As Good as it Gets? A Life Course Perspective on Marital Quality

Marital relationships, like individuals, follow a developmental trajectory over time with ups and downs and gains and losses. We work from a life course perspective and use growth curve analysis to look at trajectories of change in marital quality over time. Although the tendency is for marital quality to decline over time, some groups begin with much higher levels of marital quality than others. Moreover, a number of life course and contextual factors can accelerate or slow this path of change. Our findings point to the importance of considering the multi-dimensionality of time (e.g., age, marital duration, the passage of years) as well as family transitions (e.g., having children, emptying or refilling the nest) in creating the meanings and experiences of marriage over time.     

Assessing the impact of planned social change

It is a special characteristic of all modern societies that we consciously decide on and plan projects designed to improve our social systems. It is our universal predicament that our projects do not always have their intended effects. Very probably we all share in the experience that often we cannot tell whether the project had any impact at all, so complex is the flux of historical changes that would have been going on anyway, and so many are the other projects that might be expected to modify the same indicators.It seems inevitable that in most countries this common set of problems, combined with the obvious relevance of social science research procedures, will have generated a methodology and methodological specialists focused on the problem of assessing the impact of planned social change. It is an assumption if this paper that, in spite of differences in the forms of government and approaches to social planning and problem-solving, much of this methodology can be usefully shared — that social project evaluation methodology is one of the fields of science that has enough universality to make scientific sharing mutually beneficial. As a part of this sharing, this paper reports on program impact assessment methodology as it is developing in the United States today.     

George Herbert Mead on Intelligent Social Reconstruction*

Many thinkers have discussed the possibility of intelligent social reconstruction; but few have examined the nature of such reconstruction as closely as did George Herbert Mead. This paper explores Mead's analysis through his understanding of human nature and intelligence, his discussion of value conflicts and the possibility of their resolution by means of the community, and his recognition of the need for popular commitment as a necessary condition for any wide-spread success. While pointing to certain problems with his position, this paper concludes that there is a basic soundness to Mead's approach.