Growing up Without Status: The Integration of Children in Mixed‐Status Families

Over the past three decades, a central new challenge confronting millions of children of immigrants has emerged: growing up in a mixed‐status family in which at least one member lacks legal authorization to live and work in the United States. A body of recent research argues that unauthorized immigrant status is the fundamental determinant of integration for unauthorized immigrants, with intergenerational consequences for their U.S.‐born children. We discuss the immigration and other policies that create the particular social context within which unauthorized immigration status becomes so detrimental for integration. Specifically, we focus on federal and state policies that undermine the very factors thought to protect children and support the integration of new generations of Americans: families and social networks, economic resources and opportunities, and health. We conclude with recommendations for future research.     

Population Growth and the Local Provision of Services: The Role of Primary Schools in Portugal

Population Research and Policy Review - The shrinking population in many European regions has led to a debate on the relation between the local provision of services of general interest and the...     

All Work and no Play? Understanding the Needs of Children with Caring Responsibilities

This article draws on research with children who provide care for parents with serious mental health problems and signals ongoing research that uses photographic participation methods with these groups of vulnerable children. The intention of this article is to highlight the need to move away from popular and simplistic representations of children with caring responsibilities (young carers) as victims of their parents’ illnesses, as ‘little angels’ whose caring work is condoned through rewards or as (exploited) informal domestic workers whose childhoods are inevitably compromised by the caring activity they undertake. Recommendations are made for generating deeper understanding about the lives and needs of children who are affected by parental impairment that is congruent with the thrust of current UK policy, Every Child Matters and the 2004 Children Act.     

Introduction to the special issue: Sociology and feminist scholarship

Feminist writers in the seventies angrily criticized the work of male academicians, arguing that what scholarship presented as the norm was in fact white male experience. That critique generated a body of interdisciplinary theory and scholarship. This introduction examines what feminist sociologists mean when they talk about feminist theory—how they use the interdisciplinary theories, and how they apply a feminist methodological stance to generate feminist theory within sociology. It provides a context for understanding the articles that follow in this special issue as examples of feminist research in sociology and as statements of some of the current issues and as problems of concern to feminists in sociology. She is interested in gender, culture, religion and feminist theory. She wroteCharisma and Community: A Study of Religious Commitment within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and is currently studying witchcraft traditions and the communities that support them.     

On the use of local optimizations within Metropolis–Hastings updates

Summary.  We propose new Metropolis–Hastings algorithms for sampling from multimodal dis- tributions on ℜ ⁿ . Tjelmeland and Hegstad have obtained direct mode jumping proposals by optimization within Metropolis–Hastings updates and different proposals for 'forward' and 'backward' steps. We generalize their scheme by allowing the probability distribution for forward and backward kernels to depend on the current state. We use the new setting to combine mode jumping proposals and proposals from a prior approximation. We obtain that the frequency of proposals from the different proposal kernels is automatically adjusted to their quality. Mode jumping proposals include local optimizations. When combining this with a prior approximation it is tempting to use local optimization results not only for mode jumping proposals but also to improve the prior approximation. We show how this idea can be implemented. The resulting algorithm is adaptive but has a Markov structure. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in two simulation examples.     

Research note: Promoting intercultural education through art education

Taking UNESCO’s proposal ‘learning how to live together’ as a starting point, we examined to what extent visual education can be used as a tool to promote the aims of intercultural education. We analyzed the power of using artistic images from different cultures to change students’ perception of cultural differences, thereby facilitating the development of attitudes of respect towards different ethnic/cultural groups. We also investigated to what extent this strategy could contribute to the integration of minority peers into a majority group. Students were assigned to either an experimental or a control group. The experimental treatment consisted of exposing students to several art object images associated with different cultures. Our measurement instrument was based on an adapted version of the ‘Draw‐A‐Person‐Test’, which we have called the ‘Draw‐Two‐Persons‐Test’. We also used a questionnaire to examine attitudes among subjects     

Assessing overweight, obesity, diet, and physical activity in college students

The authors surveyed 738 college students aged 18 to 27 years to assess overweight, obesity, dietary habits, and physical activity. They used BMI (body mass index) > or = 25 kg/m2 or BMI > or = 85th percentile and BMI > or = 30 kg/m2 or BMI > or = 95th percentile to estimate overweight and obesity in those aged < or = 19 years. To define overweight and obesity in those > or = 20 years, they used BMI > or = 25 kg/m2 and > or = 30 kg/m2. They found overweight rates of 21.6% using BMI directly and 16.2% using BMI percentile and obesity rates of 4.9% using BMI directly and 4.2% using BMI percentile. More than 69% of the participants reported < 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day and more than 67% reported < 20 g of fiber per day; participants reported physical activity on fewer than 3 d/wk. Most college students are not meeting dietary and physical activity guidelines, suggesting the need for prevention interventions and increased understanding of overweight in college students.