Relations Between Measures of Irritability and Contingency Detection at 6 Months

The hypothesis that irritability and contingency detection are negatively correlated was examined in thirty‐one 6‐month‐old infants. Observation and maternal report‐based assessments of irritability were correlated with both a criterion score and a continuous score of contingency detection. Results indicated that greater irritability in infants was associated with lower contingency detection scores. Discussion focuses on identifying processes by which the 2 constructs may be associated.     

The Determinants of Racial Disparities in Perceived Job Insecurity: A Test of Three Perspectives

Why do African Americans report higher levels of perceived job insecurity than whites? We analyze data from the 1996 and 1998 General Social Survey to test alternative predictions from the compositional, inclusive‐discrimination, and dispositional perspectives concerning the sources of the racial gap in perceived insecurity. Results from ordered probit regressions provide most support for the inclusive‐discrimination perspective, which maintains that employment practices associated with “modern racial prejudice” induce perceived insecurity on a widespread and generalized basis among African Americans. Accordingly, compared to whites, African Americans experience perceived insecurity net of human capital credentials and job/labor market characteristics. Additional analyses provide one qualification to these findings: dynamics associated with the inclusive‐discrimination perspective are more pronounced in the private sector than the public sector.     

A general inverse sampling scheme and its application to adaptive cluster sampling

Not having a variance estimator is a seriously weak point of a sampling design from a practical perspective. This paper provides unbiased variance estimators for several sampling designs based on inverse sampling, both with and without an adaptive component. It proposes a new design, which is called the general inverse sampling design, that avoids sampling an infeasibly large number of units. The paper provide estimators for this design as well as its adaptive modification. A simple artificial example is used to demonstrate the computations. The adaptive and non‐adaptive designs are compared using simulations based on real data sets. The results indicate that, for appropriate populations, the adaptive version can have a substantial variance reduction compared with the non‐adaptive version. Also, adaptive general inverse sampling with a limitation on the initial sample size has a greater variance reduction than without the limitation.     

Female Labor Migrants to Shanghai: Temporary “Floaters” or Potential Settlers?1

Using data on 54,373 migrants from the Fifth Sampling Survey of the Floating Population of Shanghai, this article isolates a group of 32,967 rural labor migrants who hold rural household registrations and whose previous occupations were in agriculture, and focuses on the women among them. The demographic and occupational characteristics of these 9,124 women are described, demonstrating that migration to Shanghai is a highly gendered process, with men and women working in different occupations and sectors. Moreover, important differences are found to exist between unmarried and married female rural labor migrants that indicate that the latter are probably accompanying and working with their migrant husbands. A significant proportion of female “social” migrants also exhibit characteristics that indicate that they are the spouses of male rural labor migrants, bringing to over one third the proportion of rural labor migrants to Shanghai who could be migrating as couples. These couples and their children may be the vanguard in a transition from temporary labor migration to settlement in China's large cities.     

Compatibility,Leisure, and Satisfaction in Marital Relationships

This study challenges the prevailing view that marital companionship promotes marital satisfaction. By following a cohort of married couples for over a decade and by incorporating several methodological improvements—such as refining the measurement of marital satisfaction, determining how much spouses enjoy doing the leisure activities they pursue together and apart, and using diary data to portray marital leisure patterns—we found that the association between companionship and satisfaction is less robust than previously believed, and that it depends on how often spouses pursue activities that reflect their own and their partner's leisure preferences. Over time, involvement in leisure liked by husbands but disliked by wives, whether as a couple or by husbands alone, is both a cause and a consequence of wives' dissatisfaction.     

The government, the market, and the problem of catastrophic loss

This article addresses the comparative advantage of the government to the private property/casualty insurance industry for the provision of insurance coverage for catastrophic losses. That the government can play an important role as an insurer of societal losses has been a central public policy principle since at least the New Deal. In addition, our government typically automatically provides forms of specific relief following unusually severe or unexpected disasters, which itself can be viewed as a form of ex post insurance. This article argues that, for systemic reasons, the government is much less effective than the private property/casualty insurance market in providing coverage of losses generally, but especially of losses in contexts of catastrophes.