Funder‐initiated integration

The active role of funders in organizational restructuring and consolidation is becoming a more common area of study, because more funders—private and government funders alike—are moving in the direction of encouraging funded agencies to explore new strategies such as mergers and integrations. This research focuses on funder‐initiated nonprofit integration and explores the challenges and strategies demonstrated by a government grantor and nine funded agencies as they planned and developed a management service organization. This was an action research study, whereby all parties participated as co‐researchers to examine the integration challenges and the partnership strategies used to move the integration process forward.     

Why adult children return home

This article examines the question of why more young adults are living with their parents. The expectation of the 1960s and 1970s that grown children establish separate residence, even before marriage, began to erode in the 1980s. We asked a small, convenience sample of parents and coresident adult children to respond to two possible interpretations of the trend: (1) that children return home due to economic hardship, or (2) that children return home because they feel entitled to a particular standard of living. Parents and children concluded that economic factors drive adult children home again, but few of the adult children in this study had come home because of genuine economic hardship.     

A comparison of objective and subjective measures of clinical competence

The purpose of this study was to determine if objective performance measures from a simulated patient practical examination were related to faculty subjective assessments of surgery students' performance. Another purpose was to determine if those students performing well on a simulated patient practical examination were the same students awarded honor ratings by faculty. Faculty ratings of students (n = 72) on history taking ability, physical exam skills, problem identification, use of investigations, problem integration, patient management, and patient relations skills were correlated with objective measures on these same criteria achieved on a practical exam employing three simulated patient cases. Correlations were also calculated to study the relationship between practical exam scores and honor rating recipients. Results indicated significant relationships between faculty subjective ratings and practical exam outcomes on all practical examination skills except physical exam skills and patient management skills. Findings also indicated the performance of honor students on the practical examination was significantly better than non-honor students on two skills: history-taking and patient relations. The implications of these research findings are discussed.     

A remark on a social choice problem

If preferences are continuous monotone complete preorders, then there is a continuous social choice aggregation rule which respects unanimity and is anonymous. The simple proof of this result involves a straightforward application of well-known properties of the closed convergence topology.     

HOW ARE FAMILY‐RESPONSIVE WORKPLACE ARRANGEMENTS FAMILY FRIENDLY?

Family-responsive workplace arrangements, including schedule flexibility, reduced hours, and workplace social support, are often touted as important to employed parents' abilities to balance the simultaneous demands involved in work and childrearing. Empirical evidence regarding this supposition has most often focused on employed parents' perceptions of work-family incompatibility, leaving little understanding of (1) which arrangements are associated with parenting and children's well-being and (2) the process through which these arrangements may be related to these aspects of family life. A stress perspective on the work-family interface suggests that work-family arrangements might be related to parenting and children through the mechanisms of parents' psychological well-being. I use data from a regional sample of employed mothers to investigate this proposition. Findings from path models show that most relationships between arrangements and parenting are direct and unmediated by mothers' well-being and that work-family arrangements are only indirectly associated with children's socioemotional well-being.     

Bayesian incorporation of repeated measurements in logistic discrimination

A common problem in medical statistics is the discrimination between two groups on the basis of diagnostic information. Information on patient characteristics is used to classify individuals into one of two groups: diseased or disease-free. This classification is often with respect to a particular disease. This discrimination has two probabilistic components: (1) the discrimination is not without error, and (2) in many cases the a priori chance of disease can be estimated. Logistic models (Cox 1970; Anderson 1972) provide methods for incorporating both of these components. The a posteriori probability of disease may be estimated for a patient on the basis of both current measurement of patient characteristics and prior information. The parameters of the logistic model may be estimated on the basis of a calibration trial. In practice, not one but several sets of measurements of one characteristic of the patient may be made on a questionable case. These measurements typically are correlated; they are far from independent. How should these correlated measurements be used? This paper presents a method for incorporating several sets of measurements in the classification of a case.     

Political Generations and the Contemporary Women's Movement*

Most traditional work by political sociologists conceives of social movement activity and politics as pertaining only to the public world and political activity as inherently masculine. Women are virtually invisible in these accounts. That the nature of political and social change is shaped by the organization of gender is a fact obscured in the conceptualizations typically employed. One such concept is political generation. Virtually no scholarly work has been done to analyze women in terms of political generations. Political generations are taken as sex-neutral phenomena with no hint that the organization of politics is based in the social organization of gender. Indeed, perhaps the major assumption of generational analysis, that generations are formed during youth and its accompanying period of rebellion and change, has not been subject to sustained scrutiny; this model may well capture the male, but possibly not, the female experience. Nevertheless, the generational model might be usefully applied to an understanding of the growth and transformation of the women's movement. When women are put at the center of inquiry, the notion of political generations takes on new meanings, and it raises questions about who, how, and when social groups come to experience similar perceptions and understandings of reality. This analysis begins with a selective summary of the assumptions and directions of generational analysis in social science. Contemporary media use of generational analysis follows with an eye to the ways in which media representation has shaped some women's movement dialogue. Feminist generational thinking is explored as it attempts to account for the history of the women's movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and for the relations of young and old in the contemporary movement. Possible directions for further research and reformulation are suggested.     

Household composition choices of older unmarried women

This article extends previous research on the household composition of older unmarried women, using a statistical model that treats each of a woman's surviving children as a distinct potential provider of a shared household. Additional possibilities--living alone, living with other nuclear-family relatives, and living with others--are also recognized, providing a varied range of household-structure opportunities for older women. The approach allows us to identify individual child attributes associated with the propensity to coreside with the older unmarried mother. The results confirm earlier findings regarding the importance of income, age, and disability status as determinants of the household composition of older women. We find, however, that unmarried children, especially sons, are more likely to share a household with an elderly mother than are married children. Working reduces the likelihood that a married daughter will live with her older mother. Overall, the findings suggest that the attributes, more so than the sheer numbers, of living children influence the household structure of their mothers.     

Anger in black and white: race, alienation, and anger

Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey and the 1973 Chicago Crowding Study, we test the hypotheses that African Americans feel and express more anger than whites, that sense of control (versus powerlessness) lessens anger and mistrust increases anger, and that these indicators of alienation affect anger differently for African Americans and whites. We find that when age and gender are controlled, African Americans neither feel nor express more anger than whites, despite having a lower average sense of control and higher mistrust. This is partly because the effects of sense of control and mistrust on anger differ by race. Sense of control reduces feelings of anger and anger expression more for African Americans than whites. Mistrust increases feelings of anger for whites, but not African Americans. The results provide further evidence that, in the stress process, social structural location may moderate the effects of "detriments" and "resources" on emotional upset.     

The robustness and optimality of response surface designs

Recent work on extended optimality criteria for robust designs is applied to response surface problems. Methods of calculation are described and the criteria illustrated with several examples. The extended criteria discriminate among designs equivalent by other criteria.