Toddler Peers: From Nonverbal Coordinated Action to Verbal Discourse

Twenty-four toddlers (24 months of age) interacted with an adult play partner who experimentally created two different nonverbal interactive contexts surrounding her speech to the toddlers. One, a nonverbal imitation game, mimicked that hypothesized to facilitate toddlers' discourse with one another. The second mimicked another frequent form of toddler peer interaction, parallel play. After establishing the nonverbal context, the adult verbally described her own or the child's nonverbal action. Being engaged in nonverbal imitation games facilitated toddlers (1) responding verbally to the adult's speech in a topically well-connected way and (2) maintaining topically-connected responses over successive turns. Using nonverbal imitative acts, toddlers appear to nonverbally negotiate a topic for their interactions that facilitates their skill in verbal discourse.     

American Juvenile Justice: Recent Trends and Issues in Youth Offending

Trends in juvenile offending in the United States since the 1970s are reviewed. Serious youth violence, co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems among offenders, female delinquency, and other issues currently confronting the American juvenile justice system are examined. Policy considerations associated with recent trends in juvenile offending among American youth are identified.     

The Foreign Policy Beliefs of Political Campaign Contributors: A Post-Cold War Analysis

Objective. In this article we address two questions raised by the literature on the structure of foreign policy beliefs. First, has the end of the Cold War brought about any major changes in these belief systems? Second, how do ideology and economic interests shape these beliefs? Methods. We analyze data from a 1996 survey of U.S. presidential campaign contributors conducted by the Ray Bliss Center to determine the foreign policy belief systems of contributors. We then compare those results to the belief systems found in a 1988 survey of contributors. Results. We find that Cold War belief systems are quite durable. There was surprisingly little change in the structure or content of contributors' foreign policy beliefs between 1988 and 1996. We also find that both ideology and economic interests help shape these beliefs and examine the circumstances under which each of these two considerations appears to have the most important effects. Conclusions. Policymakers face new challenges since the end of the Cold War, but domestic political elites still approach foreign policy with a Cold War perspective. Also, although ideology is very important in determining how individuals think about foreign policy, material interests also make a difference for campaign contributors.     

Regional variation in the effect of structural factors on homicide in rural areas

A significant literature has evolved in the last 40 years investigating regional variation in lethal violence, with most studies focusing on Southern homicide rates. One question posed by this research involves the effect of structural conditions on violence in the context of a regional culture of violence. We take a unique approach to this problem by detailing two distinct conceptual processes, amplification and attenuation of structural influences on violence. We then investigate regional variations in the effects of resource deprivation on White homicide in rural areas—a context in which the Southern culture of violence should be most prominent. The results of our county-level analyses of census and homicide data around the year 2000 reveal that White homicide rates are higher in Confederate South states and that resource deprivation has a positive association with White homicide. The effect of resource deprivation also accounts for the Confederate South effect, and an interaction model indicates that the effect of this variable is significantly stronger in the non-South as predicted by the attenuation argument. Overall, these results suggest that both structural and cultural forces contribute to rural White homicide rates.     

Individual quality of life: can it be accounted for by psychological or subjective well-being?

There is ongoing discussion in the scientific literature about the need for a more theoretical foundation to underpin quality of life (QoL) measurement. This paper applied Keyes et al.’s [J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 82 (2002) 1007] model of well-being as a framework to assess whether respondents (n = 136 students) focus on elements of subjective well-being (SWB), such as satisfaction and happiness, or on elements of psychological well-being (PWB), such as meaning and personal growth, when making individual QoL (IQoL) judgments using the Schedue of the Evaluation of Individual Quality of Life (SEIQoL). The Keyes et al.’s model was confirmed and explained 41% of the variance in SEIQoL scores. Both SWB and PWB were correlated with the SEIQoL Index Score and SWB was found to be an important mediating variable in the relationship between PWB and SEIQoL. When analyzing different well-being combinations, respondents with high SWB/high PWB had significantly higher SEIQoL scores than did those with low SWB/low PWB. Respondents with high PWB/high SWB had higher SEIQoL scores than did those with high PWB/low SWB. Longitudinal studies in different patient groups are needed to explore the dynamic relationship between IQoL and well-being. Further investigation of the relationship between PWB and SWB with other instruments purporting to measure QoL would contribute to an enhanced understanding of the underlying nature of QoL.     

Labour migration as a response to relative deprivation

In this paper we define the relative deprivation of a person with income y as an increasing function of the percentage of individuals in the person's reference group whose income is larger than y. We obtain his satisfaction by adding up the marginal utilities of income over the range of income a person possesses. We model migration from one reference group to another as a response to relative deprivation and satisfaction: We say that a strong incentive to migrate exists if relative deprivation decreases while satisfaction rises with migration and that a weak incentive exists if the individual increases or decreases his satisfaction and deprivation at the same time by migrating. We derive conditions under which different incentives, weak or strong, hold for different individuals. We obtain the result that in general the richest individual in a society will not have a strong incentive to migrate but may have a weak incentive to migrate, whereas the poorest individual may have a strong incentive to migrate and also a weak incentive to migrate. Our analysis enables us to explain several perplexing migratory phenomena, identify income inequality as a distinct explanatory variable of migration and establish an incentive to migrate in situations where the utility-social welfare approach does not.This is a revised version of Harvard University Migration and Development Program, Discussion Paper No. 20. We are indebted to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Family dissolution, family reconstitution, and children’s educational careers: Recent evidence for Sweden

Both longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses on a large and recent Swedish data set demonstrate that, compared to children in intact families, children who have experienced family dissolution or reconstitution show lower educational attainment at age 16. Time constraints do not seem to be an important mechanism behind the negative effect of separation. Economic deprivation affects children s attainment negatively, but downward social mobility appears to be an even more important causal mechanism: Losing the parent with the higher social position probably reduces social capital and aspirations. When we control for socioeconomic characteristics, a small net effect of separation and reconstitution remains.     

Trends in the relationship between socioeconomic status and infant mortality in metropolitan Ohio, 1960–1990

This paper presents the results of an ecological analysis of the relationship between infant mortality and economic status in metropolitan Ohio at four points in time centering on the censuses of 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. The basic unit of analysis is the census tract of mother's usual residence, with economic status being determined by the percentage of low income families living in each tract. For each period, the census tracts were aggregated into broad income groups and three-year average infant mortality rates were computed for each area, by age, sex, race and exogenous-endogenous causes of death. The most important conclusion to be drawn from the data is that in spite of some very remarkable declines in infant mortality for all socioeconomic groups since 1960, there continues to be a very clear and pronounced inverse association between income status and infant mortality. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that it is stronger in 1990 than it was three decades earlier. The general inverse association is observed for both sexes, for whites and nonwhites, and for all major causes of death. At the same time, the data reveal notable variations in the pattern of the relationship over time, as well as several differences between whites and nonwhites in the nature and magnitude of the relationship. Some macro-economic hypotheses are offered to explain these temporal and racial differences in the pattern of the relationship between economic status and infant mortality.This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the annual meetings of the Southern Demographic Association in New Orleans, 21–23 October 1993.