A Nobel Trinity: Jane Addams,Emily Greene Balch and Alva Myrdal

The aim of the paper is to present unusual achievements of three women sociologists who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Its goal is also to contribute to a long standing discussion of the role sociologists as public intellectuals. By focusing on Addams, Balch and Myrdal’s scholarly and public life, the paper demonstrates what social scientists can offer in the role of public intellectuals and debates what are the source of intellectuals’ public standing. The paper concludes by arguing that these three intellectuals’ successful achievement of their goals was possible because of their professional credential and because of their courage to take on risky actions for purposes to institutionalise social or cultural change.     

Long-term care of the disabled elderly: do children increase caregiving by spouses?

Do adult children affect the care elderly parents provide each other? We develop two models in which the anticipated behavior of adult children provides incentives for nondisabled elderly parents to increase care for their disabled spouses. The “demonstration effect” postulates that adult children learn from a parent’s example that family caregiving is appropriate behavior. The “punishment effect” postulates that adult children may punish parents who fail to provide spousal care by not providing future care for the nondisabled spouse if and when necessary. Thus, joint children act as a commitment mechanism, increasing the probability that elderly parents will provide care for their disabled spouses. We argue that stepchildren provide weaker incentives for spousal care because the attachment of a stepchild to a stepparent is likely to be weaker than the attachment of children to parents in a traditional nuclear family. Using data from the HRS, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that joint children provide stronger incentives than stepchildren for nondisabled elderly parents to provide care for their disabled spouse.     

Fat government,thin populace? Is the growth of obesity prevalence lower in more generous welfare states?

In the last few decades, the prevalence of obesity has expanded rapidly and now constitutes a grave public health concern across the developed world. Obesity is negatively associated with, among other factors, education and healthcare quality, which are factors that governments can and do influence through welfare policies. This study investigated to what extent the change in the prevalence of obesity is lower in more generous welfare states. Based on pooled time series cross‐section regressions for 15 developed countries over 25 years, we found that the more generous are transfer payments, health policy and education policy, the lower is the increase of obesity prevalence. These findings have important implications for public policy formation and the public health and welfare state literatures.     

Evaluating the Oversight of Scientific Misconduct

The office of Research Integrity has proposed a new definition of scientific misconduct that will substantively reduce the federal government's role of oversight of scientific practices. The standard is being changed despite the lack of evidence about the effects of current policies or understanding of why research misconduct occurs, how it can be detected and prevented, and the nature and effectiveness of sanctions. Given this lack of knowledge and the perception that the integrity of science is falling, we believe it would be unwise for the academic and scientific community to adopt this new standard.     

Strategies of interaction

Our general theoretical orientation proposes that individuals in a task-oriented group setting have a variety of strategies or rules by which they decide how to organize their exchange behavior. Status consistency, reciprocity, and sex roles are examined as possible bases for interpersonal strategies. Hypotheses derived from this examination are tested in a two-person game experiment, in which independent variables are payoff matrix (mixed motive vs. cooperative), information transfer (one-way vs. two-way), and social context (married couples, mixed sex strangers, and same sex strangers). The dependent variables are number of cooperative choices and reciprocity, the latter being measured by the correlation between number of cooperative choices by one subject in a five-trial block and the number of cooperative choices by his/her partner in the previous five-trial block.