Children's Family Environments and Intellectual Outcomes During Maternal Incarceration

Despite the dramatic increase in incarcerated mothers that has occurred in the past decades, there is a paucity of family research focusing on the children affected by maternal imprisonment. The present study investigated family environments and intellectual outcomes in 60 children between the ages of 2 and 7 years during their mothers’ incarceration. Multiple methods were used to collect data from children, mothers, and children's nonmaternal caregivers. Results indicated that most children experienced multiple risks across contextual levels. Cumulative caregiver sociodemographic risks predicted children's cognitive abilities, although quality of the home and family environment mediated this relation. Results underscore the importance of children's family environments and highlight the need for increased monitoring, service delivery, and longitudinal research with children of incarcerated mothers and their families.     

The parenting of young people: using newsletters to provide information and support

The literature shows that many parents of young people do not have enough information, advice, and support in bringing up their children. This article describes an innovative project, undertaken by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence (TSA), which evaluated the use of newsletters as a form of support for the parents of young people. Following consultation with parents and young people, four newsletters were produced in a ‘magazine’ style. The newsletters were distributed to over 4000 parents across the UK. An evaluation was undertaken, involving longitudinal interviews with 40 families and over 800 telephone interviews with parents. This showed the newsletters to be an effective form of information and support for the majority of parents. However, the results also highlighted a number of issues to be considered in using newsletters as a parenting intervention, including levels of literacy, English as an additional language, social class, and reaching fathers as well as mothers.     

Understanding Racial Differences in Marital Disruption: Recent Trends and Explanations

We use data from the Current Population Survey to investigate racial differences in recent patterns of marital disruption. Although a leveling in the trend of disruption has occurred for White women since 1980, our results suggest less stabilization in rates of disruption among Black women. We also observe significant differences by race in the effects of key compositional factors on the risk of marital disruption, including age at marriage, education, premarital childbearing, and region of residence. Differences in population composition with respect to these characteristics, however, cannot alone explain the overall racial gap in disruption.     

Where is the Fed in the distribution of forecasters?

Previous research comparing the Fed's Greenbook forecasts with a median forecast from a private-sector panel has found that the Fed's forecasts are superior. These comparisons potentially miss information from other parts of the distribution of forecast errors. We compare the Fed's forecast errors to the upper and lower quartiles from the Survey of Professional Forecasters’ forecast errors and find that errors in the lower quartile are significantly smaller. We further investigate whether the forecasters who produced those forecast errors can be identified ex-ante and find that while possible the practicality of this finding is limited due to forecaster turnover.     

Studying Social Movements: Challenges and Opportunities for Participant Observation

The research method of participant observation has long been used by scholars interested in the motivations, dynamics, tactics and strategies of social movements from a movement perspective. Despite participant observation being a common research method, there have been very few efforts to bring together this literature, which has often been spread across disciplines. This makes it difficult to identify the various challenges (and their interrelation) facing participant observers. Consequently, this article first reviews how participant observation roles have been conceptualised in general and then draws specific links to how the method has been used in the study of activism and social movements. In doing so, this article brings together key academic debates on participant observation, which have been considered separately, such as insider/outsider and overt/covert, but not previously been brought together.     

On Determining the BMD from Multiple Outcomes in Developmental Toxicity Studies when One Outcome is Intentionally Missing

Public health concerns over the occurrence of developmental abnormalities that can occur as a result of prenatal exposure to drugs, chemicals, and other environmental factors has led to a number of developmental toxicity studies and the use of the benchmark dose (BMD) for risk assessment. To characterize risk from multiple sources, more recent analytic methods involve a joint modeling approach, accounting for multiple dichotomous and continuous outcomes. For some continuous outcomes, evaluating all subjects may not be feasible, and only a subset may be evaluated due to limited resources. The subset can be selected according to a prespecified probability model and the unobserved data can be viewed as intentionally missing in the sense that subset selection results in missingness that is experimentally planned. We describe a subset selection model that allows for sampling pups with malformations and healthy pups at different rates, and includes the well‐known simple random sample (SRS) as a special case. We were interested in understanding how sampling rates that are selected beforehand influence the precision of the BMD. Using simulations we show how improvements over the SRS can be obtained by oversampling malformations, and how some sampling rates can yield precision that is substantially worse than the SRS. We also illustrate the potential for cost saving with oversampling. Simulations are based on a joint mixed effects model, and to account for subset selection, use of case weights to obtain valid dose‐response estimates.     

Retirement and health benefits for Mexican migrant workers returning from the United States

In the absence of a bilateral agreement for the portability and totalization of social security contributions between the United States and Mexico, this article examines the access to pension and health insurance benefits and employment status of older Mexican return migrants. We find that return migrants who have spent less than a year in the United States have a similar level of access to social security benefits as non‐migrants. Return migrants who have spent at least a year in the United States are less likely to have public health insurance or social security benefits, and could be more vulnerable to poverty in old age. These results inform the debate on a bilateral social security agreement between the United States and Mexico to improve return migrants' social security.