PUBLIC OPINION AND THE END OF BUSING: (Mis) Perceptions of Policy Failure

Public opinion was largely ignored when the federal government first compelled busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Yet, public opinion has a potentially large impact on local school boards' plans and policies when communities seek or obtain unitary status. Scholarship suggests that self-interest, racial attitudes, and philosophical values shape antibusing sentiments. Analysis of survey data from Nashville, Tennessee, shows that they do there as well. More important, though, further analysis shows that perceptions of busing's failure, which seem to be misguided, have a substantial impact on whether respondents want busing to end, even when race, self-interest, and ideological values are controlled. Perception, as mis-perception, is therefore a potentially salient factor in policy evaluation. Perceptions of policy success or failure may be socially constructed by media, elites, or people themselves. Additional research in this direction is clearly necessary.     

Unemployment: an international perspective

Using standard OECD unemployment and national income account data, the rela-tionship between unemployment rates and the productivity-adjusted real wage rate is examined for six major countries, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, using bivariate regression analysis. In addition, pooled cross-section estimates of the same relationship are provided for the 24 traditional OECD countries covering the period 1971-1995. The object is to determine whether the observed statistically significant positive relationship between these variables found for the United States exists in other economies. The basic conclusion is that the inter-national experience in this regard is similar to that for the United States. The research underlying the analysis reported in this article has been supported by the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the United States and is reflected in Vedder and Gallaway (1998).     

Families under the microscope: parallels between the young carers debate of the 1990s and the transformation of childhood in the late nineteenth century

Existing analysis and discussion about young carers—children caring for ill or disabled family members—has been limited in scope, concentrating on narrow policy and service issues. In this paper, I attempt to introduce a more historical perspective to these debates, by comparing responses to the issue of young caring in the 1990s to resistance encountered in the implementation of child labour and education reforms towards the end of the nineteenth century. I discuss the parallel ways in which the quality of childhood for some children became problematised without sufficient recognition of the limited choices that some families face. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Economic and cultural influences on the decision to leave home in Peninsular Malaysia

Although the departure of children from the parental home is an important life-cycle event, few studies have investigated nest-leaving in developing countries. Using retrospective data from the Second Malaysian Family Life Survey, we estimate hazard models of nest-leaving in Peninsular Malaysia. We find that the departure of children, especially sons, responds to economic incentives, including housing costs, family businesses, education, and economic growth, and that ethnic differences in nest-leaving are important. We also find that the median age of departure from home has declined sharply over the past 40 years, a period of rapid social and economic change in Malaysia.     

Private Bag: Speech by Secretary of the Interior,Richard Lamm—9/21/2030

Population and Environment -     

The fertility effect of catastrophe: U.S. hurricane births

Anecdotal evidence has suggested increased fertility rates resulting from catastrophic events in an area. In this paper, we measure this fertility effect using storm advisory data and fertility data for the Atlantic and Gulf-coast counties of the USA. We find that low-severity storm advisories are associated with a positive and significant fertility effect and that high-severity advisories have a significant negative fertility effect. As the type of advisory goes from least severe to most severe, the fertility effect of the specific advisory type decreases monotonically from positive to negative. We also find some other interesting demographic effects.     

Transportation Difficulty of Black and White Rural Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to understand self-reported transportation difficulty among rural older adults. We used data from the UAB Study of Aging (255 Black and 259 White), community-dwelling participants residing in rural areas. We examined the relationship of predisposing characteristics, enabling resources, and measures of need for care with self-reports of transportation difficulty. Blacks reported having more transportation difficulty than Whites (24.7% vs. 11.6%; p ≤ .05). When we introduced other variables, race differences disappeared, but there was a race by income interaction with transportation difficulty. Whites with lower incomes were more likely to have transportation difficulty than Whites with higher incomes. When data from Blacks and Whites were analyzed separately, income was the only variable associated with transportation difficulty among Whites. Among Blacks, income was not related to transportation difficulty but several variables other than income (age, gender, marital status, MMSE scores and depression) were.     

Leaving Home and Living Alone: An Historical Perspective

This paper provides a temporal and spatial perspective on a variety of household forms in present-day Europe. Compared with the situation in pre-industrial England, many more people now live on their own but there are some surprising continuities in household forms. Notably, pre-industrial households were no more likely than present-day ones to include distant relatives, and the recent rise in the proportion of one-person families has simply returned the position to that produced by early widowhood in the seventeenth century. Nor has the general increase during recent decades in the proportion of one-person households reduced the variation within Europe in the frequency of living alone which remains much less likely in southern and parts of eastern Europe than in western Europe and Scandinavia. A more thorough comparative exercise is hampered by inconsistencies in the design of tables used to illustrate household types in different countries, and it is suggested that a standard set of tables should be agreed and produced for different national populations.     

Nondrinker Mortality Risk in the United States

The literature has shown that people who do not drink alcohol are at greater risk for death than light to moderate drinkers, yet the reasons for this remain largely unexplained. We examine whether variation in people’s reasons for nondrinking explains the increased mortality. Our data come from the 1988–2006 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File (N = 41,076 individuals age 21 and above, of whom 10,421 died over the follow-up period). The results indicate that nondrinkers include several different groups that have unique mortality risks. Among abstainers and light drinkers the risk of mortality is the same as light drinkers for a subgroup who report that they do not drink because of their family upbringing, and moral/religious reasons. In contrast, the risk of mortality is higher than light drinkers for former drinkers who cite health problems or who report problematic drinking behaviors. Our findings address a notable gap in the literature and may inform social policies to reduce or prevent alcohol abuse, increase health, and lengthen life.