The Family

Social Indicators Research -     

LARGE DEMOGRAPHIC SHOCKS AND SMALL CHANGES IN THE MARRIAGE MARKET

Between 1958 and 1961, China experienced a drastic famine. The famine substantially reduced birth rates and also adversely affected the health of these famine‐born cohorts. This paper provides nonparametric estimates of the total effects of the famine on the marital behavior of famine‐affected cohorts in rural Sichuan and Anhui. These reduced‐form estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects. The paper uses the Choo–Siow model to decompose observed marital outcomes into quantity and quality effects. A decline in marital attractiveness of famine‐affected cohorts, which is correlated with an increase in marital childlessness, provides support for the external validity of the Choo–Siow decomposition. The small observed changes in marriage rates of the famine‐born cohorts are due to a substantial decline in their marital attractiveness.     

Fostering and Assessing Critical Listening Skills in the Speech Course

In this article we present the results of two listening assessments conducted in spring 2013 and fall 2013. Our primary goal is of a pedagogical nature and is concerned with the design and the testing of a tool that could measure students’ critical listening skill improvement during the span of a semester. A total of N = 370 students participated in two quasi-experimental studies in which we developed a program to foster and measure critical listening skills. Results show that students’ listening skills improved in specific aspects of critical listening at both times. Effects were larger in the second round due to adjustments to both the course curriculum and the assessment tool. Results support the impact of the intervention by modest to high effect sizes and the construct validity of the assessment tool. We consider the improvement that was found in the current study an important beginning and recommend that the practice of listening skills becomes an integral part of the curriculum at the undergraduate level.     

Linking Human Development and the Financial Responsibility of Regions: Combined Index Proposals Using Methods from Data Envelopment Analysis

Social Indicators Research - Several indicators on human development and capabilities have been introduced in recent decades that measure the absolute level of deprivations and freedoms of people....     

The sociology of intellectuals in the 20th and 21st century

Sociologists have treated intellectuals and their ideas for a long time as mere products of external social structures. Recently, however, researchers shifted their focus to cultural explanations, appreciating more fully the role cultural structures play in shaping their biographical trajectories and success. At the same time, I argue that these theories do not fully integrate the insight of performance theories and focus usually on textual self‐presentation of intellectuals. Although such an approach is valuable, I propose that sociologists should pay attention also to the processes of meaning‐making that make up intellectual appeal on stage. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the sociology of intellectuals has been for too long obsessed with questions of success and prestige, and I propose that sociologists should shift their attention to the underappreciated and marginalised among intellectuals.     

A nonparametric test for a constant correlation matrix

We propose a nonparametric procedure to test for changes in correlation matrices at an unknown point in time. The new test requires constant expectations and variances, but only mild assumptions on the serial dependence structure, and has considerable power in finite samples. We derive the asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of no change as well as local power results and apply the test to stock returns.     

On the complete convergence for randomly indexed partial sums and the limit behaviour of a sequence of quantiles

This note contains result on the complete convergence of randomly indexed partial sums of independent non-identically distributed random variables. We use them to investigate the limit behaviour of quantiles of a sample with a random numbers of items.