Coming to stay: An analysis of the U.S. Census question on immigrants’ year of arrival

Using the New Immigrant Survey Pilot, we compare answers to the census question on year of arrival in the United States with answers to questions about the dates and durations of earlier U.S. trips. We show that the year identified by the census does not correspond to the year of either the first or the last U.S. trip. Because many immigrants enter and leave the United States several times before becoming legal immigrants, the census question produces estimates of U.S. experience that are quite different from those produced by direct questions about trip durations.     

Mary Poppins as Family Therapist

This article takes a light-hearted look at popular culture focusing on the 1964 film Mary Poppins. Some aspects drawn from theory underpinning family therapy and from the psychoanalytic ideas of Winnicott and Klein are applied, tongue firmly in cheek. Serious points made include the ubiquitous presence of popular culture in our lives, and the idea that Art/Popular culture may anticipate (or at least accompany) explicit formulation of scientific ideas.     

Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues

Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indications of economic preferences. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and of the core process of affective valuation explain several robust features of dollar responses: high correlations with other measures of attractiveness or aversiveness, insensitivity to scope, preference reversals, and the high variability of dollar responses relative to other measures of the same attitude.     

Lesbian and bisexual women's judgments of the attractiveness of different body types

Two studies were conducted using the Internet with 209 and 141 women respectively who reported themselves as being lesbian or bisexual, but not heterosexual. Women were presented with 8 figures in which weight (slender or heavy), waist‐to‐hip ratio (0.7 or 1.0), and breast size (small or large) were varied independently. Participants rated figures on a 20‐point scale for attractiveness, healthiness, femininity, kindness, and desirability for both short‐term and long‐term relationships. These ratings were summed to give a total preference score as a factor analysis showed that all ratings loaded positively on one factor. In the second study, women were also asked to rate themselves on the degree to which they were gender‐conforming or gender‐nonconforming. In both studies, participants preferred the heavy figure with the 0.7 waist‐to‐hip ratio and large breasts. The same figure with small breasts was the next most preferred. In the second study, there was no difference between gender‐conforming and gender‐nonconforming women in preference scores. We believe that a preference on the part of nonheterosexual women for heavy figures may reflect more comfort with heavier body weight as well as a rejection of what may be seen as an inappropriate societal fixation on excessive thinness.     

Contexts of English Language Use among Immigrants to the United States1

This analysis of New Immigrant Survey data indicates that the longer immigrants are in the U.S., the more likely they are to use English with friends, at work, at home, and with a spouse. The average immigrant arriving as a young adult has a predicted probability of using English with friends upon arrival of 0.44, a figure that doubles after 15 years in the U.S. The same average immigrant has a 0.40 probability of using English at home upon arrival, which rises to 0.55 after 15 years. The results suggest substantial language shift with the first generation.     

Occupational Trajectories of Legal US Immigrants: Downgrading and Recovery

Data from the New Immigrant Survey 2003 are examined to analyze trajectories in occupational prestige between the last job abroad and the first US job and from the first US job to the current US job for a select sample of men and women. Incorporating the first job in the United States overcomes an important limitation faced by many previous studies that were generally restricted to a comparison of the last job abroad and the US job as measured at the time of the survey. Distinctions are made between class‐of‐admission groups, since the trajectories toward labor market success vary systematically along that dimension. Consistent with a model of immigrant occupational assimilation, all preference groups show a U‐shaped adjustment pattern with, on average, initial downgrading followed by subsequent ascension. However, although all groups exhibit a similar pattern, the trough of the U is deepest for refugees, who also experience the steepest subsequent upward climb.     

Alcohol,Sex, and Screens: Modeling Media Influence on Adolescent Alcohol and Sex Co-Occurrence

Alcohol use and sexual behavior are important risk behaviors in adolescent development, and combining the two is common. The reasoned action approach (RAA) is used to predict adolescents’ intention to combine alcohol use and sexual behavior based on exposure to alcohol and sex combinations in popular entertainment media. We conducted a content analysis of mainstream (n = 29) and Black-oriented movies (n = 34) from 2014 and 2013–2014, respectively, and 56 television shows (2014–2015 season). Content analysis ratings featuring character portrayals of both alcohol and sex within the same five-minute segment were used to create exposure measures that were linked to online survey data collected from 1,990 adolescents ages 14 to 17 years old (50.3% Black, 49.7% White; 48.1% female). Structural equation modeling (SEM) and group analysis by race were used to test whether attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioral control mediated the effects of media exposure on intention to combine alcohol and sex. Results suggest that for both White and Black adolescents, exposure to media portrayals of alcohol and sex combinations is positively associated with adolescents’ attitudes and norms. These relationships were stronger among White adolescents. Intention was predicted by attitude, norms, and control, but only the attitude–intention relationship was different by race group (stronger for Whites).     

Dietary assimilation and health among hispanic immigrants to the United States

Three important findings emerge from this study using New Immigrant Survey data to examine dietary change and health among Hispanic immigrants. First, individuals who have been in the United States longer report a greater degree of dietary change. Second, after controlling for behavioral characteristics and preexisting diet-related conditions (diagnoses of high blood pressure and diabetes prior to coming to the United States), more dramatic levels of change in diet are associated with higher measures of body mass index. Based on respondents' comparisons of their current health to their health just prior to their most recent trip to the United States, change in diet as a result of immigrating to the United States is positively correlated with both better health and worse health. Among individuals reporting greater levels of dietary change, those with worse health have been in the United States for longer and are more likely to report the use of English at work than those reporting better health, factors that indicate acculturation and exposure to broader U.S. society.     

Gender, household labor, and scholarly productivity among university professors

In the present paper, we use data collected from 673 faculty members at one research university to describe the division of household labor among academics and explore the relationship between household labor and scholarly productivity. The analyses demonstrate that domestic labor is distributed along relatively traditional lines among academics, reflecting the continued traditionalism found in the general population regarding house-hold labor and child care. Women college-professors shoulder considerably more house-hold labor than do their male colleagues—particularly when they are married and when there are children in the home. We hypothesized that the gender discrepancies in house-hold labor we found would translate into differences in scholarly productivity; however, this was the case only among tenure-track faculty with children in the home. This work was completed while the authors were supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (RO1 AG18869-01, Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer, Principal Investigators). The data collection was funded by the Louisiana State University Commission on the Status of Women.