EDUCATIONAL AND WORK STRATEGIES FROM ADOLESCENCE TO EARLY ADULTHOOD: CONSEQUENCES FOR EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

Whereas sociologists have long recognized that adolescence marks the start of the socioeconomic career, the importance of this period has been attributed to school performance, aspirations, and significant others' influence that support educational attainment to a greater or lesser degree. The underlying premise of this study is that adolescent work is an expression of instrumental action with consequences for socioeconomic attainment. Using data from the Youth Development Study, we find that part-time work during high school is linked with patterns of schooling and working that persist during the succeeding years and are more or less conducive to the receipt of a BA/BS degree. Moderate work coupled with school appears to especially facilitate the educational attainment of low promise youth.     

Early Marriage in the United States

Despite drastic changes in the American family, a significant minority of Americans marry early. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N= 14,165), this study evaluates the prevalence and antecedents of early marriage in the United States. The results indicate 25% of women and 16% of men marry before age 23, and early marriage varies widely across a number of characteristics. Individuals who marry earlier are more likely to be from disadvantaged families, from conservative Protestant or Mormon families, to value their religious faith more highly, to have a high‐school diploma but a lower educational trajectory, and to cohabit before marriage. Scholars and policymakers interested in marriage should pay adequate attention to understanding and supporting these individuals’ marriages.     

Multilevel particle filters for the non-linear filtering problem in continuous time

Statistics and Computing - In the following article we consider the numerical approximation of the non-linear filter in continuous-time, where the observations and signal follow diffusion...     

Is Adolescent Employment Still a Risk Factor for High School Dropout?

Past cohorts of teenagers who spent long hours in jobs were more likely to drop out of high school than those who worked moderate hours or did not work at all. This article examines the association between employment intensity and dropout among adolescents in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 who traversed high school during a time of decreased prevalence of both employment and dropout relative to earlier cohorts. Analyses reveal that a relatively small percentage of teenagers nowadays are characterized as either intensive workers or dropouts (around 11% each). Yet, despite declines in intensive employment and dropout, disadvantaged youth remain overrepresented in both groups, and intensive work is still a risk factor for poor grades and dropout.     

Death and the Penguin: modularity,alienation and organising

ABSTRACT

The originality of this paper lies in the ways in which it explores how the depiction of organised crime within Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin can inform our understanding of organisational modularity. This non-orthodox approach might open up new avenues of thought in the study of organisational modularity while further illustrating how novelistic worlds can inform accounts of organisational realities. Two main research questions underlie the paper. How can Andrey Kurkov’s novel further our understanding of the complexity of organisational worlds and realities by focusing our attention on different landscapes of organising? How does Kurkov’s novel help us grasp the concept of modularity by drawing attention to new forms of modular organisation? Drawing from our reading of Kurkov’s novel, we primarily explore organisational modularity through Kurkov’s depiction of organised crime and consider the themes of alienation and isolation in the context of modular organising.     

Metropolitan Structure and Neighborhood Attainment: Exploring Intermetropolitan Variation in Racial Residential Segregation

Using data from the 1981, 1991, and 2001 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and several decennial censuses, we examine how characteristics of metropolitan areas are associated with black and white households’ neighborhood racial composition. Results from hierarchical linear models show that about 20% to 40% of the variation in the percentage of households’ tract population that is non-Hispanic white or non-Hispanic black exists across metropolitan areas. Over time, white households’ exposure to non-Hispanic white neighbors has declined, and their exposure to non-Hispanic black neighbors has increased; the reverse trends are observed for blacks. These trends cannot be attributed to changes in the ecological structure of metropolitan areas. Blacks have fewer white neighbors in large metropolitan areas containing sizable minority populations, and blacks have more white neighbors in metropolitan areas with high government employment. Whites have more black neighbors in metropolitan areas with high levels of government employment and ample new housing; whites have fewer black neighbors in metropolitan areas with a high level of municipal fragmentation. The association between metropolitan-area percentage black and tract percentage black is weaker among whites than among blacks, suggesting that whites are especially motivated to self-segregate in metropolitan areas with large black populations.     

Semiparametric Stochastic Modeling of the Rate Function in Longitudinal Studies

In longitudinal biomedical studies, there is often interest in the rate functions, which describe the functional rates of change of biomarker profiles. This paper proposes a semiparametric approach to model these functions as the realizations of stochastic processes defined by stochastic differential equations. These processes are dependent on the covariates of interest and vary around a specified parametric function. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is developed for inference. The proposed method is compared with several existing methods in terms of goodness-of-fit and more importantly the ability to forecast future functional data in a simulation study. The proposed methodology is applied to prostate-specific antigen profiles for illustration. Supplementary materials for this paper are available online.     

Bayesian and likelihood inference for cure rates based on defective inverse Gaussian regression models

Failure time models are considered when there is a subpopulation of individuals that is immune, or not susceptible, to an event of interest. Such models are of considerable interest in biostatistics. The most common approach is to postulate a proportion p of immunes or long-term survivors and to use a mixture model [5]. This paper introduces the defective inverse Gaussian model as a cure model and examines the use of the Gibbs sampler together with a data augmentation algorithm to study Bayesian inferences both for the cured fraction and the regression parameters. The results of the Bayesian and likelihood approaches are illustrated on two real data sets.