Preconception Motivation and Pregnancy Wantedness: Pathways to Toddler Attachment Security

This research was designed to increase our understanding of how the motivational antecedents to childbearing and emotional responses to pregnancy affect the subsequent attachment bond of a toddler to his or her mother. Using a sample of 1,364 mothers and their newborns from the Study of Early Child Care, we tested a mother‐child influence framework hypothesized to mediate between the mother's preconception motivation and pregnancy wantedness and her child's security of attachment at 24 months. Almost all elements of the mediational sequence were confirmed in a structural equation model. We observed 2 unmediated pathways to attachment security, 1 from preconception motivation and 1 from parenting stress during infancy, and suggest interpretations of these unexpected pathways.     

One-year outcomes from the CASAWORKS for Families intervention for substance-abusing women on welfare

AIM: To evaluate the effectiveness of a multiservice intervention designed to move substance-abusing women on welfare to sobriety and self-sufficiency by addressing their substance abuse, domestic violence, employment, and basic needs. DESIGN: A field evaluation with repeated measures at 6 and 12 months on an intent-to-treat sample of 529 women conducted in 11 selected sites across the country. There were significant improvements shown in substance use and family and social functioning by the 6-month point, and additional improvements in employment by the 12-month point. By 12 months, more than 46% were abstinent from alcohol and other drugs, and 30% were employed at least part-time. There were only modest improvements shown in the medical and psychiatric status of these women. These preliminary findings suggest that site-level interagency coordination and program-level case management were associated with improvements in the targeted areas as predicted by the model. Future work will require a more closely specified, manual-guided form of the intervention plus the inclusion of control groups and cost measures to fully evaluate the cost benefits from the final form of the intervention.     

Adolescents' Plans for Family Formation: Is Parental Socialization Important?

This study examines adolescents' plans for family formation (marriage and parenthood) and the congruence between their plans and their mothers' expectations and behaviors within these spheres. Using log‐linear and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to analyze data from the National Survey of Children (N= 724 ), this study addresses mechanisms of family socialization (e.g., modeling and defining influence) informed by social learning and symbolic interactionist theories. It also reveals whether and how these mechanisms vary according to gender. Results reveal that family factors best predict children's plans, although peer groups also may be important. In addition, defining influence is stronger than modeling influence.     

Beauty is in the in-group of the beholded: Intergroup differences in the perceived attractiveness of leaders

Physical attractiveness is most commonly presumed to be an exogenous characteristic that influences people's feelings, perceptions, and behavior across myriad types of relationships. We investigate the opposite prediction in which feelings toward other people influence the perceptions of others' attractiveness. Focusing specifically on subordinates' perceptions of leaders of in-groups and out-groups, we examine whether group membership moderates familiarity in relation to ratings of physical attractiveness. Studies 1 and 2 show that subordinates rate the leaders of their in-groups as significantly more physically attractive than comparably familiar out-group leaders. Our findings have relevance for understanding the interactive roles of physical attractiveness within contemporary organizational environments and help to account for variance in interpersonal perceptions on the basis of group membership. In contrast with research traditions that treat physical attractiveness as a static trait, our findings highlight the importance of group membership as a lens for perceiving familiar leaders' physical attractiveness.     

Student well-being: Are they better off now?

Past and present well-being of university students from Canada and the United States are compared. Ratings for the domains of health, recreation, self-esteem, and education decreased significantly between the 1984 measures and the 1992 measures. Canadian students generally rated the domains lower than did students from the United States. Self-discrepancy measures tended to decrease and hope measures for the United States students indicated less hopefulness now than in 1984. In general, student perceptions of well-being seem poorer now than in the past.A path analysis revealed that MDT predicted 39 percent of the variance for satisfaction and 45 percent for happiness. Empirical support is provided for most of the hypothesized paths and for self esteem and social support as conditioners of well-being. The results are consistent with cultural convergence and theories of well-being that incorporate both actual world changes and individual perception of those changes.     

Social capital and lifelong learning

Social capital and lifelong learning have each been centralto government policy concerns in Britain and both have beencentrally relevant to policy debates on regeneration, and developmentmore broadly. There have been widespread assumptions about theconnections between     

Allowing for heterogeneity in the decomposition of measures of inequality in health*

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the GHQ measure of psychological well-being taken from the British Household Panel Survey. The results suggest that there is an important degree of heterogeneity in the association of health to explanatory variables across birth cohorts and genders which, in turn, accounts for a substantial percentage of the inequality in observed health.*Data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) were supplied by the ESRC Data Archive. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Archive bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. This chapter derives from the project “The dynamics of income, health and inequality over the lifecycle” (known as the ECuity III Project), which is funded in part by the European Community's Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources programme (contract QLK6-CT-2002-02297) and the project “La dinámica del estado de salud y los factores socieconómicos a lo largo del ciclo vital. Implicaciones para las políticas públicas”, which is supported by the Fundación BBVA.