Doubling up when times are tough: A study of obligations to share a home in response to economic hardship

This study uses a factorial vignette design embedded in an Internet survey to investigate attitudes toward an adult child and parent living together in response to economic hardship. Over half of Americans said the desirability of intergenerational co-residence depends on particularistic aspects of the family, notably the quality of family relationships. Support for co-residence is greatest when the adult child is single rather than partnered. Support is weaker if the adult child is cohabiting rather than married to the partner, although groups with greater exposure to cohabitation make less of a distinction between cohabitation and marriage. Presence of a grandchild does not affect views about co-residence. There is more support for sharing a home when a mother needs a place to live than when the adult child does. Responses to open-ended questions show that individuals invoke both universalistic family obligations and particularistic qualities of family relationships to explain their attitudes.     

Morality and Nuclear Energy: Perceptions of Risks and Benefits,Personal Norms,and Willingness to Take Action Related to Nuclear Energy

We examined factors underlying people's willingness to take action in favor of or against nuclear energy from a moral perspective. We conducted a questionnaire study among a sample of the Dutch population (N = 123). As expected, perceptions of risks and benefits were related to personal norms (PN), that is, feelings of moral obligation toward taking action in favor of or against nuclear energy. In turn, PN predicted willingness to take action. Furthermore, PN mediated the relationships between perceptions of risk and benefits and willingness to take action. In line with our hypothesis, beliefs about the risks and benefits of nuclear energy were less powerful in explaining PN for supporters compared to PN of opponents. Also, beliefs on risks and benefits and PN explained significantly more variance in willingness to take action of opponents than of supporters. Our results suggest that a moral framework is useful to explain willingness to take action in favor of and against nuclear energy, and that people are more likely to protest in favor of or against nuclear energy when PN are strong.     

On measures of productivity

The welfare of an individual enterprise, as well as that of the national economy, very much depends on productivity. But it appears that methods for determining measures of productivity are lamentably unsophisticated and lead to many ambiguities and inconsistencies. It is generally suggested that productivity represents some ratio of output to input, but existing measures of inputs and outputs are unsatisfactory, largely because they gloss over the difficulties of reducing multi-inputs and multi-outputs to single denominators. This paper examines certain approaches that may be developed to handle some of the measurement problems involved in this area.     

Nuns and monkeys: investigating the behavior of our oldest old

The use of nonhuman primates, particularly rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), as the best model for human physiological and cognitive aging is broadly accepted. Studies employing nonhuman primates to investigate behavioral changes that may occur with increasing age, however, are not common mostly because of the unavailability of appropriate subjects. Recent longitudinal human studies suggest that individual personality might play a large role in aging "successfully" and in the retention of high levels of cognition into old age. As a result of the demographic trend of increasing numbers of aged monkeys and apes in captivity, an opportunity exists to further investigate behavioral aging using the monkey model.     

Cancer and aging: yin, yang, and p53

The author discusses a recent paper published in Nature that shows that a hyperactive allele of the tumor suppressor p53 leads to the development of some premature aging phenotypes in mice. This new discovery is discussed in light of previous findings related to mechanisms of aging.     

Evidence-based practice in community-based child welfare systems

The immaturity of the evidence base in some areas of child welfare practice demands that practitioners approach the development and refinement of practice in a systematic way that explicitly seeks to build on and learn from experience. The efforts of public child welfare agencies in Boston and Cleveland show that it is possible to draw on a broader base of knowledge and experience while responding to unique conditions and circumstances in each agency's community.     

A productivity study in a chemical plant

This paper describes a case study in the application of a productivity analysis model in a plant producing industrial gases. Although the process is a relatively simple one, several inputs (labour, electricity, capital and some materials) and several outputs (liquid and gaseous oxygen, gaseous nitrogen, argon and a hydrogen-nitrogen mixture) are involved. The case study demonstrates how measures of total input and total output can be applied and analyses the performance of the plant over a 15-month period in terms of a variety of managerial control ratios.     

Myths and Misconceptions About University Student Volunteering: Development and Perpetuation

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This paper examines myths and misconceptions about university student volunteering. Our study explored the experiences of...