A FORMAL EXPLICATION OF THE CONCEPT OF FAMILY HOMEOSTASIS

The concept of family homeostasis and related concepts such as family rules and family feedback mechanisms came under heavy fire in a recent article by Dell (1982). It is not easy to evaluate the arguments brought forth by Dell, since the concepts in question seem to have never been formally explicated. Most of this article is devoted to an attempt to develop such a formal explication. Dell's arguments are then examined one by one in the light of this explication, and most of them are shown to be mistaken. His main conclusion, that the concept of homeostasis should be replaced by a concept of coherence, is rejected.     

The Impacts of State Surveillance on Political Assembly and Association: A Socio-Legal Analysis

Based on group interviews conducted in 2006 that included 71 social justice organizations, this paper analyzes the impact of surveillance on the exercise of assembly and association rights. We link these protected legal activities with analytic frameworks from social movements scholarship in order to further a socio-legal conception of political violence against social movements.

Assessing the predictive value of a binary surrogate for a binary true endpoint based on the minimum probability of a prediction error

The individual causal association (ICA) has recently been introduced as a metric of surrogacy in a causal‐inference framework. The ICA is defined on the unit interval and quantifies the association between the individual causal effect on the surrogate (ΔS) and true (ΔT) endpoint. In addition, the ICA offers a general assessment of the surrogate predictive value, taking value 1 when there is a deterministic relationship between ΔT and ΔS, and value 0 when both causal effects are independent. However, when one moves away from the previous two extreme scenarios, the interpretation of the ICA becomes challenging. In the present work, a new metric of surrogacy, the minimum probability of a prediction error (PPE), is introduced when both endpoints are binary, ie, the probability of erroneously predicting the value of ΔT using ΔS. Although the PPE has a more straightforward interpretation than the ICA, its magnitude is bounded above by a quantity that depends on the true endpoint. For this reason, the reduction in prediction error (RPE) attributed to the surrogate is defined. The RPE always lies in the unit interval, taking value 1 if prediction is perfect and 0 if ΔS conveys no information on ΔT. The methodology is illustrated using data from two clinical trials and a user‐friendly R package Surrogate is provided to carry out the validation exercise.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Increasing Inequality in Parent Incomes and Children’s Schooling</Emphasis>

Income inequality and the achievement test score gap between high- and low-income children increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. This article investigates the demographic (family income, mother’s education, family size, two-parent family structure, and age of mother at birth) underpinnings of the growing income-based gap in schooling using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Across 31 cohorts, we find that increases in the income gap between high- and low-income children account for approximately three-quarters of the increasing gap in completed schooling, one-half of the gap in college attendance, and one-fifth of the gap in college graduation. We find no consistent evidence of increases in the estimated associations between parental income and children’s completed schooling. Increasing gaps in the two-parent family structures of high- and low-income families accounted for relatively little of the schooling gap because our estimates of the (regression-adjusted) associations between family structure and schooling were surprisingly small for much of our accounting period. On the other hand, increasing gaps in mother’s age at the time of birth accounts for a substantial portion of the increasing schooling gap: mother’s age is consistently predictive of children’s completed schooling, and the maternal age gap for children born into low- and high-income families increased considerably over the period.     

Ergonomics and usability of children interfaces: Spore®, the case study

This study supports itself in ergonomic concepts and usability criteria by prioritizing the identification and correction of problems found during the interaction of children with projected interfaces for them and left from the cognitive, interactional and interfacial difficulties caused by the excesses of color, elements and animation in sites and games, between them the difficulty of recognition of the information during the interaction with the elements of grid of the interface. The results of the methodology had proven that 78.38% of the 37 children got so absorbed by the game and forgot to fulfill their tasks, at least partially, and that the application of the supported ergonomic beddings in usability criteria is imperative. It is relevant to point out that the projetual activity of the game is centered in the user, the child, whose behavior is distinct and particular. Points that had been disclosed that had passed unobserved by the involved adults in this project, and that they had displayed the unappropriateness of some screens of the Spore? to the etária band due to the ambiguity of the game, besides, the children had been sensible to the clarity in some screens and had passed for unnecessary situations of stress.     

How Teen Mothers Are Faring Under Welfare Reform

We examine socioeconomic and psychological well-being among 88 low-income minor mothers. Half of the young mothers receive cash welfare assistance and face new policy mandates regarding coresidence status and school attendance. Although most appear to be "complying" with the requirements of the new welfare rules and are satisfied with their current living arrangements, many are faring poorly on dimensions of psychological well-being and life stress. Receipt of cash welfare is not a significant correlate of school success, parenting stress, or economic strain. Teen coresidence with their mothers does not appear to buffer against the experience of child care problems, depressive symptoms, or domestic violence. We discuss the implications of the results forresearch, policy, and services for teen parent families.     

Dilemmas of an Economic Theorist

What on earth are economic theorists like me trying to accomplish? This paper discusses four dilemmas encountered by an economic theorist: The dilemma of absurd conclusions: Should we abandon a model if it produces absurd conclusions or should we regard a model as a very limited set of assumptions that will inevitably fail in some contexts? The dilemma of responding to evidence: Should our models be judged according to experimental results? The dilemma of modelless regularities: Should models provide the hypothesis for testing or are they simply exercises in logic that have no use in identifying regularities? The dilemma of relevance: Do we have the right to offer advice or to make statements that are intended to influence the real world?     

Is there a moral economy of state formation? Religious minorities and repertoires of regime integration in the Middle East and Western Europe, 600–1614

This article asks how state formation processes informed the normative frameworks of late-Medieval and early-Modern Latin European and Muslim Middle Eastern regimes. The question at hand is not why pre-Modern regimes discriminated against religious minorities (as well as other groups) during the pre-Modern period, but why Western European states consistently engaged in mass expulsions of their non-Christian subjects from the late thirteenth century onward and the neighboring states of the Middle East did not. Rather than addressing these peculiar policies as a function of religion, culture, or law the article adopts a comparative, contextual method. With the aid of Charles Tilly’s theoretical perspectives it isolates critical variables in pre-Modern Middle Eastern state formation. These variables are then used to shed light on the circumstances and relationships that led to Latin Europe’s mass expulsions of Jews and Muslims between 1290 and 1614.