Household composition choices of older unmarried women

This article extends previous research on the household composition of older unmarried women, using a statistical model that treats each of a woman's surviving children as a distinct potential provider of a shared household. Additional possibilities--living alone, living with other nuclear-family relatives, and living with others--are also recognized, providing a varied range of household-structure opportunities for older women. The approach allows us to identify individual child attributes associated with the propensity to coreside with the older unmarried mother. The results confirm earlier findings regarding the importance of income, age, and disability status as determinants of the household composition of older women. We find, however, that unmarried children, especially sons, are more likely to share a household with an elderly mother than are married children. Working reduces the likelihood that a married daughter will live with her older mother. Overall, the findings suggest that the attributes, more so than the sheer numbers, of living children influence the household structure of their mothers.     

Time completion for various dispatching rules in job shops

This study investigates the relative priority of various job shop dispatching rules for various shop utilization levels under both deterministic and stochastic assumptions with regard to processing times. The primary criterion for evaluation is that of percentage on time completion. The results indicate that an assumption of accurately predetermining actual operation times in most cases is not likely to weaken the analysis and impact of research studies which are performed using such an assumption. Also conclusions indicate that the ranking of dispatching rules according to their effectiveness varies significantly with shop utilization levels.     

Participatory research: Three models and an analysis

This article examines three models of participatory research: what we call the parallel process model, the mutual engagement model, and the University of Central America (UCA) model. These models represent successively greater degrees of academic engagement with outside communities—from complementary, though not necessarily uncommitted, engagement by academic(s); to compromised full engagement between the academic(s) and the community; to institutional engagement between the entire university and the community. Our analysis outlines the tensions that may arise within participatory research between service and scholarship. We conclude that for participatory research to capture the attention and involvement of the broader discipline, it must provide a spectrum of theory, methods, and substance that sociologists find of importance independent of the participatory way in which such contributions are generated. This article is based on a paper presented at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, D.L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 20–24, 1992.     

MARRIAGE, DEPRESSION, AND COGNITION: UNRAVELING THE GORDIAN KNOT-REPLY TO ETTINGER ET AL.

Heim and Snyder (1991) explicitly applied a multidimensional assessment and data-analytic strategy to predict husbands' and wives' depressive symptoms from measures of marital disaffection, overt marital conflict, appraisals of relationship prognosis, characterizations of the spouse, and causal attributions. For both genders, the best single predictor of depression was a measure of marital disaffection—accounting by itself for approximately one third of the variance in subjects' depressive symptoms. Additional attributional predictors of depression for married women indicated the need for therapists to support wives' assertive expression of relationship concerns and confrontation of husbands' behaviors contributing to their distress. We reiterate the complex and recursive relationships among marital difficulties, depression, congnitive processes, and their antecedents and consequences and encourage focused research on components of this intricate puzzle.     

A demonstration of the effect of seasonal migration on fertility

Fertility estimates were calculated using own children data from the Mexican migrant town of Guadalupe, Michoacan. In this town, 75 percent of families have a member working in the United States, and wives are often regularly separated from their migrant husbands. Simulations by Menken (1979) and Bongaarts and Potter (1979) suggest that fertility among these women should be depressed. Our results confirmed this hypothesis, showing that the seasonal absence of migrant husbands disrupted both the level and timing of fertility. However, the effect was greater for legal than for illegal migrants, a pattern that stemmed from social factors as well as physical separation. A logistic regression analysis showed that reductions in birth probabilities are greater the longer a couple is separated, and that these reductions are in the range expected from prior simulations.