The End of “Lowest‐Low” Fertility?

Total fertility rates fell to previously unseen levels in a large number of countries beginning in the early 1990s. The persistence of TFRs below 1.3 raised the possibility of rapid population aging and decline. We discuss the recent widespread turnaround in so‐called lowest‐low‐fertility countries in Europe and East Asia. The number of countries with TFRs below 1.3 fell from 21 in 2003 to five in 2008. Moreover, the upturn in the TFR was not confined to lowest‐fertility countries, but affected the whole developed world. We explore the demographic explanations for the recent rise in TFRs stemming from fertility timing effects as well as economic, policy, and social factors. Although the current economic downturn may suppress TFRs in the short run, we conclude that formerly lowest‐low‐fertility countries will continue to see increases in fertility as the transitory effects of shifts to later childbearing become less important.     

Directions in a Post-aid World? South–South Development Cooperation and CSOs in Latin America

The architecture of international aid to developing and emerging economies is undergoing significant change. Post-aid world conditions will reshape relationships between international aid actors including donors, civil society organizations (CSOs), governments, and other institutions. These trends draw attention to South–South Development Cooperation (SSDC) as a promising direction in regions like Latin America. CSOs’ participation in SSDC might challenge and divert the dependency and power asymmetries in traditional North–South aid. As potential adaptive strategy for CSOs, SSDC diversifies the actors involved in aid and the resources exchanged, and produces different development discourses. The article outlines SSDC as an alternative development model and specifically considers the participation of CSOs. It provides a case of CSOs’ participation in SSDC in the region of Latin America. As research on CSOs in SSDC is limited, the article contributes to its further understanding and provides further avenues of research.     

Contemporary American stepparenthood: Integrating cohabiting and nonresident stepparents

Our understanding of contemporary stepfamily life requires incorporating emerging trends in cohabitation and nonresident stepparenting into our `traditional' definition of a stepparent (married adult with resident stepchildren). Using the National Survey of Families and Households, I provide a demographic profile of stepparents that includes cohabiting and nonresident stepparents. Adopting this revised view of stepparenthood alters our knowledge of both the prevalence and composition of stepparent families. The `traditional' definition of a stepparent is shown to describe less thanhalf of all stepparents today. Results also highlight diversity in stepparents' parenting obligations and sociodemographic characteristics. This revised view of stepparenthood has implications for future research on and policy targeted at stepfamilies.     

Psychosocial Correlates of Interpersonal Sensitivity: A Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis examines how interpersonal sensitivity (IS), defined as accurate judgment or recall of others’ behavior or appearance, is related to psychosocial characteristics of the perceiver, defined as personality traits, social and emotional functioning, life experiences, values, attitudes, and self-concept. For 215 independent studies reported in 96 published sources, higher IS was generally associated with favorable or adaptive psychosocial functioning. Significant mean correlations were found for 27 of the 40 categories of psychosocial variables; these categories covered many different personality traits, indicators of mental health, and social and work-related competencies. Moreover, many additional studies that fell outside these conceptual categories also showed significant positive relations between IS and numerous other psychosocial variables. Taken together, the results support the construct validity of IS tests and demonstrate that IS is associated with many important aspects of personal and social functioning.

Doing Disability: Disability Formations in the Search for Work*

Disability theorists have spent much time discussing how disability is defined. The theoretical roots for these debates reside in the medical, structural, and minority models of disability. The medical model views disability as equivalent to a functional impairment; the minority model sees a lack of equal rights as a primary impediment to social equality between able and disabled populations; and the structural model looks to environmental factors as the cause of disability. While debates over how to define disability are informative, there is currently an insufficient amount of empirical research looking at how people come to identify themselves as having a disability. Rather than focus on how disability is (or should be) defined, herein we look at how disability identities are constructed as people search for work. We show that people's interactions with employers and employment agencies have important influences on how disability identities are constructed. We borrow from the “doing gender” and “racial formations” paradigms to introduce an interactive approach to looking at how disability identities are constructed. We introduce the concept of disability formation to highlight how disability identities are continually negotiated through interactions with employment agencies and employers. Our findings are based on focus groups with 58 people who self‐identified as having a disability and were working or searching for work.     

DISCRIMINATION, WOMEN, AND WORK: Processes and Variations by Race and Class

Research on gender and workplace stratification has made clear that persistent employment, wage, and mobility gaps exist, and that discrimination at organizational and interactional levels is playing a role. Few studies, however, have been able to directly capture processes involved. In this article, we draw on unique qualitative and quantitative data pertaining to verified cases of workplace sex and race discrimination (1988 to 2003), and analyze the discriminatory experiences of African-American and white women across various occupational statuses. Notable are high levels of discriminatory firing for both groups, but higher instances of race-based promotional discrimination for black women—a pattern partially linked to their disparate concentration in sex-segregated workplaces and in positions of lower occupational prestige. Our qualitative immersion into case materials reveals influential mechanisms and employer justifications, unique manifestations of differential treatment on the job, and the use of "soft skill" criteria in gatekeeper decision making. We conclude by discussing important dimensions of workplace discrimination for women, variations by social class and race status, and how complexities of status matter for what women experience and gatekeeper behavior.     

Relationship between urbanization and bat community structure in national parks of the southeastern U.S.

Urbanization and development are predicted to increase considerably in the United States over the next several decades, and this is expected to result in large-scale habitat loss, fragmentation and loss of wildlife species. Thus, natural parks and preserves are becomingly increasingly important in the conservation of regional biodiversity. We used mist-nets and AnabatII acoustic detectors to survey bats in 10 national parks in the southeastern U.S. and examined the relationship between bat community structure and development in the surrounding 5 km. We predicted that species richness would increase with park size and that species richness and evenness would decrease with development. Species richness was not related to development or any other landscape characteristics including park size. In contrast, species evenness declined with increasing development. Percent Developed land in the surrounding 5 km area was the only variable that entered into the stepwise regression model. The decrease in species evenness in the urban parks was due to the dominance of big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) in these parks. The percentage of big brown bats in our captures was positively related to percent Developed land in the surrounding area. Our data suggest that urban parks may be important for conserving regional bat biodiversity. However, the low species evenness in these parks suggests that some bat species may be susceptible to the effects of urbanization and may be extirpated over time. Thus, management of urban as well as rural parks should strive to conserve as much bat roosting and foraging habitat as possible.     

Welfare reform and immigrant fertility

Immigration policy is at the forefront of US policy discussions, and the use of welfare benefits by immigrants has been hotly debated. In 1996, Congress enacted welfare reform legislation, which imposed strict restrictions on welfare eligibility for noncitizens. However, a number of states restored access to welfare benefits to immigrants that had been cut out in the federal welfare reform law. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we examine whether immigrant women adjusted their childbearing in response to changes in the generosity of welfare benefits at the state-level. We find that noncitizen women reduced their fertility in response to cutbacks imposed by the legislation. Our findings, which prove robust to a number of identification and robustness checks, underscore how immigrants respond to state-level policies and provide insight into the potential impacts of comprehensive immigration reform, particularly the components related to the path to citizenship and access to public benefits.