Time,history and the making of the industrial middle class: the story of Samuel Smith

This article uses the politics of time to explore the making of the industrial middle class. It argues that anxieties about the decline of industry and the future of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century fuelled a small explosion in life writing, prosopography and popular history. Accounts combined anecdotes about everyday life and reminiscences of the great civic age in a network of texts that attempted to recreate the associational life of the industrial middle class and present it as the foundation of national progress. However, slips in time between retrospection, nostalgia, memory and history reveal the complexity of late-Victorian anti-industrialism and the tensions in liberalism between a political culture that was inclusive and open and a social world that was not. The article combines a deep reading of the autobiography of the cotton magnate and liberal politician Samuel Smith alongside popular local history and collective biography. In so doing it shows how life stories were consciously composed as history, intent on shaping the provincial middle class as a historical force at a time of uncertainty about the future of industry and of liberalism.     

Infant Mortality Rate as a Measure of a Country’s Health: A Robust Method to Improve Reliability and Comparability

Researchers and policymakers often rely on the infant mortality rate as an indicator of a country’s health. Despite arguments about its relevance, uniform measurement of infant mortality is necessary to guarantee its use as a valid measure of population health. Using important socioeconomic indicators, we develop a novel method to adjust country-specific reported infant mortality figures. We conclude that an augmented measure of mortality that includes both infant and late fetal deaths should be considered when assessing levels of social welfare in a country. In addition, mortality statistics that exhibit a substantially high ratio of late fetal to early neonatal deaths should be more closely scrutinized.     

Is the male marriage premium due to selection? The effect of shotgun weddings on the return to marriage

In standard cross-sectional wage regressions, married men appear to earn 10 to 20% more than comparable never married men. One proposed explanation for this male marriage premium is that men may be selected into marriage on the basis of characteristics valued by employers as well as by spouses or because they earn high wages. This paper examines the selection hypothesis by focusing on shotgun weddings, which may make marital status uncorrelated with earnings ability. We compare the estimated marriage premium between white men whose first marriages are soon followed by a birth and other married white men in the United States. The return to marriage differs little for married men with a premarital conception and other married men, and the results suggest that at most 10% of the estimated marriage premium is due to selection. Received: 19 June 1998/Accepted: 10 July 2000     

Teaching Note—Partnering Macro Social Work Students and Agencies Addressing Youth Homelessness: A Model for Service Learning

In addition to direct practice skills, social work students need to become familiar and competent with macrolevel approaches to addressing youth and transgender youth homelessness. Service-learning courses provide an effective approach for students to learn the necessary knowledge and skills. In two sections of an upper-division social work macropractice course, teams of students worked with nonprofit organizations that addressed the needs of homeless youths and transgender youths. A three-pronged approach—community forum, fund-raising, and advocacy campaign—allowed a range of activities and learning experiences that benefited the students and agencies. This three-pronged service-learning model engaged the community, spread the message about youth and transgender youth homelessness, and consisted of projects that people can easily implement in their own communities.     

The consequences of early marriage on marital dissolution

Research has been consistent in documenting the direct negative effect of early marriage on marital stability, while disagreeing over the level of influence of status attainment measures on divorce. However, the discipline has failed to come to consensus on the complexity of these relationships: that early marriage may operate indirectly through mediating variables to increase the likelihood of divorce. The focus of this paper is an analysis of a path model which includes the estimated effects of antecedents of early marriage, early marriage and education on the probability of divorce. Findings using the General Social Surveys support research that suggests that early marriage is the most important variable influencing divorce. Further, little influence of the early marriage measure through education was found.     

“That Model is Sooooo Last Millennium!” Residential Long-Term Care as a System,Not a Place

The current quandary with the design of existing long-term care settings results from focus on structures (“institutions”) instead of on a system of supports and services that transcends physical and traditional boundaries across settings, including nursing homes, assisted living residences, and the home. Supported by analyses of the commonalities, socio-historical and political contexts, core values, and fallacies of social and medical models in existing and emerging long-term care options, a holistic model is proposed based on new core values that facilitate community and family integration and that asserts dignity and personhood as universal attributes in an array of settings.     

Weak Identification in Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Designs

In fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) designs, the treatment effect is identified through a discontinuity in the conditional probability of treatment assignment. We show that when identification is weak (i.e., when the discontinuity is of a small magnitude), the usual t-test based on the FRD estimator and its standard error suffers from asymptotic size distortions as in a standard instrumental variables setting. This problem can be especially severe in the FRD setting since only observations close to the discontinuity are useful for estimating the treatment effect. To eliminate those size distortions, we propose a modified t-statistic that uses a null-restricted version of the standard error of the FRD estimator. Simple and asymptotically valid confidence sets for the treatment effect can be also constructed using this null-restricted standard error. An extension to testing for constancy of the regression discontinuity effect across covariates is also discussed. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.