The Development of Intergroup Forgiveness in Northern Ireland

As societies like Northern Ireland, Israel, and South Africa strive to resolve social conflict, there is growing theoretical and empirical interest in the role of intergroup forgiveness. This study examined intergroup forgiveness among 340 young adults in Northern Ireland. A short form of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory explored possible influences on propensity to forgive. All participants were Catholic and female (mean age 17.36 years), and had experienced verbal or physical injury or bereavement due to the Northern Irish political violence. Overall forgiveness levels were low in comparison with previous studies of interpersonal forgiveness but similar to previous studies of intergroup forgiveness in Northern Ireland. The strongest (negative) predictor of forgiveness was the perceived degree of hurt caused by the injury .     

Criteria families use to select nursing homes

The study is conducted to determine families' rankings of characteristics they consider most important when selecting a nursing home. Friedman's two-way analysis of variance is used to test for differences in the rankings. In response to a mailed survey, 231 families rank the characteristics in the following order: quality of care, appearance, atmosphere, location, reputation, building safety, quality of food, cost, and activities. Relationships are also found between the rankings and the demographic characteristics: gender, marital status, education, income, number of homes available, patient/respondent relationship, and distance respondent lived from the chosen home.     

Testing for space-time clusters of unknown size

The Knox test is widely used in epidemiology to test for infection or contagion, which is indicated by an excess of cases that are close both in space and time. Often, however, the values of the space and time critical parameters that define 'closeness' are unknown. An exact test is proposed for this situation, its computer implementation is described and examples of its use on published data sets are given. Other possible applications of the method adopted here are discussed. This is an example of a test where nuisance parameters are absent under H0, and where the distribution of the test statistic can be found numerically.     

Interpolating demography with families and households

This paper argues that the field of household and family demography serves a critical role in the development of our understanding of the determinants and consequences of population trends. Like the community, families and households are situated between the two levels at which demographic research is ordinarily conducted — the individual and the nation-state. The results of the papers in this issue are used to illustrate the critical ways that intergenerational and gender relationships shape demographic processes.     

DO MEN “NEED” A SPOUSE MORE THAN WOMEN?: PERCEPTIONS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF MARRIAGE FOR MEN AND WOMEN

This study examines how important men and women feel marriage is for men and for women. Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households, we find that both men and women feel that men need to be married more than women do. Women are more likely than men to think that both men and women can have satisfying lives without marriage, but they are also more likely to think that only women can have satisfying lives without marriage. Younger, more educated people are less likely to emphasize marriage. On the other hand, religious people and those who are married with children are particularly likely to think that neither men nor women can have satisfying lives without marriage.     

Shared Housing: Making Alternative Lifestyles Work

Changing lifestyles mean that fewer people are living in traditional families and that demands for innovative styles of housing are increasing. Many young people live in shared houses. Such housing offers relatively cheap and flexible accommodation and also has the potential to make a positive contribution to individuals' quality of life. This paper considers the factors that contribute to the success of these households: successful conflict management, the personality and expectations of sharers, the social interaction within the house and its physical design. It concludes with a consideration of ways in which sharing could be encouraged as a housing option.     

The Semantically Reciprocating Robot: Adult Influences on Children's Early Conversational Skills

Two-year-old children's conversational replies were observed in two social contexts: (a) with a partner who consistently responded to each of their utterances by semantically reciprocating and commenting briefly on their topic; or (b) with a partner who also consistently replied to each of their utterances but did not semantically reciprocate their topic. Children were significantly more likely to reply to a partner who maintained their topic. Given that a child replied, the verbal responses in the semantic reciprocation group were also more likely to have a topic-comment structure characteristic of more advanced conversational skills. These experimental data confirm previous correlational evidence suggesting that children are sensitive to semantic reciprocation during the early stages of verbal communicative development, and they support recent arguments suggesting that the adult's use of expansions scaffolds the child's tendency to use predicative, topic-comment replies…and perhaps advances the child's understanding of the adult partner as an attentional/intentional mental agent.