Work Roles, Management and Perceived Well-being for Married Women within Family Businesses

The study uses the National Family Business Survey and is grounded in the systemic Sustainable Family Business Model. It investigated the relationship between management activity of married women within family businesses and perceived well-being controlling for work roles, family context, personal and financial resources. Statistical analyses indicated that successfully achieving the most important family goal was positively related to management activity. Low-income women performed more management than did those with other income levels. Successfully achieving family goals, having lower education, less competition between family and business resources, no family cash flow problems, and higher management activity contributed to positive perceived well-being. Well-being increased at a decreasing rate as income increased.This study reports results from the Cooperative Regional Research Project, NE-167R, ‘Family Businesses: Interaction in Work and Family Spheres,’ partially supported by the Cooperative States Research, Education and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Experiment Stations at University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Illinois, Purdue University (Indiana), Iowa State University, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Montana State University, University of Nebraska, Cornell University (New York), North Dakota State University, The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Texas A & M University, Utah State University, The University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (for The University of Manitoba).     

A Grounded Analysis of Career Uncertainty Perceived by College Students in Taiwan

The authors examined career‐related uncertainties perceived by college students in Taiwan. Five hundred thirty‐two Taiwanese students responded to a free‐response instrument containing 3 questions related to career uncertainties: (a) the sources of career uncertainty, (b) the experiences at the moment of feeling uncertainty, and (c) coping efficacies toward the uncertainty. Responses were sorted into categories within each question based on the grounded theory methodology (B. G. Glaser & A. L. Strauss, 1967). A hypothetical model was developed to describe college students' perceptions of career uncertainties, experiences of feeling uncertainty, and coping efficacy toward the uncertainty.     

Reporting and Validating Research Findings Through Reconstructed Stories

This paper describes the use of and reasons why reconstructed stories were used as a method of presenting and validating the findings from the interview data with visually impaired people obtained from Enfield Vision Research Project, into the needs of visually impaired people resident in the London Borough of Enfield. In order to present and validate the findings of the first 20 interviews the researchers organised a group respondent validation event. The researchers orally presented the findings in the form of reconstructed stories. These stories encompassed a number of themes and sub-themes that had emerged from the analysis. The attendees were separated into two groups to discuss the stories. Thirty-seven of the 90 visually impaired research participants attended the event. The research participants felt that the stories were an effective method in presenting and communicating the research findings. They also confirmed the credibility of the findings, and thereby dependability and confirmability were also achieved. The use of reconstructed stories is a novel, user friendly and effective method of presenting and validating qualitative research data, and is particularly suitable method when the respondents have visual difficulties.     

Boundaries and the Functioning of Family and Business Systems

The purposes of the present study were to: (1) examine connections between performance success and the boundaries between families and the businesses they own and (2) explore whether boundary-performance links were mediated by satisfaction. Tests of the mediation hypothesis revealed that family satisfaction partially mediated connections between boundaries and family functioning. Business satisfaction fully mediated connections between boundary characteristics and business strengths, but did not mediate the relationship between boundary characteristics and cash flow problems. Although previous literature suggests that permeable boundaries (i.e. enmeshment) are especially problematic for family firms, this appears to be only partially true.     

School Context and the Effect of ESL Placement on Mexican‐Origin Adolescents' Achievement*

Objectives. Immigrant adolescents' academic achievement is crucial to our future economic stability, and Mexican‐origin linguistic minority youth in U.S. schools generally demonstrate lower levels of achievement. English as a Second Language (ESL) programs provide an institutional response to these students' needs, the effect of which may vary by the proportion of immigrant students in the school. Measures. Using propensity score matching and data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we estimate the effect of ESL placement on Mexican‐origin achievement for first‐, second‐, and third‐generation adolescents separately in schools with many and few immigrant students. Results. The estimated effect of ESL placement varies by both immigrant concentration in the school and by students' generational status. Conclusions. We find that ESL enrollment may be protective for second‐generation Mexican‐origin adolescents in high immigrant concentration schools, and may prove detrimental for first‐generation adolescents in contexts with few other immigrant students.     

Attitudes Toward the Poor and Attributions for Poverty

Prior psychological research on attitudes toward the poor has focused almost exclusively on the attributions people make to explain why individuals are poor (e.g., Smith & Stone, 1989; Zucker & Weiner, 1993). The goal of the current study was to investigate the relationships among feelings about the poor and poverty, stereotypes of the poor, attributions for poverty, and sociopolitical ideologies (as assessed by the Protestant Ethic, Belief in a Just World, and Right Wing Authoritarianism Scales). In our Midwestern college sample (n = 209), attitudes toward the poor were found to be significantly more negative than attitudes toward the middle class. In addition, participants were most likely to blame poor people them-selves for their poverty. However, attitudes toward the poor and attributions for the causes of poverty were found to vary among individuals from different sociodemographic backgrounds and by degree of endorsement of Protestant ethic, just world, and authoritarianism beliefs. Few gender differences were obtained.     

NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCE:

Research on immigrant women workers in the United States and Third World women employed by multinational corporations in export-enclaves has highlighted how global movements of capital and labor are expressed in changing labor processes, working conditions, and ethnic relations in the workplace. Notably absent from this body of literature are the ways in which rural, white American women respond to the new work environments offered by direct foreign investments in the United States. Using in-depth interviews with workers and observations of the workplace and the community we explore how the Japanese purchase of an apparel manufacturing firm in upstate New York reconstituted factory floor relations. In so doing, we extend interpretations of the social construction of the labor process by recognizing the racialized and ethnicized character of rural white women. We also show how both workers and managers construct stereotypic expectations of the other that are manipulated on the shop floor in the struggle for control, recognition, and appreciation.     

Bayesian sequential inference for nonlinear multivariate diffusions

In this paper, we adapt recently developed simulation-based sequential algorithms to the problem concerning the Bayesian analysis of discretely observed diffusion processes. The estimation framework involves the introduction of m−1 latent data points between every pair of observations. Sequential MCMC methods are then used to sample the posterior distribution of the latent data and the model parameters on-line. The method is applied to the estimation of parameters in a simple stochastic volatility model (SV) of the U.S. short-term interest rate. We also provide a simulation study to validate our method, using synthetic data generated by the SV model with parameters calibrated to match weekly observations of the U.S. short-term interest rate.