Premarital childbearing in Thamaga Village,Botswana

This paper examines the diminished importance of marriage as a setting for childbearing in Botswana. It uses qualitative data gathered in Thamaga Village during 1995 to explore the cultural basis of this development. Marriage practices and traditional attitudes to marriage, childbearing and sexual relations are reviewed, and factors identified as having undermined them are discussed. Rational adaptation theory and social disorganization theory then provide a framework within which forces encouraging premarital childbearing in Thamaga are investigated. Both theories are found to be useful. Especially where women are older, premarital childbearing is often strategic and goaldirected, providing a sense of self-worth, labour and old-age security. In many other cases, however, it reflects spontaneous sexual activity generated by the undermining of social controls and inauspicious economic circumstances. Societal attitudes to premarital motherhood become less condemnatory after about age 25, as women are judged to have waited long enough for marriage.     

Forming relationships in Australia: Qualitative insights into a process important to human wellbeing

Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted during 2002–03 for the Australian Family Formation Decisions (AFFD) Project, this paper probes the relationship formation experiences of 115 women, men and couples of family-forming age living in eastern Australia. Contemporary relationship formation is characterized by a mixture of ambivalence and resignation to having limited control over the process on the one hand (if it happens it happens), and urgency on the other, especially among women seeking to fulfil maternal ambitions in their thirties after prioritizing other things earlier in their adult lives. For most the process of partnering involves trial and error, with timing — finding someone whose expectations of a relationship match one's own — posing a major challenge. It gives rise to a common phenomenon, the ‘too soon syndrome’, where relationships with many positive attributes are abandoned because one party perceives the other as too keen to ‘settle down’, and/or himself or herself as not ready to do so. The paper also examines impediments to partnering, including traditional ones like shyness; negative trial-and-error experiences; the demands of study and career establishment; pursuit of agendas emphasizing travel and enjoyment; sole parenthood; and parental marriage breakdown. A framework is provided by Beck's (1992) concept of reflexive modernization, and his associated proposition that life has become highly individualized with an emphasis on creating do-it-yourself biographies.     

Sexual Behavior and Heavy Episodic Drinking Across the Transition to Adulthood: Differences by College Attendance

Despite a growing literature on college students’ sexual behaviors, little is known about how sexual behaviors, and their associations with alcohol, differ for college and noncollege attenders, and whether these patterns represent changes during college or an extension of pre‐college behaviors. This paper applied time‐varying effect models to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine (1) prevalence of four sexual behaviors from ages 14 to 24 and (2) how their association with frequent heavy episodic drinking varied across these ages for college and noncollege attenders. Nonattenders have higher prevalence of all sexual behaviors than college attenders across most ages; however, the association between heavy episodic drinking and sexual behaviors is stronger for college attenders during ages 18–20.     

Changes in Parent,Sibling, and Peer Support During the Transition to Young Adulthood

Longitudinal trajectories of parent, sibling, and peer support during the transition to young adulthood were compared among 600 participants (51.1% female) from Asian, European, and Latin American backgrounds. Participants completed questionnaires at 12th grade, 2 and 4 years after high school. Results indicated that parent support increased across this period for participants from European backgrounds but remained stable for participants from Asian and Latin American backgrounds. Peer and sibling support remained relatively stable. Supports had specific implications for self‐esteem and depressive mood. On average, young adults with higher levels of support reported greater expectations to reciprocate support within the family. Together, these findings highlight the changing dynamics of family and friends during the transition to young adulthood.     

The Fate of Obamacare: Racial Resentment,Ethnocentrism and Attitudes about Healthcare Reform

Health care has been a contentious issue in American politics for decades, and scholars are beginning to understand the reasons behind public support for, and opposition to, healthcare reform. Using national survey data, we measure the impact of various racial attitudes, including Racial Resentment and Ethnocentrism, on white support for healthcare reform. We measure participants’ attitudes across a range of important dimensions of healthcare reform and examine a randomized experiment with a control group that frames legislation as “recent” healthcare reform and a treatment condition that frames legislation as “President Obama’s” healthcare reform. The findings demonstrate that racial attitudes and Ethnocentrism continue to play a role in both support and opposition to healthcare reform.     

A “Subterranean Agenda”? Racial Attitudes, Presidential Evaluations, and Tea Party Membership

Recent research suggests that fiscally conservative policy preferences and disapproval of President Obama are significant predictors of Tea Party membership (Maxwell and Parent 2012). Unfortunately, however, we know very little about the reasons why Tea Party members so aggressively disapprove of President Obama. While Tea Party members adamantly deny that President Obama’s race plays any role in their motivations, their critics argue that racial attitudes are a primary reason why individuals choose to join the movement. In this article, using national survey data conducted by Knowledge Networks (n = 1649), we explore the possibility that three unique racial attitudes have been influential in the establishment of the Tea Party. Specifically, we investigate the role of symbolic racism, racial stereotypes, and ethnocentrism as predictors of self-identified Tea Party membership among whites.     

The Use of Incarceration in Canada: A Test of Political and Social Threat Explanations on the Variation in Prison Admissions across Canadian Provinces, 2001–2010

Recent scholarship has indicated that political and ethnic threat theories—which maintain that the use of prison is not only determined by the extent of crime in society but also by various features related to power, ideology, and access to resources—provide powerful accounts as to why the use of punishment varies within and between societies. However, no study to date has tested these theories within Canada, a country in which such theories are quite plausible. This study begins to fill this void by assessing these theoretical claims using a pooled time series analysis of the variation in imprisonment rates across Canadian provinces from the years 2001 to 2010. After accounting for several measures including charge rates, the results show that Canadian incarceration rates are largely driven by ethnic threat. The size of the Aboriginal and visible minority populations across each province are the most significant determinants of the variation in punishment. Furthermore, we find a nonlinear relationship consistent with a political version of the threat hypothesis. Results, however, do not support political accounts which stress the power of right‐wing parties or a conservative public.     

Indigenous fertility in Australia: updating Alan Gray

Journal of Population Research - Although he was not the first scholar to investigate it, there is little question that the Ph.D. research of Alan Gray, completed in 1983, represented a landmark in...     

Bayesian Estimation of Stochastic Discount Factors

This article provides a Bayesian method of estimating the marginal posterior distributions for stochastic discount factors associated with observed asset returns. These estimates can be used to provide measures of fit for asset-pricing models and to identify broad features of the characteristics that should be explained. These measures of fit can be used to supplement model-evaluation exercises based on Hansen–Jagannathan bounds