Adoptive and Nonadoptive Mother–Child Behavioral Interaction: A Comparative Study at 4 Years of Age

Comparable samples of low-risk adopted and non-adopted children and mothers were observed during three tasks at age 4 years. Quality of mother–child interactions, child level of functioning in four domains, and maternal parenting satisfaction and social support were assessed. Adopted children were as competent as non-adopted children on measures of developmental functioning. Both groups of mothers expressed high satisfaction and support as parents. However, ratings of child, maternal, and dyadic behavior when interacting were all lower for adoptive dyads than for non-adoptive dyads, and adoptive dyads with boys accounted for the maternal and dyadic group differences.     

Long-Term Employment and Complementary Human Resource Management Practices

This paper identifies human resource management practices that we hypothesize will raise the return to and, hence, complement long-term-employment (LTE) contracts. Compared to firms that do not offer LTE contracts, we find that firms offering LTE contracts make greater use of a wide array of the hypothesized complementary practices relating to training, compensation, information-sharing, job design, employee-customer interactions, and responses to declines in the demand for labor. Additionally, we provide evidence of complementarities between LTE contracts and above average use of the hypothesized complementary practices in their effects on quit rates, an inverse proxy for employees’ reciprocal commitment to LTE.     

Rapid Response to a Conjunctivitis Outbreak: The Use of Technology to Leverage Information

Abstract

When an outbreak of conjunctivitis was identified at a rural New England college early in 2002, the college health center medical staff used various information management and communication systems to alert the community to the situation. They called upon the state Department of Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help them understand and manage the outbreak. Technological systems already in place at the college allowed for rapid collection of data by means of a survey delivered over the Internet and a carriage study facilitated by a Web-based appointment and communication system. Within days, the data were collected and analyzed and an immediate response to contain the outbreak was launched.     

Married and Cohabiting Parents’ Relationship Stability: A Focus on Race and Ethnicity

We draw on three waves of the Fragile Families Study (N =2,249) to examine family stability among a recent birth cohort of children. We find that children born to cohabiting versus married parents have over five times the risk of experiencing their parents’ separation. This difference in union stability is greatest for White children, as compared with Black or Mexican American children. For White children, differences in parents’ education levels, paternal substance abuse, and prior marriage and children account for the higher instability faced by those born to cohabiting parents, whereas differences in union stability are not fully explained among Black and Mexican American children. These findings have implications for policies aimed at promoting family stability and reducing inequality.     

Uncertainties in the CIIT Model for Formaldehyde-Induced Carcinogenicity in the Rat: A Limited Sensitivity Analysis–I

Scientists at the CIIT Centers for Health Research (Conolly et al., 2000, 2003; Kimbell et al., 2001a, 2001b) developed a two-stage clonal expansion model of formaldehyde-induced nasal cancers in the F344 rat that made extensive use of mechanistic information. An inference of their modeling approach was that formaldehyde-induced tumorigenicity could be optimally explained without the role of formaldehyde's mutagenic action. In this article, we examine the strength of this result and modify select features to examine the sensitivity of the predicted dose response to select assumptions. We implement solutions to the two-stage cancer model that are valid for nonhomogeneous models (i.e., models with time-dependent parameters), thus accounting for time dependence in variables. In this reimplementation, we examine the sensitivity of model predictions to pooling historical and concurrent control data, and to lumping sacrificed animals in which tumors were discovered incidentally with those in which death was caused by the tumors. We found the CIIT model results were not significantly altered with the nonhomogeneous solutions. Dose-response predictions below the range of exposures where tumors occurred in the bioassays were highly sensitive to the choice of control data. In the range of exposures where tumors were observed, the model attributed up to 74% of the added tumor probability to formaldehyde's mutagenic action when our reanalysis restricted the use of the National Toxicology Program (NTP) historical control data to only those obtained from inhalation exposures. Model results were insensitive to hourly or daily temporal variations in DNA protein cross-link (DPX) concentration, a surrogate for the dose-metric linked to formaldehyde-induced mutations, prompting us to utilize weekly averages for this quantity. Various other biological and mathematical uncertainties in the model have been retained unmodified in this analysis. These include model specification of initiated cell division and death rates, and uncertainty and variability in the dose response for cell replication rates, issues that will be considered in a future paper.