Religious Homogamy and Marital Quality: Historical and Generational Patterns, 1980 – 1997

Despite significant social changes in the past 50 years, research continues to find a strong and enduring link between religious homogamy and marital quality. Yet, research has not explicitly examined whether this link has changed over time or over generations. To address historical and generational trends, I use national, longitudinal data collected between 1980 and 1997 that represents 3,211 respondents in the parental and offspring generations and 2 measures each of marital quality and religious homogamy. The findings show that the relationship between religious homogamy and marital quality weakened significantly between 1980 and 1997 from intragenerational change and generational replacement. The homogamy–marital quality link was weaker in both generations partly because of the increasing relative influence of gender, work, and family issues. Additionally, a decline in perceptions of religious authority has altered the religion–marital quality connection, though mostly among the younger generation. Even so, religiously homogamous couples still report higher marital quality.     

Beyond the dyad: Including the father in separation-individuation

As a result of changes in family role distribution generated by the Women's Movement, many fathers are participating more directly in the care of their infants and young children. To be responsive to this change in the ecology of parenting, clinicians must reconsider and update traditional formulations about fatherhood toward, an expanded theoretical perspective for learning about and helping families. Using Mahler's phases of separation-individuation as an organizing conceptual framework, the author, reviews recent theory and empirical findings regarding the role of the father in preoedipal development and discusses some implications for social work practice.     

Organizational Variety in Regulatory Governance: An Agenda for a Comparative Investigation of OECD Countries

An analysis of organizational variety in regulatory governance must recognize that, contrary to the classical agency model, regulatory functions are commonly diffused among a number of public and sometimes private bodies. A regimes approach assists in understanding the ways in which diffuse regulatory power is exercised and in identifying central issues for analysis. In this article, six parameters for classifying organizations in regulatory regimes are addressed: ownership, legal form, funding, functions, powers, and governance level. An exploration of these parameters is suggestive of novel approaches to questions of independence and accountability. With wide diffusion of regulatory power, interdependence is as much a hallmark of the regulatory state as the application of any strong independence doctrine. Accountability may be better conceived as consisting both of formal judicial and political mechanisms and of informal day-to-day ways in which those exercising regulatory power have to account to others co-located within the space of a particular regulatory regime.     

The role of interagency collaboration for substance-abusing families involved with child welfare

Meeting the needs of families involved with the child welfare system because of a substance abuse issue remains a challenge for child welfare practitioners. In order to improve services to these families, there has been an increasing focus on improving collaboration between child welfare, treatment providers, and the court systems. This paper presents the results from qualitative interviews with 104 representatives of these three systems that explore how the collaborative process works to benefit families, as well as the barriers and supports for building successful collaborations. Results indicate that collaboration has at least three major functions: building shared value systems, improving communication, and providing a "team" of support. Each of these leads to different kinds of benefits for families as well as providers and has different implications for building successful collaborative interventions. Despite these putative benefits, providers within each system, however, continue to struggle to build effective collaborations, and they face such issues as deeply ingrained mistrust and continued lack of understanding of other systems' values, goals, and perspectives. Challenges that remain for successful collaborations are discussed.