Marriage and Family Counselor Licensure: Special Reference to Nevada*

The background of licensure-certification of marriage and family counselors is briefly sketched and major provisions of California compared. Special attention is given to the Nevada law. (Editor.)     

Weighing the success of a national Alzheimer's disease service demonstration

As the need for long-term care services within the United States has grown dramatically, Congress has consistently deflected the primary responsibility for such care to state governments, local organizations, and, ultimately, the family. This paper examines the impact of the Alzheimer's Disease Demonstration Grants to States (ADDGS) program, a small federally funded initiative within the context of this trend. Although the demonstration can be deemed a huge success relative to the goals of creating new services for an underserved target population, questions are raised about the merits of the program relative to the exploding need for an effective network of long-term care services.     

Life feeling scales for use in German and American samples

This paper describes an effort to construct social life feeling scales (self-determination, trust, future outlook, and so forth) for use in both American and German samples. Unidimensional scales (as defined) based on American respondents were modified as required to meet the same criteria in a German sample. Scales based on the German sample were modified as required to meet the same criteria among the American respondents. These modified scales were combined in order to meet given criteria of unidimensionality in both samples. Although combined scales meet (approximately) criteria of unidimensionality in both samples (German and American), the question of whether the feelings underlying these scales are identical in both populations remains.Financial support for this project was provided by Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analyzen, and Office of Research and Development, Indiana University.     

Effect on unwanted fertility of extending physician-administered birth control in the United States

A goal of publicly subsidized family planning programs in the United States is to prevent unwanted births, and the primary means being used to achieve this goal is to increase coverage with physician-administered contraception, with priority being given to persons from low-income families. We analyzed data from families living in low-income neighborhoods to determine whether that means would contribute to that goal, and if so, how much unwanted fertility might be decreased through increased coverage with physician-administered methods.The results indicate that increased coverage with those methods would decrease unwanted fertility by 80 percent (79 percent among blacks, 83 percent among whites). Increasing the ratio of sterilization to pill and IUD makes the effect of the increased coverage even more dramatic.     

Cohort migration

Most migration analyses focus on net migration and are concerned with areal redistributions of population. Migration may also be studied as an event in the life-cycle of an individual, and migration rates may be defined as properties of cohorts. A number of efforts to examine migration as a cohort process has been hampered by the character of available data [or the United States. Rather than await the development of a registration system-either directly or via social security and tax records-the collection of residence histories is suggested as the most feasible approach to obtaining suitable data. A schematic representation of residence histories clarifies their relation to other types of migration data and illustrates the need to design such surveys with specific research purposes in mind. Exploratory work with the 1958 Residence History Supplement to the Current Population Survey (by Beale, Shryock, myself, and various colleagues) demonstrates the utility of this approach.Local studies have made fruitful use of residence histories but typically are unable to delineate birth cohorts or other appropriate base populations exposed to risk. Development of cohort migration techniques analogous to the life table approach to mortality or cohort Jertility analysis requires national data. But migration, unlike Jertility and mortality, involves events that are reversible and repeatable. Hence the demographer's stock of analytic tools requires expansion. To the sociologist-demographer, experimentation with cohort migration models seems to be getting at one of the crucial methodological problems of sociology, the analysis of social mobility. A mutually profitable interchange with students of social mobility is envisaged.     

The difference in unwanted births between blacks and whites

Blacks are more likely than whites to have unwanted births. A common explanation for that difference is that blacks use less effective contraceptive methods, use contraception less effectively, and use contraception less often than whites. Analysis of data from 17 cities in our family planning evaluation project suggested that, among women living in low-income neighborhoods, the black-white difference in unwanted births was not due to (1) blacks reaching desired completed parity at younger ages than whites, (2) differences in age or parity in our black and white samples, (3) black-white differences in current use of physician-administered contraception, or (4) blacks being more likely than whites to adopt physician-administered contraception after having an unwanted birth. Black-white differences which might have contributed to relatively more unwanted births among blacks were (1) blacks desired fewer children, (2) blacks were less likely than whites to use nonphysician-administered methods and more likely than whites to use no contraception, and (3) blacks had higher failure rates than whites subsequent to the adoption of physician-administered methods and when not using those methods. Comparisons are made with the 1965 and 1970 National Fertility Studies, and program implications of the findings discussed.     

The poor as a “perfect contraceptive population” and zero population growth

A goal of the federal family planning program is to enable women to have only those children they want, with priority given to the poor. Is that compatible with the goal of those who want zero population growth? This analysis shows that prevention of all unwanted births to women in low-income families would have yielded completed fertility much above that required for zero population growth.     

The impact of risk attitude,uncertainty and disequilibria on optimal production and inventory

Summary The empirical facts seem to indicate that in real economies the effect of uncertainty tends to decrease production. The limitations of empirical investigations presented should be stressed: they were performed mainly on an aggregate level, they mainly refer to Austrian manufacturing, they rely heavily on questionnaires. Above all empirical investigation will never be able to decide normative questions or to explain the behavior in the general equilibrium. Nevertheless in the short run, given all the rigidities and disequilibria which exist, uncertainty tends to lower optimal production even in absence of risk aversion. Risk aversion becomes important for large, for once-for-all decisions, but it is not the only channel through which uncertainty changes decisions.Technological concavity created by concave marginal revenues or by convex marginal costs, marginal costs of uncertainty in disequilibria model or asymmetric costs of revisions of the preliminary decision are able to bias the decision downward in a real world economy without invokingPaper presented to the 2nd Conference on the Foundations of Risk and Utility (FUR), Venezia, 1984.