Cohabitation and social background: Trends observed for Swedish women born between 1936 and 1960

This paper throws some light on changing family-building patterns in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. The family-building events analyzed are first informal cohabitation, first marriage, birth of first child (both outside a union and within a consensual union), and separations from childless informal cohabitation. Results from three previous studies are first summarized. These analyze the patterns by socio-economic and regional origin, applying multiple-decrement techniques separately for each background factor. The new results presented here are based on analyses that use multiplicative hazard models, permitting isolation of the effects of socio-economic background and region of childhood and adolescence respectively. It is generally found that socio-economic background is more important than the region where the woman grew up. Marriage intensities, however, which exhibit a clear regional pattern, are exceptions to this.     

Bayesian robustness in bidimensional models: Prior independence

When θ is a multidimensional parameter, the issue of prior dependence or independence of coordinates is a serious concern. This is especially true in robust Bayesian analysis; Lavine et al. (J. Amer. Statist. Assoc.86, 964–971 (1991)) show that allowing a wide range of prior dependencies among coordinates can result in near vacuous conclusions. It is sometimes possible, however, to make confidently the judgement that the coordinates of θ are independent a priori and, when this can be done, robust Bayesian conclusions improve dramatically. In this paper, it is shown how to incorporate the independence assumption into robust Bayesian analysis involving -contamination and density band classes of priors. Attention is restricted to the case θ = (θ₁, θ₂) for clarity, although the ideas generalize.     

Racing Against the Biological Clock? Childbearing and Sterility Among Men and Women in Second Unions in France

In developed countries, rising rates of union disruption have induced an increase in the share of people experiencing several fertile partnerships during their fertile life-span. However, from the large-scale 1999 French Family Survey, in the 1939–1954 birth cohorts it appears that completed fertility of repartnered men is slightly higher than that of never-separated men while repartnered women have fertility levels similar to those who remain in a first intact partnership. Following this observation, this article aims to study whether people, and especially women, have enough time to have children in the context of second union before they become limited by the “biological clock”. Using a cure model, we find that once age-related sterility is controlled for, the decrease in risk of having children with age is not visible anymore up to age 40. This offers some evidence that people in their second partnership, especially women, are constrained in their childbearing by the decline in fecundity with age. Additionally, childless women seem to respond proactively to the decline in fecundity with age by accelerating childbearing.     

The diversity of household assets holdings in the United States in 2007 and 2009: measurement and determinants

Review of Economics of the Household - We apply diversity indices, such as the Gini-Simpson index and entropy related indices, to the study of the distribution of individual asset holdings in the...     

Sources of Social Influence on Adolescents’ Alcohol Use

The present research examines social influences on self‐reported frequency of drunkenness in a longitudinal sample of 1,439 adolescents (46% female, 90% White, mean age = 14 at baseline) with social network measures from friends, romantic partners, and romantic partners’ friends. We build on past research by addressing multiple mechanisms of social influence—peers’ frequency of drunkenness, alcohol‐related attitudes, and unstructured socializing—across relationship types. Adolescents’ drunkenness frequency increased when their friends’ and partners’ friends’ drunkenness frequency increased and when their romantic partners’ positive alcohol‐related attitudes increased. Furthermore, the association between unstructured socializing and frequency of drunkenness was stronger for older than younger adolescents. Results advance understanding of the social transmission of alcohol use in adolescence and inform intervention efforts.     

Virtual Servants: Stereotyping Female Front‐Office Employees on the Internet

This article focuses on the service providers of the future: virtual assistants on the Internet. Recent technological developments, supported by intensive research on artificial intelligence, have enabled corporations to construct ‘virtual employees’ who can interact with their online customers. The number of virtual assistants on the Internet continues to grow and most of these new service providers are human‐like and female. In this article I profile virtual employees on the Internet — who they are, what they do and how they present themselves. I demonstrate that the Internet suffers from the same gender stereotyping characteristic of customer services in general and that the unreflective choice of female images is, at the minimum, a symbolic reinforcement of the real circumstances of gender divisions in customer service.     

Intergenerationale Fertilitätstransmission in Ost- und Westdeutschland

This study addresses intergenerational fertility transmission: How similar is the fertility behavior of parents and their children? I first discuss the implications of intergenerational fertility transmission for population development and review prominent theoretical mechanisms of fertility transmission. Using data from the German National Education Panel (NEPS), fertility transmission in East and West Germany is compared with fertility correlations and quantile regression models for count data. For the analysis cohorts (1944–66) we find relatively strong fertility transmission in West Germany but no effect in East Germany. In West Germany the impact of parents’ fertility is particularly strong in small and in large families. In line with previous research, the results support that intergenerational fertility transmission is stronger in liberal democratic societies compared with regulative restrictive regimes, such as the communist East. The article concludes that the intergenerational continuity in fertility that is usually found in developed societies was disrupted by the regulative communist regime in East Germany. Fertility in one generation therefore is generated at the intersection of family internal dynamics and macro-structural contexts.     

Determinants of parental participation in Family‐centered Care in Juvenile Justice Institutions

This study assessed if staff members of two juvenile justice institutions in the Netherlands were able to motivate parents to participate in a programme of Family‐centred Care. For research purposes, parents were considered to participate if they (a) attended the family meeting, (b) visited their son during regular visiting hours, and (c) participated in measurements. Study participants were the parents of 139 short‐term detained male adolescents. The family meeting was attended by 47% of the parents, most adolescents (74.1%) were visited at least once by their parents, and 42% of the parents participated in measurements. Several factors influenced the parental participation rate variables, although effect sizes were small. The more parenting problems parents faced, the less likely they were to attend the family meeting. Parents with a job visited their son more often than unemployed parents. Finally, a longer stay of the adolescent and Dutch ethnicity predicted more parental participation in measurements. Our study showed that parental participation is feasible. However, the participation rates in the two years after the first steps of implementation were eligible for improvement. More implementation experience where staff could fully benefit from training and coaching in family‐centred work could substantially increase parental participation rates.