Child Support Obligations and Low‐Income Fathers

Using the 1994–1998 waves of the Current Population Survey—Child Support Supplement (N =5,387), the aims of this study are to document child support obligation rates of nonresident fathers, to examine the effect of the obligation rate on child support compliance, and to calculate the trade‐off between fathers’ financial responsibility and children's well‐being, paying particular attention to low‐income fathers. The results indicate that low‐income fathers have high child support obligation rates, which significantly reduce their child support compliance. Although lowering the obligation rate for these fathers may improve their compliance, it does not fully offset the lowered obligation amounts and leads to a 30% net payment loss for welfare mothers and a 43% loss for nonwelfare mothers. Policy implications are discussed.     

Dependent masking and system life data analysis: Bayesian inference for two-component systems

Data from field operations of a system is often used to estimate the reliability of components. Under ideal circumstances, this system field data contains the time to failure along with information on the exact component responsible for the system failure. However, in many cases, the exact component causing the failure of the system cannot be identified, and is considered to be masked. Previously developed models for estimation of component reliability from masked system life data have been based upon the assumption that masking occurs independently of the true cause of system failure. In this paper we develop a Bayesian methodology for estimating component reliabilities from masked system life data when the probability of masking is dependent upon the true cause of system failure. The Bayesian approach is illustrated for the case of a two-component system of exponentially distributed components.     

Drama therapy in diagnosis and treatment

The author examines the use of drama therapy as a therapeutic and diagnostic tool that can help provide insights into personality and character and aid in the exploration of conflicts of children in therapy.     

Communicating uncertainty in national security intelligence: Expert and nonexpert interpretations of and preferences for verbal and numeric formats

Organizations in several domains including national security intelligence communicate judgments under uncertainty using verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) instead of numeric probabilities (e.g., 75% chance), despite research indicating that the former have variable meanings across individuals. In the intelligence domain, uncertainty is also communicated using terms such as low, moderate, or high to describe the analyst's confidence level. However, little research has examined how intelligence professionals interpret these terms and whether they prefer them to numeric uncertainty quantifiers. In two experiments (N = 481 and 624, respectively), uncertainty communication preferences of expert (n = 41 intelligence analysts in Experiment 1) and nonexpert intelligence consumers were elicited. We examined which format participants judged to be more informative and simpler to process. We further tested whether participants treated verbal probability and confidence terms as independent constructs and whether participants provided coherent numeric probability translations of verbal probabilities. Results showed that although most nonexperts favored the numeric format, experts were about equally split, and most participants in both samples regarded the numeric format as more informative. Experts and nonexperts consistently conflated probability and confidence. For instance, confidence intervals inferred from verbal confidence terms had a greater effect on the location of the estimate than the width of the estimate, contrary to normative expectation. Approximately one-fourth of experts and over one-half of nonexperts provided incoherent numeric probability translations for the terms likely and unlikely when the elicitation of best estimates and lower and upper bounds were briefly spaced by intervening tasks.     

Introduction: The Puerto Rico Project: Reflections Sixty Years Later

In the late 1940s Julian Steward initiated a social anthropological study of Puerto Rico, carried out by a team working in a range of communities representing different ecological zones. The project was a landmark in anthropology but met with criticism from Puerto Rican scholars. The articles in this collection reconsider the Puerto Rico Project in terms of its place within the history of anthropology, its reception in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, and some theoretical and political issues raised by it.     

WILLPOWER AND THE OPTIMAL CONTROL OF VISCERAL URGES

Common intuition and experimental psychology suggest that the ability to self‐regulate (willpower) is a depletable resource. We investigate the behavior of an agent with limited willpower who optimally consumes over time an endowment of a tempting and storable consumption good or cake. We assume that restraining consumption below the most tempting feasible rate requires willpower. Any willpower not used to regulate consumption may be valuable in controlling other urges. Willpower thus links otherwise unrelated behaviors requiring self‐control. An agent with limited willpower will display apparent domain‐specific time preference. Such an agent will almost never perfectly smooth his consumption, even when it is feasible to do so. Whether the agent relaxes control of his consumption over time as experimental psychologists predict or tightens it as most behavioral theories predict depends in our model on the net effect of two analytically distinct but opposing forces.     

Child and Family Outcomes in New York and Tel AVIV: Using Social Indicators in a City Level Comparative Analysis

This article presents a comparative study in which social indicators were employed as a means to examine differences in living conditions and family and children outcomes on a local level. The study obtained household-level data on the well-being of children and families in two cities: New York (NYC) and Tel Aviv (TLV). Data were collected using computer assisted telephone interview (CATI) technology and random digit dialing (RDD). Telephone interviews were conducted with the randomly selected adults in English, Spanish and Chinese in NYC and in Hebrew in TLV. The study reported here documented differences in family and child well-being between the two cities. It further documented that family size and caregiver level of education play a similar role in both cities and their importance in regard to child and family outcomes. The significant differences found in adults’ and especially children’s outcomes were analyzed by the caregiver’s level of education and further support the need for policies that alleviate the burden of less educated caregivers and aim to improve the well-being of them and their families. The study demonstrates the relevance of social indicators at the local level, not only for measuring outcomes among specific populations, but also in regard to their possible implications for social policies, a most timely task in an era of social services devolution.