pre-death morbidity). Estimated impacts are smaller in specifications without individual fixed effects, suggesting that estimates based on cross-sectional data are biased toward zero. Effects are largest for children whose mothers died and, in a novel finding, for those with low baseline academic performance.     

Untilting age distributions: a transformation for graphical analysis

"This article presents a new approach to the plotting of age distribution data. 'Untilting' is a way of transforming data that vary systematically from very high to very low values so as to show local variation more clearly. The article derives an untilting transformation from the formal structure of age distributions. The transformation turns out to be closely related to two familiar demographic techniques, reverse-survival estimation of births and birth rates, and comparison of observed with stable age distributions. The ideas are illustrated by application to age distributions from the 1979 and 1989 censuses of Vietnam."     

Male street prostitution in Dublin: a psychological analysis

This study assessed the mental health characteristics of 12 male street prostitutes (MSPs) in Dublin, with particular regard to issues of homelessness, substance abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, and self-esteem. Participants completed five psychometric tests, which indicated that all of the participants had above average levels of depression and suicidal ideation and low levels of self-esteem. This study found that candidates likely to become MSPs are young males with a combination of factors, including a background of childhood sexual or physical abuse, leaving school early, running away from home, and a dependence on heroin.     

Family policies in OECD countries: a comparative analysis

This article discusses the diversity of family policy models in 28 OECD countries in terms of the balance between their different objectives and the mix of instruments adopted to implement the policies. Cross-country policy differences are investigated by applying a principal component analysis to comprehensive country-level data from the OECD Family database covering variables such as parental leave conditions, childcare service provision, and financial support to families. The results find persistent differences in the family policy patterns embedded in different contexts of work-family "outcomes." Country classifications of family policy packages only partially corroborate categorizations in earlier studies, owing to considerable within-group heterogeneity and the presence of group outliers. The Nordic countries outdistance the others with comprehensive support to working parents with very young children. Anglo-Saxon countries provide much less support for working parents with very young children, and financial support is targeted on low-income and large families and focuses on preschool and early elementary education. Continental and Eastern European countries form a more heterogeneous group, while the support received by families in Southern Europe and in Asian countries is much lower in all its dimensions.     

Digital media responses to a feminist scholarly article: a critical discourse analysis

In this critical discourse analysis, I identified the linguistic tools and discourses used in the articles, blog posts, discussion forums, and tweets published in response to my article on STEM in Higher Education that identified gendered discourses in instructional language. Beginning from the standpoint of the author of the journal article, I examined digital media publications to understand how linguistic tools such as stance and deixis were used to convey meaning, emotion, and power and negotiated through language. Analysis suggested that linguistic tools and trolling strategies seen throughout the corpus were used to generate support for calls to denounce the research and silence me, as the author of the journal article. These findings provide insight into how opposition to academic feminist work builds, in many cases, in reaction to the recontextualization of the research instead of responding to the research itself.     

Retirement patterns in Hong Kong: a censored regression analysis

This paper provides an overview of retirement patterns in Hong Kong on the basis of limited data. A censored regression model is used to infer the retirement age from people‘s current retirement status and their current age. This model is equivalent to a restricted probit model, and the interpretation of parameters is straightforward. The results clearly show a negative income effect on the retirement decision. The retirement age seems to be positively related to lifetime earnings but negatively related to the rate of decline of earnings with age. JEL classification: C24, J14, J26 Received May 6, 1996 / Accepted February 5, 1997     

Experiences of veterans' widows following conjugal bereavement: a qualitative analysis

This qualitative study analyzed the conjugal grief experience of veterans' widows. The narratives yielded several themes, including the decreased self-reported symptoms of distress when widows reported having positive social support without negative social support, the development of an ongoing relationship with their deceased spouses with a mechanism for creating meaning from their loss, and the assumption of a new identity and new roles and responsibilities. Widows who ascribed a belief that external forces control their life events and those who have children with psychosocial issues reported increased symptoms of distress related to their spouses' death.     

Diet,mortality and life expectancy: a cross national analysis

"There are numerous reasons why mortality and life expectancy vary between countries. Epidemiological studies seem to indicate that dietary variations may be among them. A sample of 51 countries studied with data from the International Comparisons Project and other sources, shows that after controlling for nutrient intake, consumption of medical goods and services, income distribution, weather, and literacy, countries with more meat and poultry in their diet have lower life expectancies after age five. The results for infant mortality and child death between one and five indicate that a more animal-intensive diet may be actually beneficial, especially if fish consumption is increased and meat and poultry consumption reduced."     

Politics and fertility: a new approach to population policy analysis

This paper aims to explain why divergentpopulation policies and programs arise in otherwisesimilar countries and to clarify how such policiesrelate to fertility decline. An analysis wasundertaken of demographic and policy change over a 30year period in four pairs of developing countries: Algeria and Tunisia; Bangladesh and Pakistan; thePhilippines and Thailand; and Zambia and Zimbabwe. Insome countries, popular demand for family planningfacilitated changing policy. In others, independentfactors, such as economic crisis or internationalpressure, pushed policy makers into action onpopulation policy, often in the absence of populardemand. In these countries, governments whichidentified a coherent rationale, usually economic, forreducing population growth, tended to develop moresuccessful policies. Strong and financially securecoalitions of policy elites were important in sharingthe political risk associated with such policies. Analysis of these processes has lessons for policymakers and researchers interested in expeditingimplementation of new approaches to population andreproductive health.     

Population and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: a mediating perspective and a mixed-method analysis

As progress is made in understanding the dynamics of land-use and land-cover change (LUCC), arguments that view population pressure as one of the major factors affecting forest destruction continue to be framed. Following the advances in the field of population-environment studies, this paper contends that a full account of the complex web of drivers involved in tropical deforestation needs to go beyond demographics per se. This paper examines the contribution of the ??population factor?? as a cause of deforestation in Machadinho D??Oeste, Rond?nia, Brazilian Amazonia, an area with significant small-scale farming. Conceptually, the paper shows that socioeconomic status and mediating factors (i.e., education, managerial skills, previous rural experience, integration into the local, and regional contexts), and attitudes and behaviors toward the land parcel development mediate migrants?? relationships with the local environment. The analysis combines multiple data sources (i.e., demographic census, household survey, land-cover maps, in-depth interviews) and analytical approaches (i.e., fuzzy sets statistics, remote-sensing/GIS analysis, interpretivist qualitative assessment) to examine the complex interrelationships between LUCC and human population.     

Birth spacing and fertility limitation: a behavioral analysis of a nineteenth century frontier population

Our analysis of changing birth interval distributions over the course of a fertility transition from natural to controlled fertility has examined three closely related propositions. First, within both natural fertility populations (identified at the aggregate level) and cohorts following the onset of fertility limitation, we hypothesized that substantial groups of women with long birth intervals across the individually specified childbearing careers could be identified. That is, even during periods when fertility behavior at the aggregate level is consistent with a natural fertility regime, birth intervals at all parities are inversely related to completed family size. Our tabular analysis enables us to conclude that birth spacing patterns are parity dependent; there is stability in CEB-parity specific mean and birth interval variance over the entire transition. Our evidence does not suggest that the early group of women limiting and spacing births was marked by infecundity. Secondly, the transition appears to be associated with an increasingly larger proportion of women shifting to the same spacing schedules associated with smaller families in earlier cohorts. Thirdly, variations in birth spacing by age of marriage indicate that changes in birth intervals over time are at least indirectly associated with age of marriage, indicating an additional compositional effect. The evidence we have presented on spacing behavior does not negate the argument that parity-dependent stopping behavior was a powerful factor in the fertility transition. Our data also provide evidence of attempts to truncate childbearing. Specifically, the smaller the completed family size, the longer the ultimate birth interval; and ultimate birth intervals increase across cohorts controlling CEB and parity. But spacing appears to represent an additional strategy of fertility limitation. Thus, it may be necessary to distinguish spacing and stopping behavior if one wishes to clarify behavioral patterns within a population (Edlefsen, 1981; Friedlander et al., 1980; Rodriguez and Hobcraft, 1980). Because fertility transition theories imply increased attempts to limit family sizes, it is important to examine differential behavior within subgroups achieving different family sizes. It is this level of analysis which we have attempted to achieve in utilizing parity-specific birth intervals controlled by children ever born.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Deepwater Horizon oil spill exposure and child health: a longitudinal analysis

Population and Environment - The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) created widespread concern about threats to health among residents of the Louisiana Gulf Coast. This study uses data from the...     

Household dynamics and fuelwood consumption in developing countries: a cross-national analysis

Previous research has suggested a link between household dynamics (i.e., average household size and number of households) and environmental impacts at the national level. Building on this work, we empirically test the relationship between household dynamics and fuelwood consumption, which has been implicated in anthropogenic threats to biodiversity. We focus our analysis on developing countries (where fuelwood is an important energy source). Our results show that nations with smaller average households consume more fuelwood per capita. This finding indicates that the household economies of scale are, indeed, associated with the consumption of fuelwood. In addition, we found that number of households is a better predictor of total fuelwood consumption than average household size suggesting a greater relative contribution to consumption levels. Thus, insofar as declining average household sizes result in increased number of households and higher per capita consumption, this trend may be a signal of serious threats to biodiversity and resource conservation. We also found further support for the ??energy ladder?? hypothesis that economic development reduces demand for traditional fuels.     

Household commodity demand and demographics in the Netherlands: a microeconometric analysis

We investigate the effects of demographics, household expenditure and female employment on the allocation of household expenditure to consumer goods. For this purpose we estimate an Almost Ideal Demand System based on Dutch micro data. We find that interactions between household expenditure and demographics are of significant importance in explaining the allocation to consumer goods. As a consequence, consumer goods such as housing and clothing change with demographic characteristics from luxuries to necessities. Furthermore, this implies that budget and price-elasticities cannot be consistently estimated from aggregated data and that equivalence scales are not identified from budget survey data alone. We reject weak separability of consumer goods from female employment. A couple with an employed spouse has a smaller budget share for housing and personal care and a larger budget share for education, recreation and transport and clothing compared to a couple with a non-employed spouse. Received: 12 September 1997/Accepted: 27 February 1998     

Running hard and falling behind: a welfare analysis of two-earner families

This paper investigates the commonly asserted proposition that long term economic changes have put the family in a financial bind. Structural parameters of a family utility model are obtained by estimating simultaneous labor supply functions for a two-earner household. We find evidence indicating that the average 1990‘s two-earner family would prefer to receive the 1980‘s real wage package (were it available) instead of the real wage package it actually faces. The degree to which the 1990‘s family is worse off (in terms of the changes in the real wage package) is roughly equivalent to an hour of leisure per week. Received September 25, 1995 / Accepted February 5, 1997     

Planned fertility and family background: a quantile regression for counts analysis

This paper examines how education and family background affect the fertility plans of young individuals in Mexico. Quantile regression for count data is used for the analysis. Results indicate that education and family structure affect planned fertility only at the tails of the conditional distribution. Education reduces planned fertility only among women with relatively strong preferences towards children. An absent father reduces planned fertility mostly at the bottom of the conditional distribution.