Linking Financial Strain to Marital Instability: Examining the Roles of Emotional Distress and Marital Interaction

Using a sample consisting of 4,997 married couples from the National Survey of Families and Households, individual emotional distress, the occurrence of couple disagreements, couple fighting, and couple quality time together mediated the relationship between financial strain and personal assessments of marital instability. The overall results suggest that financial strain influences both positive and negative forms of couple interaction which are stronger mediators than personal emotional distress of the relationship between financial strain and marital instability. The results further suggest that there were no gender differences among these linkages.     

Collective Memory and Nonpublic Opinion: A Historical Note on a Methodological Controversy About a Political Problem

This article describes a little‐known moment in the history of social research, the so‐called Group Experiment (Gruppenexperiment) conducted in Germany in 1950–51 by members of the reconstituted Frankfurt school. That research, I argue, provides a missing link in the history of the ideas of deliberative democracy and public discourse, areas of political theory in which the substantive legacies of pragmatism and interactionism are particularly significant. Most important, however, the Gruppenexperiment provides a model for rethinking certain methodological and conceptual problems plaguing contemporary research on collective memory, namely, the tendency to reify it.     

Quality Provision with Heterogeneous Consumer Reservation Utilities

This study examines a firm's quality and price decisions when consumers differ not only in their willingness‐to‐pay for quality but also in their reservation utility for the basic product. We find that while the firm offers lower‐quality products when consumers' valuations for quality deteriorate, the optimal quality may increase with a negative shift in consumers' reservation utilities. We also investigate the optimal price and quality of the products within a vertically differentiated product line when the number of products is exogenously given. The existing literature shows that when consumers differ only in their willingness‐to‐pay for quality, the firm sets the efficient quality for consumers with the highest valuation for quality, whereas the concern for cannibalization pushes down the quality of inferior products. We find that when consumers are heterogeneous in both their reservation utility and valuation for quality, the concern for cannibalization may distort the quality upwards, even for consumers with the highest willingness‐to‐pay for quality. In addition, a low‐quality product may enjoy a higher profit margin than a high‐quality product within the product line.     

He Said What? Guided Cognitive Reframing About the Co‐Resident Father/Stepfather–Adolescent Relationship

We studied young adolescents' seeking out support to understand conflict with their co‐resident fathers/stepfathers, and the cognitive and affective implications of such support‐seeking, phenomena we call guided cognitive reframing. Our sample included 392 adolescents (M_age = 12.5, 52.3% female) who were either of Mexican or European ancestry and lived with their biological mothers and either a stepfather or a biological father. More frequent reframing was associated with more adaptive cognitive explanations for father/stepfather behavior. Cognitions explained the link between seeking out and feelings about the father/stepfather and self. Feelings about the self were more strongly linked to depressive symptoms than cognitions. We discuss the implications for future research on social support, coping, guided cognitive reframing, and father–child relationships.     

Will nuclear power pay for itself?

Will nuclear power ever generate enough revenue to cover its costs? Historical data covering capital, fuel, operations, maintenance, decommissioning, and waste disposal costs, and generation and revenue figures during the period 1953 through 1991 were analyzed and compared. The analysis shows that nuclear power is currently nowhere near meeting its costs. Scenarios projecting future costs and revenues were developed. Analysis of these projections suggests that even under the most optimistic conditions (where costs are cut considerably and revenues climb substantially), the current generation of the nuclear option over its lifetime may be best be economically marginal.