Parenting in poverty: Perspectives of high-risk parents

Parents considered high risk by child protection services commonly are striving to raise children in poverty but are identified as requiring improved parenting skills. Parent perceptions of their own needs are typically not sought or elicited. This longitudinal study of 35 parents over 18 months garnered 115 in-depth interviews focusing on parent views regarding barriers to effective parenting. Analysis indicated that parents uniformly identified poverty as the primary barrier to their capacity to provide adequate care for their children. Themes elicited indicated that financially parents were living precariously close to margins of defeat. Parents accepted personal responsibility for their economic and parental failings, equating no income with bad parenting. Depression and despair associated with poverty were acknowledged to impair parenting and increase self-doubt about parenting capacity. Experiences with social services generally led to low expectations of parenting assistance. The need for improved aid for impoverished parents is discussed.     

Confucian Scholars and Specialized Scientific and Technical Knowledge in Traditional China, 1000–1700: A Preliminary Overview

In this essay, I will provide a preliminary overview of the relation between the Confucian scholars and the specialized scientific and technical knowledge in traditional China. I will begin by analyzing various elements in the historical background of traditional China that had various different effects on the scholars' attitudes to the specialized knowledge—classical Confucian ideas and phrases, practical reasons, etc. I will then look at the actual examples showing the varying relations between the Confucian scholars and the specialized knowledge. I will end with a comparative look at the situation in the West, where there were developments both for separation and for convergence between general scholars and specialized scientific and technical knowledge. I will show that the relation, on the whole, was ambivalent in traditional China. Although there was some kind of separation of scholars from the specialized scientific and technical knowledge, the separation was not clear cut, and there was no solid ground for such separation; at times, there were convergences between the two. There was a wide spectrum of attitude among the Confucian scholars toward the specialized knowledge, varying according to different individuals, different periods, and different subjects.     

Effect of Multiemployer Collective Bargaining on Employer-Provided Health Insurance in the Construction Industry

Research on employer provided health insurance has shown that worker characteristics, wages and unionization influence the prevalence of health insurance. Using the SIPP, this research confirms that these factors are also important in the construction industry. However, in this volatile industry populated by small firms, the institution of collectively bargained multiemployer health trust funds provides an additional impetus for the delivery of health insurance by exploiting cross-firm economies of scale in the purchase of health insurance services and reducing the barriers to health insurance created by firm-labor turnover through the creation of cross-employer portable health benefits that do not require multiple probation periods and tolerate spells of unemployment. Additionally, while there is a countercyclical pattern of health coverage in the nonunion sector associated with the shedding of marginal workers and contractors in the downturn, this countercyclical pattern is not present in unionized construction. The greater insurance coverage of marginal unionized workers facilitated by multiemployer trust-fund efficiencies means that the shedding of marginal workers in the downturn does not disproportionately shed workers who are not covered by insurance.     

Simex approaches to measurement error in roc studies

This paper explores the estimation of the area under the ROC curve when test scores are subject to errors. The naive approach that ignores measurement errors generally yields inconsistent estimates. Finding the asymptotic bias of the naive estimator, Coffin and Sukhatme (1995, 1997) proposed bias-corrected estimators for parametric and nonparametric cases. However, the asymptotic distributions of these estimators have not been developed because of their complexity. We propose several alternative approaches, including the SIMEX procedure of Cook and Stefanski (1994). We also provide the asymptotic distributions of the SIMEX estimators for use in statistical inference. Small simulation studies illustrate that the SIMEX estimators perform reasonably well when compared to the bias-corrected estimators.     

A Multilevel Study of Antecedents and a Mediator of Employee—Organization Relationships

One research direction that is needed but has not been fully exploited in studies of organization—public relationships is research on the antecedents of relationships. The antecedents of relationships are the first stage of the relationship framework, for they are what cause specific relationships between an organization and its publics to develop. The purpose of this study was to explore possible antecedents of internal relationships in organizations. This study examines the influences of organizational structure and internal communication on employee—organization relationships using organizational justice as a mediating factor. The multilevel nature of the main constructs of this study was addressed by using the multilevel analysis method.     

Ethical oxymora for risk assessment practitioners

We define working conditions faced by some practitioners of risk assessment that contradict their formal training and career expectations. Panels of expert risk scientists are used to assess the importance of these ethical oxymora. We offer recommendations aimed at helping risk scientists deal with these contradictions.

An oxymoron is a figure of speech combining contradictory ideas into a useful expression (e.g., sweet sorrow, silent thunder). In this paper we argue that some practitioners of quantitative risk assessment face working conditions that strongly contradict their professional ethos. In the first part of the paper, after briefly defining quantitative risk assessment, we describe four ethical oxymora faced by risk analysts. Second, we describe how we used panels of expert risk scientists to assess the importance of these ethical problems. We offer recommendations aimed at helping risk scientists deal with these oxymora in the last part.     

Liberal–conservative self-identification in Korea: a cross-cultural explanation

Two sets of explanations for the liberal–conservative political orientation developed and tested in the U.S. were compared and tested with Korean data. The two sets of explanations are (1) Moral Foundations Theory that states that liberals and conservatives have different moral intuitions (Haidt and Graham, Soc Justice Res 20:98–116, 2007) and (2) a theory that cognitive needs to manage uncertainty and threat are the main factors behind the political orientation (Jost et al., Psychol Bull 129:339–375, 2003). These two sets of explanation for political orientation were tested and supported empirically in the U.S. The Korean data showed clear support for the Moral Foundations Theory. Compared to conservatives, liberals in South Korea agreed more with individual oriented moral statements and less with community oriented moral statements. The data showed weak support for the uncertainty and threat explanation in that conservatives showed higher level of intolerance to ambiguity and higher level of death anxiety, but the correlations are weak. Implications of these findings were discussed.     

Causes and consequences of childhood poverty in Korea: a panel data analysis

This study examines the causes and effects of childhood poverty in Korea using longitudinal data from the Seoul Child Panel Study. In the study, we find that not living with two parents or full-time employed parents are significant risk factors for child poverty in Korea. We also find that poverty is a risk factor lowering children's school achievement, and that family process factors such as family relation and parental monitoring are strongly related to children's internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors. The article concludes by suggesting policy approaches to reduce child poverty and the negative impact of poverty on children's development.     

Assets and a wife's marital satisfaction in Korea

Assets have the potential to influence marital happiness and satisfaction. Using the two waves of the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women & Families (KLoWF), this study examines the extent to which assets, debts (negative assets) and their changes are related to a wife's marital happiness and relation satisfaction with her husband, controlling for the socio-economic characteristics of the wife. This study found that financial assets, real assets and their changes have significant associations with a wife's marital happiness and relation satisfaction with her husband. Relatively, income was not strongly related to marital satisfaction. The findings of this study underscore the importance of assets for marital satisfaction.