An Annotated Bibliography of Verbal Behavior Scholarship Published Outside of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior: 2014

This annotated bibliography summarizes journal articles on verbal behavior published outside of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, the primary journal for scholarship in this area. Seventeen such articles were published in 2014 and are annotated as a resource for practitioners, researchers, and educators.     

Modernization and the Demographic Transition: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses of a Revised Model

Abstract

We specify a revised model of the demographic transition which accounts for national fertility levels and changes over the past two decades. The model includes cultural, geographic, demographic and family planning program variables, in addition to a measure of national socio-economic modernization. Using crude birth rates for 117 countries, we operationalize and then apply the revised model to 1974 rates, and then test a longitudinal model of 1955–59 to 1974 change in rates. A final model for 81 less developed nations from the original set of 117 countries includes a measure of family planning program effort. Including this highly significant measure in a model of 1955–59 to 1974 change results in further evidence favoring modification of the traditional demographic transition model. Implications for the future course of fertility in underdeveloped countries are discussed.     

Housing hardship and energy insecurity among native-born and immigrant low-income families with children in the United States

The costs for rent and utilities account for the largest share of living expenses, yet these two critical dimensions of material hardship have seldom been examined concurrently in population-based studies. This paper employs multivariate statistical analysis using American Community Survey data to demonstrate the relative risk ratio of low-income renter-occupied households with children experiencing ‘rent burden', ‘energy insecurity', or a ‘double burden’ as opposed to no burden. Findings suggest that low-income households are more likely to experience these economic hardships in general but that specific groups are disproportionately burdened in different ways. For instance, whereas immigrants are more likely to experience rental burden, they are less likely to experience energy insecurity and are also spared from the double burden. In contrast, native-born African Americans are more likely than all other groups to experience the double burden. These results may be driven by the housing stock available to certain groups due to racial residential segregation, decisions regarding the quality of housing low-income householders are able to afford, as well as home-country values, such as modest living and energy conservation practices, among immigrant families. This paper also points to important policy gaps in safety net benefits related to housing and energy targeting low-income households.     

The Mother‐Citizen and the Working Girl: First‐Wave Feminist Citizenship Claims in Canada and Discursive Opportunities for Twenty‐First Century Childcare Policy

L'État providence Canadien est déséquilibré: leader mondial dans certains domaines de l'investissement social—plus particulièrement en soins de santé et enseignement supérieur—il traîne dans d'autres domaines de la dépense d'aide sociale, y compris les politiques de garde d'enfants. Nous constatons qu'aujourd'hui la résistance dans la plupart des régions du Canada à la politique de garde d'enfants universel a des racines historiques profondes. Elle est de fait intégré dans le cadre même du bien‐être social canadien: le contrat de citoyenneté sociale. Nous employons une approche de “bas en haut” sur l'état du bien‐être en nous concentrant sur la façon dont les acteurs collectifs, en particulier, les féministes de la première vague et leurs contemporains au sein des organisations du mouvement ouvrier, ont encadrées et caractérisé la citoyenneté sociale féminine; Nous constatons que l'exclusion de l'adhésion des femmes employées tronque les possibilités discursives par lesquelles des revendications pour des provisions universelles de bien‐être sociale pourraient être apportées. Canada's welfare state is lopsided: while leading the world in some areas of social investment—most notably health care and higher education—it is a laggard in other areas of social welfare spending, including childcare policies. We find that policy resistance to universal childcare in most regions of Canada today has deep historical roots and is, indeed, embedded into the very framework of the Canadian welfare state: the social citizenship contract. We employ a “bottom‐up” perspective on the welfare state focusing on how collective actors, in particular, first‐wave feminists and their contemporaries within labor movement organizations, framed and characterized female social citizenship in ways that excluded employed women from full membership and, in this, truncated discursive opportunities by which claims for universal welfare state provisions could be made.     

Lag Length Selection for Unit Root Tests in the Presence of Nonstationary Volatility

A number of recent papers have focused on the problem of testing for a unit root in the case where the driving shocks may be unconditionally heteroskedastic. These papers have, however, taken the lag length in the unit root test regression to be a deterministic function of the sample size, rather than data-determined, the latter being standard empirical practice. We investigate the finite sample impact of unconditional heteroskedasticity on conventional data-dependent lag selection methods in augmented Dickey–Fuller type regressions and propose new lag selection criteria which allow for unconditional heteroskedasticity. Standard lag selection methods are shown to have a tendency to over-fit the lag order under heteroskedasticity, resulting in significant power losses in the (wild bootstrap implementation of the) augmented Dickey–Fuller tests under the alternative. The proposed new lag selection criteria are shown to avoid this problem yet deliver unit root tests with almost identical finite sample properties as the corresponding tests based on conventional lag selection when the shocks are homoskedastic.     

A simplified proof of a theorem on the difference of the moore–penrose inverses of two positive semi–difinte matrices

Simplified proofs are given of a standard result that establishes positive semi–definiteness of the difference of the inverses of two non–singular matrices, and of the extension of this result by Milliken and Akdeniz (1977) to the difference of the Moore–Penrose inverse of two singular matrices.