Stress at Home, Peace at Work: A Test of the Time Bind Hypothesis

Objective . We test the central thesis of Hochschild's (1997) The Time Bind : people who are unsatisfied with housework, parenting, or their marriage work more hours, or at a minimum prefer to work more hours, especially if satisfaction with work is high. Methods . Using the data from the 1987–1988 National Survey of Families and Households, we analyzed the influence of work and home satisfaction on the actual and desired work hours of 1,533 respondents who were employed, married to an employed spouse, and had one or more resident children under age 18. Results . We found that people who were more satisfied with work than home or who were dissatisfied with home life in general did not work more hours or even desire to do so. Conclusions . Contrary to Hochschild's assertions, there was little evidence that working parents dissatisfied with home life worked more hours or desired to spend more time at work.     

Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against AIDS

The AIDS epidemic in sub‐Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten‐year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or should not do in response to the AIDS epidemic. The predominant injunctions in the early years in both sources were premarital abstinence and marital fidelity. Following the introduction of HIV testing and treatment, however, the discourses diverged. Discourse in the media turned toward moral injunctions requiring individuals to interact with authoritative institutions; thus the conceptual center of gravity of the struggle against AIDS in the media shifted from collectivities of individuals to collectivities of institutions. Rural Malawians, however, received these moral injunctions with great skepticism and continued to advise each other to prevent death by controlling one's sexual appetites.     

Developmental Idealism and Cultural Models of the Family in Malawi

This paper examines the extent to which developmental idealism has been disseminated in Malawi. Developmental idealism is a set of beliefs and values about development and the relationships between development and family structures and behavior. Developmental idealism states that attributes of societies and families defined as modern are better than attributes defined as traditional, that modern societies help produce modern families, that modern families facilitate the achievement of modern societies, and that the future will bring family change in the direction of modernity. Previous research has demonstrated that knowledge of developmental idealism is widespread in many places around the world, but provides little systematic data about it in sub-Saharan Africa or how knowledge of it is associated with certain demographic characteristics in that region. In this paper, we address this issue by examining whether ordinary people in two settings in Malawi, a sub-Saharan African country, have received and understood messages that are intended to associate development with certain types of family forms and family behaviors. We then examine associations between demographic characteristics and developmental idealism to investigate possible mechanisms linking global discourse about development to the grassroots. We analyze data collected in face-to-face surveys from two samples of Malawian men in 2009 and 2010, one rural, the other in a low-to-medium income neighborhood of a city. Our analysis of these survey data shows considerable evidence that many developmental idealism beliefs have been spread in that country and that education has positive effects on beliefs in the association between development and family attributes. We also find higher levels of developmental idealism awareness in the urban sample than we do in the rural sample, but once dissimilarities in education and wealth between the two samples are controlled, awareness levels no longer differed between urban and rural respondents. We explore how these beliefs intersect with longstanding local values and beliefs in Malawi.     

Group-sequential logrank methods for trial designs using bivariate non-competing event-time outcomes

We discuss the multivariate (2L-variate) correlation structure and the asymptotic distribution for the group-sequential weighted logrank statistics formulated when monitoring two correlated event-time outcomes in clinical trials. The asymptotic distribution and the variance–covariance for the 2L-variate weighted logrank statistic are derived as available in various group-sequential trial designs. These methods are used to determine a group-sequential testing procedure based on calendar times or information fractions. We apply the theoretical results to a group-sequential method for monitoring a clinical trial with early stopping for efficacy when the trial is designed to evaluate the joint effect on two correlated event-time outcomes. We illustrate the method with application to a clinical trial and describe how to calculate the required sample sizes and numbers of events.

     

Collusion With Persistent Cost Shocks

We consider a dynamic Bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed cost shock in each period. Although cost shocks are independent across firms, within a firm costs follow a first‐order Markov process. We analyze the set of collusive equilibria available to firms, emphasizing the best collusive scheme for the firms at the start of the game. In general, there is a trade‐off between productive efficiency, whereby the low‐cost firm serves the market in a given period, and high prices. We show that when costs are perfectly correlated over time within a firm, if the distribution of costs is log‐concave and firms are sufficiently patient, then the optimal collusive scheme entails price rigidity: firms set the same price and share the market equally, regardless of their respective costs. When serial correlation of costs is imperfect, partial productive efficiency is optimal. For the case of two cost types, first‐best collusion is possible if the firms are patient relative to the persistence of cost shocks, but not otherwise. We present numerical examples of first‐best collusive schemes.     

The emotional terrain of parenting and marriage: Emotion work and marital satisfaction

This study examines how the division of labor surrounding emotion work relates to the marital satisfaction of husbands and wives. The analysis is performed on data from a random sample of couples with at least one child from a northern city in a western state (N = 96 couples). Results suggest that for both husbands and wives the emotion work received from and performed for their spouse is significantly and positively related to marital satisfaction. Results also suggest that the marital satisfaction of husbands is enhanced when they are involved in performing emotion work for children, but if their levels of emotion work for children begin to approach or exceed that of their wives then their marital satisfaction tends to decline. Implications of the study are discussed.