Compatibility,Leisure, and Satisfaction in Marital Relationships

This study challenges the prevailing view that marital companionship promotes marital satisfaction. By following a cohort of married couples for over a decade and by incorporating several methodological improvements—such as refining the measurement of marital satisfaction, determining how much spouses enjoy doing the leisure activities they pursue together and apart, and using diary data to portray marital leisure patterns—we found that the association between companionship and satisfaction is less robust than previously believed, and that it depends on how often spouses pursue activities that reflect their own and their partner's leisure preferences. Over time, involvement in leisure liked by husbands but disliked by wives, whether as a couple or by husbands alone, is both a cause and a consequence of wives' dissatisfaction.     

Minority Poverty in Nonmetropolitan Texas*

Abstract Despite a high prevalence of poverty among minorities in nonmetropolitan areas, research and policy concerns regarding poverty have continued focusing on metropolitan minorities. This study uses a model integrating individual, household, and structural factors to examine poverty among Latinos, blacks, and Anglos in nonmetropolitan and, for comparative purposes, metropolitan areas, using data from the 1985 Special Texas Census TDHS 1987. The findings show that minorities in nonmetropolitan areas tend to have the highest poverty rates. In addition, consistent as well as divergent patterns exist among the six ethnic-resident groups with respect to the relationships among the various individual, household, and structural factors and poverty.     

A timely measure of unemployment

Conventional unemployment statistics have two dimensions—size and date. Population-at-risk unemployment rates add a third dimension—time. They are unlikely to revolutionise our picture of the nature of unemployment, says Ray Thomas . But they do give a more accurate and comprehensive picture than existing measures, and provide new insights into old problems, such as indicating the importance of statistics of entrants in helping to explain geographical variation in unemployment.     

Accuracy of the College Majors Finder for Three Majors

The Self-Directed Search was administered to 68 university seniors who were majoring in Chemistry/Chemical Engineering, Elementary Education, and Office Administration. Their resulting three-letter summary codes were compared with three-letter college major codes obtained from the College Majors Finder. A high degree of agreement between the two sets of codes was found for each of the three majors. Effective methods for matching people to jobs have held the interest and occupied much time for career counselors and vocational theorists since the inception of the trait-factor approach to career counseling. More recently, Holland (1985a) broadened and clarified matching procedures through the development of his typological theory of vocational choice. Just as personality types and occupational environments have been organized using Holland's framework to foster an understanding of occupational choice, Holland's theory can also be used to explain other types of choices, such as choice of a college major.