‘Where are you from?’: Identifying place1

Many social research projects, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys, take local place as a given: they choose participants from a particular place, take this place as background for what the participants say, ask them about place‐related issues, and correlate responses with different places. But people can identify places in different ways, in geographical or relational terms, and in different levels of scale. This study analyses passages in focus groups in which participants say where they are from, shows that participants generally take the question and answer as routine, and then shows the ways the interaction develops when this routineness is broken, amended, or called into question. When a participant revises their statement of where they are from, they adapt to what they see as the knowledge and stance of their interlocutor, they re‐present themselves, and they create possibilities for further talk, defending, telling stories, or showing entitlement to an opinion. I argue that the ways people answer this question, interactively, can tell us about them, and us, as well as about their map of the world.     

Generational differences amongst new age travellers

Previous studies of ‘New Age’ travellers have paid no attention to generational differences within the travellers’ scene. This paper looks at these differences to reflect upon the new social movement (NSM) literature. It is argued that NSM theory only analyses those movements with ‘post-material’ concerns about culture, identity and symbolic challenges. It thus ignores less privileged movements which are concerned with apparently ‘traditional’ issues, such as survival, political opposition and citizenship rights. A number of such movements have emerged during the past few years in the wake of economic and social restructuring under post-Fordist conditions and the dismantling of a Keynesian-style welfare state that is associated with these processes. While the older generation of travellers was tied to the NSM movements and chose to move onto the road, the younger travellers have been forced to do so for lack of any reasonable alternative, having faced unemployment and homelessness in a post-Fordist/Keynesian era. They are, therefore, part of the contemporary movement scene to which ‘old’ issues are seemingly still applicable. The article concludes by showing how both the older and the younger travellers are now struggling to survive in the face of legislation which effectively criminalises their way of life.     

The Ageing of Australia: Fiscal Sustainability,Intergenerational Equity and Inter‐temporal Fiscal Balance

Australian public policy makers are presently confronted with significant demographic changes that will profoundly affect the formulation of rational economic and social policy over the long term. This paper seeks to outline the potential impact of this demographic change and place it in historical perspective. The challenges posed by an ageing population for fiscal policy are explored and it is stressed that policy inertia will invite severe costs in future. It is argued that an appropriate policy stance should be developed in the context of a framework for inter‐temporal fiscal balance not only to focus on long‐run fiscal sustainability, but also to include considerations of intergenerational equity.     

When Worlds Collide: Young People,Drugs and ‘Responsible Adulthood’

Young people's behaviours which are problematic to parents and therapists are also found in the wider adult community. Here these behaviours are often accepted as normal and legitimate, and as such they may occur even in the lives of these same parents and therapists. This paper considers some of the issues this raises in working with young people and their families.     

A reconsideration of the economic consequences of marital dissolution

A close look at the income flows in the years following a divorce or separation reveals marked differences in the distribution of effects. The economic consequences of divorce are especially adverse for women. In most cases, children remain with the mother, who usually has considerably lower potential labor market earnings than her former husband, partly because her responsibilities for the children are likely to reduce her labor supply and may have limited her past human capital investments. Alimony and child support are the principal mechanisms for transfers from the ex-husband to the ex-wife, but payments are rarely frequent or sizeable enough to make up for an appreciable amount of the labor income lost through the departure of the ex-husband. Human capital investments on the part of the mother have a modest effect on her economic situation in the years following the divorce. Most men who divorce or separate are immediately better off because they retain most of their labor incomes, typically do not pay large amounts of alimony and child support to their ex-wives, and no longer have to provide for the level of needs associated with their former families. Much more important than growth in the ex-wife's own labor income is the role of a new husband's labor income upon her remarriage. More than half of the white women remarry within five years following a divorce or separation; the comparable fraction for black women is less than half. An interesting question is whether the currently unmarried would enjoy the same kind of economic benefits, were they to remarry, as women who have remarried. Estimates from a model of the new husband's labor income, adjusted for selection bias inherent in the process of remarriage, indicate that the currently unmarried would probably not gain equal benefits if they were to remarry. The expected labor income of potential husbands of black women averages only about $5000--a modest amount when compared with the alternatives available to these women.     

Panel data and models of change: A comparison of first difference and conventional two-wave models

The method of first differences as an approach to modeling change is described and it is compared to more conventional two-wave panel models. Substantial advantages are found to the first-difference approach, especially if there are unmeasured, unchanging predictor variables in the model. It is also argued that there are substantial problems in the interpretation of results from the conventional two-wave models. Some of the analytic results are illustrated with a number of applications to the area of stressful life events.     

On the Distribution of Matrix Quadratic Forms

A characterization of the distribution of the multivariate quadratic form given by X A X′, where X is a p × n normally distributed matrix and A is an n × n symmetric real matrix, is presented. We show that the distribution of the quadratic form is the same as the distribution of a weighted sum of non central Wishart distributed matrices. This is applied to derive the distribution of the sample covariance between the rows of X when the expectation is the same for every column and is estimated with the regular mean.     

Optimal Viterbi Bayesian predictive classification for data from finite alphabets

A family of Viterbi Bayesian predictive classifiers has been recently popularized for speech recognition applications with continuous acoustic signals modeled by finite mixture densities embedded in a hidden Markov framework. Here we generalize such classifiers to sequentially observed data from multiple finite alphabets and derive the optimal predictive classifier under exchangeability of the emitted symbols. We demonstrate that the optimal predictive classifier which learns from unlabelled test items improves considerably upon marginal maximum a posteriori rule in the presence of sparse training data. It is shown that the learning process saturates when the amount of test data tends to infinity, such that no further gain in classification accuracy is possible upon arrival of new test items in the long run.