Vertical mobility and community type as factors in the migration of college graduates

Internal migration statistics are generally inadequate. One of the chief sources of this is the lack of direct data relating to migration. There appears also to be a lack of interest on the part of researchers in pursuing the study of the relationship between vertical mobility and migration. This study is designed to determine the relative importance of intergenerational vertical mobility and type of community or place of origin in contributing to the migration of college graduates by using direct mobility and migration data.The study sample consists of 850 employed male graduates of eight private colleges in Iowa between 1954 and 1958. Data were obtained through the colleges and consist, among other things, of information about fathers' occupations, graduates' occupations, and the addresses of graduates both at matriculation and at the time of the study. Information about communities or places of origin is dichotomized on the basis of whether they are located in Standard Metropolitan Areas (SMA's) in 1950 or whether they are located in non-SMA's (NSMA's). Upward mobility is treated as a product of higher education and as an antecedent of migration.Hypotheses asserting the existence of associations between mobility and migration and between type of community or place of origin and migration are tested. Associations are established showing (1) that upwardly mobile graduates are more likely to migrate than others and (2) that graduates from NSMA's are more likely to migrate than graduates from SMA's.The relative influence of the two factors is determined by partialing the associations between each factor and migration while holding the other factor constant. Type of community or place of origin is found to be of greater importance for migration than is upward mobility. Graduates from NSMA's are more likely to migrate than those from SMA's, regardless of their relative mobility. Graduates from SMA's are likely to migrate only if they are also upwardly mobile.     

Controlling health care costs: An evaluation of strategies

There has been much discussion about the factors underlying inflation in the health care sector and the means to moderate increases in health expenditures. This paper identifies various costcontainment strategies and synthesizes research findings that may be helpful in evaluating their effectiveness. The review demonstrates the complexity of the issues and relationships that must be confronted and understood in cost containment. The delivery system is shown to be not well-suited to improving efficiency and restraining health care expenditure. Any single strategy, whether it involves restructuring the market or more direct regulation, cannot in itself accomplish the combination of expenditure control and adequacy of services that is socially desirable. A number of mutually reinforcing strategies are required. Finally, more empirical and analytical information on incentives, provider and regulatory decisionmaking, costs of regulation, and the dynamics of negotiation, is essential for the design of an effective costcontainment program.     

Family Therapy with the Learning Disabled Child and His/Her Family

No therapist can come in contact with and treat children with minimal brain damage or specific learning disabilities without being struck by the fact that there are numerous intertwined factors that have contributed to and continue to perpetuate the problems. In addition to the helping approaches which have been utilized in recent years, such as tutoring, special education, and child therapy, this article elaborates the importance of utilizing family therapy as the treatment of choice sometime during the course of treating the child and helping the parents to understand and deal with their handicapped youngster.     

An assessment of the quality of developmental day center playgrounds for exceptional children

This study assessed the playgrounds of developmental day care centers and compared them with playgrounds of regular certified day care centers. Twenty playgrounds, randomly selected from the listing of developmental day centers, were compared with a matched sample of 20 playgrounds from certified day care centers in one state. A revision of Frost's Playground Rating System (1978b) was employed to rate the two groups of playgrounds on content, safety, and function. Data were analyzed using an analysis of variance technique. The quality of developmental day center playgrounds for exceptional children was inferior to that of regular day care center playgrounds in terms of playground content. No significant differences were noted on safety or function.     

Gender and racial/ethnic differences in predicting adolescent sexual risk: athletic participation versus exercise

Though often conflated, informal physical exercise and organized athletic participation have very different implications for adolescent sexual risk outcomes. The purpose of this research is to disaggregate strenuous exercise from sports, examine how each is associated with sexual risk, and explain the observed differences using the conceptual lens of cultural resource theory. Using a nationally representative sample of over 16,000 public and private high school students, we employ logistic regression to test hypotheses about the gender-specific and race-specific effects of strenuous exercise and athletic participation on adolescent sexual risk behavior. The results show that both forms of physical activity buffer sexual risk for girls. Strenuous exercise is associated with increased odds of sexual risk for boys. Sports and race interact to influence boys' sexual risk outcomes: Athletic participation is associated with lowered odds of sexual risk for white male adolescents, but heightened odds of sexual risk for black male adolescents.     

Trajectories of gender role orientations in adolescence and early adulthood: a prospective study of the mental health effects of masculinity and femininity

Adolescence is the segment of the life course when gender differences in mental health emerge and gender becomes a more salient factor shaping orientations toward oneself and views of one's place in the social world. This study uses mixture modeling, to identify trajectories of masculinity and femininity between ages 12 and 25, and OLS regression, to examine the effects of those trajectories on mental health in young adulthood (measured as depressive symptoms and alcohol problems at age 25). Four waves of prospective data from the Rutgers Health and Human Development Project are used; respondents (n = 447) are age 12 at Wave 1 (1979-81), 15 at Wave 2 (1982-84), 18 at Wave 3 (1985-87), and 25 at Wave 4 (1992-94). Results indicate that having relatively high and increasing levels of masculinity over adolescence decreases depressive symptoms in early adulthood for both males and females. Reflecting the privileging of males over females, the findings suggest that masculinity, but not femininity, is a central axis on which advantages and disadvantages across some dimensions of mental health accumulate over adolescence.