Marriage Expectations Among African American Couples in Early Adulthood: A Dyadic Analysis

Using Family and Community Health Study data consisting of 168 unmarried, primarily African American couples, the current study sought to understand the dyadic interplay among school, work, and partner-specific marriage expectations in early adulthood. Drawing on the economic prospects, adult transitions, and work - family literatures, the authors hypothesized and found ample support that expectations to marry a romantic partner were linked not only to one's own school and work-related experiences but also to those of a partner. These associations held while controlling for relationship satisfaction, general views of marriage, and other covariates that have been posited to explain racial inequalities in relationship and marriage patterns. Furthermore, the authors found that actor covariates of marital expectations differed from partner covariates, a finding that highlights the advantages of dyadic analyses in helping researchers understand marriage as both a developmental and interpersonal process.     

Verarmungsrisiken nach kritischen Lebensereignissen in Deutschland und den USA

We study how the impact of job loss, sickness, retirement, and family dissolution on the risk of relative income poverty differs between Germany and the United States, and whether the impact of these events has changed between 1980 and 2009. Americans are more likely than Germans to enter poverty after any of the four events, yet they also recover more quickly from job loss and family dissolution. Comparisons over time do not indicate a secular rise in the impact of critical life events on poverty risks, but our results show that poverty trajectories are subject to stronger cyclical fluctuations in the United States: Through its emphasis on market mechanisms, the liberal American welfare state raises the importance of (re-)employment opportunities for coping with the consequences of adverse life events. The absence of clear long-term trends leads to a reassessment of common views about welfare state change such as Jacob Hacker??s thesis of a ??Great Risk Shift?? or the notion of an ??Americanization?? of Continental European welfare states. So far, there is also little evidence that the often claimed recalibration of welfare states towards ??new social risks?? has alleviated the adverse economic consequences of family dissolution.     

IT security planning under uncertainty for high-impact events

While many IT security incidents result in relatively minor operational disruptions or minimal recovery costs, occasionally high-impact security breaches can have catastrophic effects on the firm. Unfortunately, measuring security risk and planning for countermeasures or mitigation is a difficult task. Past research has suggested risk metrics which may be beneficial in understanding and planning for security incidents, but most of these metrics are aimed at identifying expected overall loss and do not directly address the identification of, or planning for, sparse events which might result in high-impact loss. The use of an upper percentile value or some other worst-case measure has been widely discussed in the literature as a means of stochastic optimization, but has not been applied to this decision domain. A key requirement in security planning for any threat scenario, expected or otherwise, is the ability to choose countermeasures optimally with regard to tradeoffs between countermeasure cost and remaining risk. Most of the planning models in the literature are qualitative, and none that we are aware of allow for the optimal determination of these tradeoffs. Therefore, we develop a model for optimally choosing countermeasures to block or mitigate security attacks in the presence of a given threat level profile. We utilize this model to examine scenarios under both expected threat levels and worst-case levels, and develop budget-dependent risk curves. These curves demonstrate the tradeoffs which occur if decision makers divert budgets away from planning for ordinary risk in an effort to mitigate the effects of potential high-impact outcomes.     

Temperamental,Parental, and Contextual Contributors to Early‐emerging Internalizing Problems: A New Integrative Analysis Approach

This study evaluated a comprehensive model of factors associated with internalizing problems (IP) in early childhood, hypothesizing direct, mediated, and moderated pathways linking child temperamental inhibition, maternal overcontrol and rejection, and contextual stressors to IP. In a novel approach, three samples were integrated to form a large sample (N = 500) of Canadian children (2–6 years; M = 3.95 years; SD = .80). Items tapping into the same constructs across samples were used to create parallel measures of inhibited temperament, maternal positive, critical, and punitive parenting, maternal negative emotionality, family socioeconomic and structural stressors, and child's IP. Multiple‐groups structural equation modeling indicated that associations were invariant across samples and did not differ for boys and girls. Child inhibition, less positive and more critical parenting, maternal negative emotionality, and family socioeconomic disadvantage were found to have direct associations with IP. In addition, maternal negative emotionality was associated with IP through more critical parenting, and both maternal negative emotionality and socioeconomic stress were associated with IP through less positive parenting. Results highlight the multiple independent and cumulative risk factors for early IP and demonstrate the power of integrating data across developmental studies.     

Nursing a Grievance? The Role of Healthcare Assistants in a Modernized National Health Service

The complex division of labour in health care has encouraged the analysis of occupational boundary disputes between separate professions. Less attention has been directed at the divisions in individual occupational groups but in a context of intensive health sector workforce reform there has been a growth in lower status occupations. This article extends debate about lower status occupations by exploring the manner in which nurses and healthcare assistants engage in boundary work to advance their occupational interests. The UK government's modernization agenda has encouraged a more prominent role for healthcare assistants and the findings confirm that this agenda has reinforced occupational boundary disputes between nurses and healthcare assistants. Tensions between nurses and healthcare assistants took particular forms influenced by gendered notions of caring work. The consequences of these boundary management strategies in terms of work undertaken, pay and status are also explored.     

On-the-job training and starting wages

Human capital theory predicts that training should reduce starting wages, yet this rela-tionship remains empirically undocumented. Estimation of how training affects wages must control heterogeneity bias. I do this by estimating firstdifference starting wage regressions on a sample of workers from the Employment Opportunities Pilot Project (EOPP) data. I find that on-the-job training has a statistically significant effect on starting wages.