Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults' Lives

How do new parents differ from their childless counterparts in social and psychological resources, daily strains, and psychological well‐being? Using a nationally representative panel of 1,933 adults who were childless at the first interview, we compare 6 indicators of adults' lives for those who became parents and those remaining childless several years later, controlling for earlier states. Becoming a parent is both detrimental and rewarding. With the exception of social integration, which is greater for all groups of new parents compared with their childless counterparts, the effects of parental status on adults' lives vary markedly by gender and marital status. Unmarried parents report lower self‐efficacy and higher depression than their childless counterparts. Married mothers' lives are marked by more housework and more marital conflict but less depression than their childless counterparts. Parental status has little influence on the lives of married men.     

WHOSE GAY COMMUNITY? SOCIAL CLASS,SEXUAL SELF‐EXPRESSION,AND GAY COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

The visible and political gay community has been characterized as an increasingly middle-class, white institution. It is hypothesized that this middle-class nature requires economic and psychosocial resources that are not available to the working class and, thus, may limit the expression of sexual orientation for the working class. An analysis of data from the multicity Urban Men's Health Study supports this hypothesis. Nine of 14 hypothesized effects are statistically significant and indicate that working-class men who are homosexually active are less likely to describe themselves as gay, are more likely to have heterosexual experience, and are less likely to be involved in the gay community. Thus, it is important to incorporate class differences when addressing the social and the political dynamics of sexual orientation.     

Improving flexibility and efficiency by adding parallelism to genetic algorithms

In this paper we develop a study on several types of parallel genetic algorithms (PGAs). Our motivation is to bring some uniformity to the proposal, comparison, and knowledge exchange among the traditionally opposite kinds of serial and parallel GAs. We comparatively analyze the properties of steady-state, generational, and cellular genetic algorithms. Afterwards, this study is extended to consider a distributed model consisting in a ring of GA islands. The analyzed features are the time complexity, selection pressure, schema processing rates, efficacy in finding an optimum, efficiency, speedup, and resistance to scalability. Besides that, we briefly discuss how the migration policy affects the search. Also, some of the search properties of cellular GAs are investigated. The selected benchmark is a representative subset of problems containing real world difficulties. We often conclude that parallel GAs are numerically better and faster than equivalent sequential GAs. Our aim is to shed some light on the advantages and drawbacks of various sequential and parallel GAs to help researchers using them in the very diverse application fields of the evolutionary computation.     

Residual analysis for spatial point processes (with discussion)

Summary.  We define residuals for point process models fitted to spatial point pattern data, and we propose diagnostic plots based on them. The residuals apply to any point process model that has a conditional intensity; the model may exhibit spatial heterogeneity, interpoint interaction and dependence on spatial covariates. Some existing ad hoc methods for model checking (quadrat counts, scan statistic, kernel smoothed intensity and Berman's diagnostic) are recovered as special cases. Diagnostic tools are developed systematically, by using an analogy between our spatial residuals and the usual residuals for (non-spatial) generalized linear models. The conditional intensity λ plays the role of the mean response. This makes it possible to adapt existing knowledge about model validation for generalized linear models to the spatial point process context, giving recommendations for diagnostic plots. A plot of smoothed residuals against spatial location, or against a spatial covariate, is effective in diagnosing spatial trend or co-variate effects. Q – Q -plots of the residuals are effective in diagnosing interpoint interaction.     

Testing How Management Matters in an Era of Government by Performance Management

Public administration finds itself in an era of government byperformance management, which is reflected in the widespreadassumption that management is a key determinant of performance,and that it is reasonable to expect managers to measurably improveorganizational effectiveness. This article joins a growing literaturein seeking to conceptualize and empirically test how externalenvironmental influences and internal management factors combineto create performance, relying on data from the 2002–2003National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-II) survey ofstate government health and human services officials. We categorizemanagerial efforts to facilitate organizational performanceas determined either through their interactions with the organizationalenvironment, or through employing workable levers to changeinternal organizational culture, structure, and technology.Among the external environmental variables we find that thesupport of elected officials and the influence of the publicand media have a positive impact on effectiveness. Among internalmanagement choices, the ability to create a developmental organizationalculture, establish a focus on results through goal clarity,and decentralize decision-making authority are all positivelyassociated with organizational effectiveness.     

Four‐Month Attentional Regulation and Its Prediction of Three‐Year Compliance

The extent to which 4‐month attentional regulation during an infant‐mother still‐face situation and 12‐month attachment security during the Strange Situation predicted rates of compliance and noncompliance during a cleanup task at 36 months was examined longitudinally in 70 infant‐mother dyads. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that infants who showed more attentional regulation during the still‐face situation with mothers later showed a higher rate of committed compliance and a lower rate of situational compliance during cleanup with mothers. Furthermore, lower levels of attentional regulation were later associated with higher rates of assertive behavior, but only for infants in an insecure attachment relationship.     

THE ANSWERING MACHINE POSES MANY QUESTIONS FOR TELEPHONE SURVEY RESEARCHERS

The proliferation of the telephone answering machine raisesa number of questions about the continued efficiency of thetelephone as a data-gathering mechanism. The most critical ofthese is what effect the use of these machines might have onestablishing contact with potential respondents. If individualsroutinely use these machines to screen calls, then their accessibilityto telephone survey researchers will be restricted. A secondquestion is the degree to which respondents who own answeringmachines and are reachable are likely to participate in a survey.A third question is the extent to which the incidence of theanswering machine as a response disposition might vary by thetime of calling and the respondent's place of residence. Thefindings of this study, based on a nationwide survey, pointto a significant proportion of answering machine owners beingreachable and willing to participate. Furthermore, the answeringmachine appears to be in use more on weekends than on weekdayevenings and in more urbanized areas than in areas with fewerinhabitants.     

Measuring the non-profit sector cross-nationally: a comparative methodology

As a result in part of the way non-profit institutions are defined and treated in the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), little is known about the size, scope, financial base and role of this set of institutions at the international level, even though their importance is increasingly being recognised throughout the world. To remedy this significant lack of systematic information on non-profit institutions cross-nationally, the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project has undertaken a major analysis of the economic role of this sector in twelve countries throughout the world, utilising a more meaningful definition of the sector and an approach that is otherwise consistent with the overall thrust of the SNA system. This paper outlines the basis of the more inclusive definition of the non-profit sector embodied in this project, the classification system formulated to structure data-gathering on this more broadly-defined sector and the data assembly strategy developed to build up key estimates of the scale, structure and revenue sources of the non-profit sector in the project countries. The article concludes with a recommendation to incorporate a similar approach to the assembly of data on the non-profit sector into the ongoing SNA system on a regular basis.Professor Lester Salamon is Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and Director of the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218.Helmut Anheier is Research Scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08903. He is co-editor ofVoluntas.     

Stress at work and psychological and immunological parameters in a group of Norwegian female bank employees

This study concerned the immunological correlates of stress and work. Self reported stress, emotional state, ego-strength, and defensiveness were examined in relation to measures of cellular immunity (T-cell response to Con A and number of T4 and T8 cells) and humoral immunity (concentrations of immunoglobulins and complement components in plasma) in a group of 96 Norwegian female bank employees. The analyses showed that workload, the stress factor with the highest group mean, was associated with number of T-cells, while strain due to body posture during work was related to concentrations of IgM and C3. Further, depression was significantly correlated with IgM concentration and T-cell number, and anxiety with C3 concentration. T-cell activity was the immunological parameter most consistently associated with psychological well-being, showing positive correlations with defensiveness and ego-strength and negative correlations with anxiety and depression. In conclusion, T-cell number and concentrations of IgM and C3 were sensitive to both work-related stress experience and emotional distress. Coping abilities, indicated by the MMPI Ego-strength scale and emotional distress, were reflected in T-cell activity; insufficient coping was associated with low T-cell activity.