Money in marriage: how patterns of allocation both reflect and conceal power

This paper examines perceptions of money within marriage, focusing upon the concepts of control and ownership. It considers the criteria involved in Pahl's (1983; 1989) typology for the allocation of income, and their ability to capture the dynamic perceptual elements associated with change. These issues were explored by means of data from semi-structured interviews, using mainly middle-class couples (thirteen women and nine of their partners) in the 30–50 year age-range. Most of the women were in the process of returning to the labour market following an absence of at least eight years. The findings demonstrate, on the one hand, that Pahl's revised typology (1989), which includes an emphasis on the person possessing overall control, can be used to trace major shifts in the balance of economic power as a function of the life-cycle and associated changes in the source of income. On the other hand, the findings also show that a couple's report of their financial arrangements, concerning the Spooling’ of income, can yield the erroneous impression that resources are equally shared. In particular, the ‘rights’ of ownership associated with having earned the income may remain hidden, and lead to patterns of overall control with potential consequences for a non-earning, dependent partner.     

The Structure of Mental Health: Higher-Order Confirmatory Factor Analyses of Psychological Distress and Well-Being Measures

Social Indicators Research - This paper addresses the question of whether psychological distress and subjective well-being are the opposite poles of the same axis of mental health or independent...     

Adaptive and repeated cumulative meta‐analyses of safety data during a new drug development process

During a new drug development process, it is desirable to timely detect potential safety signals. For this purpose, repeated meta‐analyses may be performed sequentially on accumulating safety data. Moreover, if the amount of safety data from the originally planned program is not enough to ensure adequate power to test a specific hypothesis (e.g., the noninferiority hypothesis of an event of interest), the total sample size may be increased by adding new studies to the program. Without appropriate adjustment, it is well known that the type I error rate will be inflated because of repeated analyses and sample size adjustment. In this paper, we discuss potential issues associated with adaptive and repeated cumulative meta‐analyses of safety data conducted during a drug development process. We consider both frequentist and Bayesian approaches. A new drug development example is used to demonstrate the application of the methods. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reconnecting Past,Present and Future Lives: Therapy with a Young Person who Experienced Severe Childhood Privation

This case study describes therapy over a three year period with a young adopted person who presented as highly suicidal, with a childhood background characterised by severe privation and abuse. The paper describes the use of a visual Life line, designed to assist the young person in reconnecting and honouring different parts of her life. A flexible and client centred therapeutic approach is also described.     

Does Part-Time Mothering Help Get a Job? The Role of Shared Custody in Women’s Employment

Though child shared physical custody arrangements after divorce are much more frequent and parents who use it more diverse in many European countries, little is known about their economic consequences for parents. By relaxing family time constraints, does shared custody help divorced mothers return to or stay on work more easily? Since lone mothers are one of the least-employed groups, and they face high unemployment rates, the type of child custody arrangement adopted after divorce is of particular interest for their employability. This article analyses to what extent the type of child custody arrangement affects mothers’ labour market patterns after divorce.Using a large sample of divorcees from an exhaustive French administrative income tax database, and taking advantage of the huge territorial discrepancies observed in the proportion of shared custody, we correct for the possible endogeneity of shared custody. Results show that not repartnered mothers with shared custody arrangements are 24 percentage points more likely to work one year after divorce compared to those having sole custody, while no significant effect is found for repartnered mothers. Among lone mothers, we also highlight huge heterogeneous effects: larger positive effects are observed for previously inactive women, for those belonging to the lowest income quintiles before divorce, for those with a young child, and for those who have three or more children. Thus, shared physical custody arrangements may reduce work–family conflict by diminishing childcare expenses and enlarge the possibilities to find a suitable job because of more relaxed time constraints for lone mothers.