Experiential Wellbeing Data from the American Time Use Survey: Comparisons with Other Methods and Analytic Illustrations with Age and Income

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in self-reported measures of wellbeing by official statisticians and by researchers in the social sciences. This paper considers data from a wellbeing supplement to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which parsed the previous day into episodes. Respondents provided ratings of five experiential wellbeing adjectives (happiness, stress, tiredness, sadness, and pain) for each of three randomly selected episodes. Because the ATUS wellbeing module has not received very much attention, in this paper we provide the reader with details about the features of these data and our approach to analyzing the data (e.g., weighting considerations), and then illustrate the applicability of these data to current issues. Specifically, we examine the association of age and income with all of the experiential wellbeing adjective in the ATUS. Results from the ATUS wellbeing module were broadly consistent with earlier findings on age, but did not confirm all earlier findings between income and wellbeing. We conclude that the ATUS, with its measurement of time use, specific activities, and hedonic experience in a nationally representative survey, offers a unique opportunity to incorporate time use into the burgeoning field of wellbeing research.     

Social Work and the Natural Environment: Embedding Content Across Curricula

Social work is a profession focused on people within their environments. This is reflected in codes of ethics, where our shared mandate is to work towards individual wellbeing and social change. Recently, social work literature has promoted green and eco-social work, drawing on climate change science, notions of expanded and future justice, knowledge of the link between health and the environment, and principles of deep ecology. However, if social workers are to take up their place in a rapidly changing, globalised world, rife with environmental concerns, their education must prepare them to do this. One way of doing this is to embed curriculum on social work in relation to the natural environment in already existing units. This paper describes two examples of how this could be done based on the authors’ experiences from their respective universities.

IMPLICATIONS

• It is incumbent on social work to respond to the mounting evidence related to the environmental crisis.

• Social work is well placed in terms of theory, values, and skills to lead the way in developing an eco-social paradigm of potential relevance across disciplines.

• Social work educators need to educate students about emerging issues, such as environmental degradation. Embedding material in already existing courses, as per examples provided in this paper, provides one way of doing this.

     

Welfare Recipients or Workers? Contesting the Workfare State in New York City

This paper addresses how New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrow focus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation.     

Spousal Interdependence in Turnover Decisions: The Case of Israel's Medical Sector Employees

Gender-related labor behavior traditionally has been sensitive to and symptomatic of changes in the labor force and the social structure. Two developments in family life call into question the traditional gender model of work behavior, which posits the family versus job dichotomy: (a) the greater share of economic responsibilities assumed by female spouses, and (b) the greater male involvement in family life within married couple families. A multivariate model that encompasses demographics, work conditions, and family constraints was regressed on the actual turnover behavior of male and female spouses. The analysis reveals that male and female respondents differ in the importance they assign to employment conditions and work attitudes, but they do not differ in the importance they assign to the other spouse's employment and family responsibilities when a turnover decision is considered. These findings support the notion of spousal interdependence in turnover decisions. This interdependence nevertheless is asymmetrical, since the turnover antecedents are caused by the impact of different predictors for men and women.     

The Dearing Report and Students with Disabilities and Learning Difficulties

The movement to promote improved levels of participation from groups under-represented in higher education which occurred between 1980 and 1990 neglected disabled people. The position has been addressed by the national higher education funding councils since 1992 and progress has been made. Therefore, it was surprising to find that, whilst certain social groups were highlighted, nothing was said about disabled people in the terms of reference of Sir Ron Dearing's National Committee of Inquiry. This paper describes attempts made to inform and influence the Committee. Next, it considers the Report itself. First, the recommendations for future policy which are directed specifically towards disabled people are discussed; secondly, the potential implications for disabled people of the general recommendations are explored; and thirdly, the supplementary report on students with disabilities is reviewed. The conclusion provides a brief overview of developments since the Report's publication.     

Some Properties of the Liang-Zeger Method Applied to Clustered Binary Regression

The Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) method popularized by Liang and Zeger provides a very general method for fitting regression models to observations that occur in clusters. Features of the method are the specification of a 'working correlation' (a guess at the true correlation structure of the data) which is used to improve efficiency in estimating the regression coefficients, and the 'information sandwich' which provides a way of consistently estimating the standard errors of the estimated regression coefficients even if (as we might expect) the working correlation is wrong. This paper develops asymptotic expressions for the bias and efficiency both of the regression coefficient estimates and of the sandwich estimate, and uses them to study the behaviour of the estimates.
It looks at the effect of the choice of the working correlation on the estimate and also examines the effect of different cluster sizes and different degrees of correlation between the covariates. The performance of these methods is found to be excellent, particularly when the degree of correlation in the responses and covariates is small to moderate.     

Transient probability functions of finite birth–death processes with catastrophes

A representation of the transient probability functions of finite birth–death processes (with or without catastrophes) as a linear combination of exponential functions is derived using a recursive, Cayley–Hamilton approach. This method of solution allows practitioners to solve for these transient probability functions by reducing the problem to three calculations: determining eigenvalues of the Q$Q$-matrix, raising the Q$Q$-matrix to an integer power and solving a system of linear equations. The approach avoids Laplace transforms and permits solution of a particular transition probability function from state i$i$ to j$j$ without determining all such functions.     

Independence in multi-way contingency tables: S.N. Roy's breakthroughs and later developments

In the mid-1950s S.N. Roy and his students contributed two landmark articles to the contingency table literature [Roy, S.N., Kastenbaum, M.A., 1956. On the hypothesis of no “interaction” in a multiway contingency table. Ann. Math. Statist. 27, 749–757; Roy, S.N., Mitra, S.K., 1956. An introduction to some nonparametric generalizations of analysis of variance and multivariate analysis. Biometrika 43, 361–376]. The first article generalized concepts of interaction from 2×2×2$2\times 2\times 2$ contingency tables to three-way tables of arbitrary size and to larger tables. In the second article, which is the source of our primary focus, various notions of independence were clarified for three-way contingency tables, Roy's union–intersection test was applied to construct chi-squared tests of hypotheses about the structure of such tables, and the chi-squared statistics were shown not to depend on the distinction between response and explanatory variables. This work pre-dates by many years later developments that expressed such results in the context of loglinear models. It pre-dates by a quarter century the development of graphical models. We summarize the main results in these key articles and discuss the connection between them and the later developments of loglinear modeling and of graphical modeling. We also mention ways in which these later developments have themselves been further generalized.