The Association of Couples’ Relationship Status and Quality With Breastfeeding Initiation

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey (N= 3,567), we examine the links between relationship status, relationship quality, and race and ethnicity in breastfeeding initiation. We consider four relationship types: married, cohabiting, romantically involved but not cohabiting (termed visiting), and nonromantically involved mothers. We find that even after adjusting for a wide range of sociodemographic factors, married mothers were more likely to breastfeed than unmarried mothers and that racial and ethnic differences in breastfeeding do not result from differences in marriage rates. Among unwed mothers, paternal provision of money or other assistance during pregnancy decreases the likelihood of breastfeeding. We conclude that relationship status, above and beyond demographic characteristics, is an important correlate of breastfeeding.     

Understanding Vulnerability: From Categories to Experiences of Young Congolese People in Uganda

This article problematises the ‘vulnerables’ category that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees applies to groups of refugees. Drawing on 9 months’ qualitative research with young Congolese refugees in Uganda, it presents research subjects’ self‐identification and lived realities that do not correspond to the homogenous, fixed ‘vulnerables’ ideal. Moreover, it argues that the ‘vulnerables’ categorisation approach can provoke a number of counter‐productive effects, including a focus on symptoms rather than causes, inflated numbers of ‘vulnerables’ and undermining indigenous support structures. An alternative approach that interrogates and addresses the contextual and relational aspects of vulnerability is proposed.     

Choice uncertainty and the endowment effect

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - We experimentally test for the role of choice uncertainty in generating “endowment effects” - the robust empirical finding that endowing participants...     

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Short notices

Howard M. Gitelman, Workingmen of Waltham: Mobility in American Urban Industrial Development, 1850–1890 (1975), xvi+192 (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, £5.50).

Michael J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain. The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (1975), xii+205 (Harvester Press, Hassocks, £7.50).

Raymond Wolters, The New negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions of the 1920s (1975), viii+370 (Princeton University Press, £7.90).

Marie B. Rowlands, Masters and Men in the West Midland Metalware Trades before the Industrial Revolution (1975) x+198 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £8.00).

Dwight L. Smith (ed.), Afro‐American History: A Bibliography (1974), xvi+856 (ABC Clio Inc., Santa Barbara and Oxford, £22.50).

Hugh Cunningham, The Volunteer Force: a Social and Political History 1859–1908 (1975) 168 (Croom Helm, £6.50).

Leslie Clarkson, Death, Disease and Famine in Pre‐Industrial England (Dublin, 1975), iii+188 (Gill and Macmillan, £8.75).

Arnold J. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society front the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (1975), xviii+265 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £7.90).

R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundation in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (1976), x+181 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £5.25).

David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: a Social History (1976), xii+292 (Allen Lane, £9.00).

Paul Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film (1976), viii+208 (Cambridge University Press, £4.95).

Katherine S. Naughton, The Geentry of Bedfordshire in the 13th and 14th ceaturies (1976), 90 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, Local History Occ. Papers. 3rd series, No. 2. £3.75).

Thomas J. Archdeacon, New York City, 1664–1710: Conquest and Change (1976), 197 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, £6.35).     

Max-stable processes for modeling extremes observed in space and time

Max-stable processes have proved to be useful for the statistical modeling of spatial extremes. For statistical inference it is often assumed that there is no temporal dependence; i.e., that the observations at spatial locations are independent in time. In a first approach we construct max-stable space–time processes as limits of rescaled pointwise maxima of independent Gaussian processes, where the space–time covariance functions satisfy weak regularity conditions. This leads to so-called Brown–Resnick processes. In a second approach, we extend Smith’s storm profile model to a space–time setting. We provide explicit expressions for the bivariate distribution functions, which are equal under appropriate choice of the parameters. We also show how the space–time covariance function of the underlying Gaussian process can be interpreted in terms of the tail dependence function in the limiting max-stable space–time process.     

Impact of Economic Conditions and Crises on Mortality and its Predictability

To investigate how economic conditions and crises affect mortality and its predictability in industrialized countries, we review the related literature, and we forecast mortality developments in Spain, Hungary, and Russia—three countries which have recently undergone major transformation processes following the introduction of radical economic and political reforms. The results of our retrospective mortality forecasts from 1991 to 2009 suggest that our model can capture major changes in long-term mortality trends, and that the forecast errors it generates are usually smaller than those of other well-accepted models, like the Lee-Carter model and its coherent variant. This is because our approach is capable of modeling (1) dynamic shifts in survival improvements from younger to older ages over time, as well as (2) substantial changes in long-term trends by optionally complementing the extrapolated mortality trends in a country of interest with those of selected reference countries. However, the forecasting performance of our model is limited (like that of every model): e.g., if mortality becomes extremely volatile—as was the case in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—generating a precise forecast will depend more on luck than on methodology and expert judgment. In general, we conclude that, on their own, recent economic changes appear to have minor effects on life expectancy in industrialized countries, but that the effects of these changes are greater if they occur in conjunction with other major social and political changes.