The effect of respondent's kinship position on reported levels of integrational contact: USA and Japan

Intergenerational relationships are a topic of general concern to social scientists because of the importance of the family for individual's well-being, especially in times of crisis. Hence, a considerable amount of research on relationships between parents and their adult children has been published in a broad array of social science journals. Most of this research examines intergenerational relationships from the perspective of only one generation and implicitly assumes that we would get the same results if we were to examine the relationships from the point of view of other family members. In societies where there are strong norms regarding kin contact, this assumption is likely to be invalid. This research examines reported levels of face-to-face contact among kin in the USA and Japan, and tests whether these reports are systematically different for respondents in some kinship positions than in others. The results show that norms favoring patrilineal contact in Japan can produce reporting bias. In Japan, married daughters tend to underreport levels of contact with their parents. In the USA, children-in-law report lower levels of visiting.     

Framing the Problem of Sex Trafficking

News media play an important role in explaining the issue of sex trafficking and may influence discourse among the public and policymakers. Understanding the ways that mass media address sex trafficking has implications for the news industry and the global status of women. This study, a quantitative content analysis, analyzed news coverage of sex trafficking in major US newspapers to understand how the issue was framed during a year of coverage. Using Entman's typology to classify the function of frames, the study focused on how news coverage defined the problem of sex trafficking and identified the remedy. The study found that news coverage of trafficking was overwhelmingly framed as a crime issue (episodic not thematic) and proposed no remedies. Most news coverage favored official sources. Survivors of trafficking and their advocates were the least heard-from sources. The authors argue ultimately that if media are to fulfill their watchdog role where trafficking is concerned, a wider range of news frames and sources is needed.     

Inter-generational effects of disability benefits: evidence from Canadian social assistance programs

Individuals with disabilities face greater challenges in the labor market than able-bodied individuals, and a growing body of research is finding that their children also tend to have more developmental problems than the children of able-bodied parents. Can transfer payments help reduce this gap? In this paper, we present the first evidence on how parental disability benefits affect the well-being of children. Using changes in real benefits under ten disability benefit programs in Canada as an identification strategy and Statistics Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) as the data source on child outcomes, we find strong evidence that higher benefits lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, as measured by math scores in standardized tests, hyperactive symptoms, and emotional anxiety behavior. The effect is larger on children with a disabled mother than on those with a disabled father.     

Working Beyond the Traditional Retirement Age: The Influence of Health on Australia’s Older Workers

This article examines the relationship between health and workforce participation beyond the age of 65 years in Australia. This study found that people with a chronic health condition were less likely to be employed than those without a health condition (OR, 0.59; 95% CI [0.38, 0.92]). Among those with a chronic health condition, those in income quartile 2 (OR, 0.27; 95% CI [0.11, 0.67]) and 3 (OR, 0.38; 95% CI, [0.15–0.93]) were significantly less likely to be employed relative to those in income quartile 4. Older workers with a chronic health condition were less likely to work beyond the age of 65; however, among those with a chronic health condition, those with very high income and those with very low income were the most likely to keep working.     

‘She has like 4000 followers!’: the celebrification of self within school social networks.

Online social interaction has become integral to contemporary social life, adding new dimensions to how young people learn, interact, and perceive themselves and one another. This paper presents theoretical insights from a year-long ethnographic study within a Scottish secondary school, where participant observation and qualitative interviews were used to explain pupils’ informal social relationships. Here, pupils aged 11–18 constructed and negotiated a hyper-surveillanced social space within which many became (or strived to become) visible and ‘known’ amongst others and where online presentations of self were highly important. This facilitated a celebrity-esque culture amongst the pupil population whereby pupils learnt from and emulated macro celebrity culture and often framed social interactions as entertainment. Central to these practices, was a continual desire to ‘make gains in distinction’ by demonstrating high social status amongst peers. The paper explores the resulting implications for teaching, learning and pupil wellbeing within contemporary educational environments.     

Challenges to Aging in Place: Understanding Home Maintenance Difficulties

Age-related declines in capabilities may compromise older adults’ ability to maintain their homes, threatening successful aging in place. Structured interviews were conducted with 44 independently living older adults (mean age = 76.1, standard deviation = 4.7) to discuss difficult home maintenance tasks and how they managed those tasks. Solutions to managing difficulties were categorized as person-related or environment-related. The majority (85%) of responses were person-related solutions. An understanding of the specific challenges that older adults face in maintaining their homes can guide redesign efforts and interventions to effectively support older adults’ desire to age in place.     

Economic and other determinants of annual change in U.S. fertility: 1917-1976

Decomposition of fertility into its age, period, and cohort components demonstrates the empirical importance of age and period. Of the two, less is known about the period dimension. A new measure of fertility, specific to race and birth order, is used to estimate the effects of annual change in unemployment, the marriage and unemployment rate, as well as annual change in contraceptive sterilization and change in the proportion of couples adopting the more effective (pill and IUD) methods introduced in the early 1960s, are all important determinants of fertility change, but their impact varies greatly by birth order.     

Drought and disproportionate disease: an investigation of gendered vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS in less-developed nations

Environmental change and climate-related disasters are an under-examined factor impacting women’s health, globally. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, we conduct analyses examining if the HIV burden among women is higher in nations that experience suffering from droughts. Specifically, we posit that droughts, which typically impact more people and for greater lengths of time than other climate-related disasters, have a unique impact on women’s vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. We use a cross-national dataset of less-developed countries and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to explore and compare relationships between suffering from drought and total HIV prevalence and suffering from drought and women’s proportion of HIV cases. Overall, the results demonstrate that while droughts have an inconsistent impact on total HIV prevalence, suffering from drought significantly increases the proportion of HIV cases among women in comparison to men, net of the impact of common economic, social, cultural, and political predictors. The findings suggest that suffering from drought differentially impacts women’s health in less-developed countries, where a number of mechanisms, such as transactional sex or displacement, likely underlie the associations identified.