After the fall: a conflict management program to foster open society

A conflict management program developed to support the transition from a closed to open society in postcommunist eastern and central Europe focuses on the future leaders of this region: adolescents.     

Processes of adjustment in organized out-of-school activities: opportunities and risks

Participation in organized out-of-school activities leads to long-term psychosocial and educational benefits for young people. Now we're learning which features of these activities best support individual children.     

LEGISLATING LOVE: The Effect of Child Support and Welfare Policies on Father–child Contact

Reducing non-marital childbearing and making nonresidential fathers take greater responsibility for their children were identified as goals of numerous policy changes since the 1980s. Child-support award rates for children born to unmarried parents have been quite low historically, leading lawmakers to focus on increasing both award and payment rates for this group. Nonmarital fathers are also much less likely to have contact with their children. Although evidence suggests that policy efforts increase child support awards and receipt, the link between child support policies, child support outcomes, and father-child contact has received less attention. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation on children born between 1985–1997 to investigate the relationship between child-support award and receipt and the amount of contact that fathers have with their non-residential children. Since it is likely that both of these behaviors are, in part, determined by unobservable characteristics of the father, we estimate an instrumental variables Tobit model. The model is identified by our assumption that child support policy variables can impact child support awards and payments, but father-child contact cannot be directly legislated. Our results suggest that there are unintended, but desirable effects of child support establishment and collection. Policies to collect child support not only increase financial resources to families, but through their impact on payments increase visitation and contact between these children and their fathers. The estimated impact of receiving child support on contact is more than 27 days per year.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, Washington DC, January 2003 and the Annual Meetings of the Association of Public Policy and Management, November 2003. Support from NICHD Grant # HD30944 is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Suzann Eshleman for excellent computer programming and James Scully for providing us with data on genetic testing laws.     

Simulation for the complex Bingham distribution

The complex Bingham distribution is relevant for the shape analysis of landmark data in two dimensions. In this paper it is shown that the problem of simulating from this distribution reduces to simulation from a truncated multivariate exponential distribution. Several simulation methods are described and their efficiencies are compared.     

Nonverbal cues employed in discriminating between disabled persons and actors

Undergraduate subjects were seen to accurately discriminate between simulating actors and genuinely disabled males confined to wheelchairs. Judgments were based on skill in manipulating the wheelchair, poorer muscular development of the disabled, and on appearance of clothing. Implications for research on the disabled employing actors was discussed.This study was supported by a grant from the York University Faculty of Arts awarded to the first two authors. The project was performed as the third author's Honours thesis. The authors wish to thank all participants for their cooperation and assistance in making this research possible. The authors also wish to thank Gail Kenyon, Coordinator of the Centre for Handicapped Students who helped recruit participants for the videotaping and to Lucie Cantrell, Executive Officer of the York University Counselling and Development Centre who arranged for the use of the Centre's facilities and equipment.     

Ethnicity and Organization: Jewish Communities in Eastern Europe and the United States*

In their most essential respects, the immigrant communities of American Jews (and the total American Jewish community) were a direct continuation of those which appeared in East Europe, prior to 1914. Using archives, government reports, and texts (primary and secondary) this paper reconstructs the sociohistorical environment in which they appeared. The extensive communal organization which characterized both settings, actually served the interests of societal demands. These institutions provided needed (often emergency) services to the community, but they also supported the out-group's status, as determined by the larger society. A clear picture emerges of the impact on the collective Jewish, and individual Jew's, adaptation to society within a highly developed and organized community.