Socioeconomic Status,Family Processes,and Individual Development

Research during the past decade shows that social class or socioeconomic status (SES) is related to satisfaction and stability in romantic unions, the quality of parent‐child relationships, and a range of developmental outcomes for adults and children. This review focuses on evidence regarding potential mechanisms proposed to account for these associations. Research findings reported during the past decade demonstrate support for an interactionist model of the relationship between SES and family life, which incorporates assumptions from both the social causation and social selection perspectives. This review concludes with recommendations for future research on SES, family processes, and individual development in terms of important theoretical and methodological issues yet to be addressed.     

Imbalanced sex ratios, men's sexual behavior, and risk of sexually transmitted infection in China

China has been experiencing pronounced changes in its sex ratio, but little research has explored the consequences of these changes for sexual behavior and health. We merge data from the 1999-2000 Chinese Health and Family Life Survey with community-level data from the 1982, 1990, and 2000 Chinese censuses to examine the relationship between the local sex ratio and several dimensions of men's sexual behavior and sexual health. Multilevel logistic regression models show that, when faced with a relative abundance of age-matched women in their community, Chinese men are slightly less likely to have intercourse with commercial sex workers, but are more likely to engage in premarital noncommercial intercourse and to test positive for a sexually transmitted infection. These findings are consistent with hypotheses derived from demographic-opportunity theory, which suggests that an abundance of opposite-sex partners will increase the risk of early, frequent, and multi-partner sex and, through this, sexually transmitted infection risk.     

生活在上海

我喜欢教学,也喜欢教学给我带来的感受。当看到学生们渐渐取得进步,就会心生成就感,我想这就是我对工作的满意度吧。所有这些,给我带来的,是让我觉得在上海生活的每一天都很有意思。     

Prosecuting the prosecutor: The makings of the Michael Morton Act

Prosecutorial misconduct is not a rare event, but it often goes undetected, unreported, or no action is taken by the criminal justice system. However, when one Texas prosecutor, Ken Anderson, served jail time for wrongfully prosecuting an innocent man, Michael Morton, for murdering his wife, he made history. Anderson withheld exculpatory evidence leading to Morton wrongfully serving 25 years before being released with new DNA evidence. However, Anderson only served a five-day sentence and $500 fine. We discuss the case in the context of inequality and legal realism in the criminal justice system. Also, we look at the implications and new legal action taken by the state of Texas to try and combat this problem, along with looking at these secretive occupational subcultures.     

Diverging Destinies: Maternal Education and the Developmental Gradient in Time With Children

Using data from the 2003?C2007 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), we compare mothers?? (N = 6,640) time spent in four parenting activities across maternal education and child age subgroups. We test the hypothesis that highly educated mothers not only spend more time in active child care than less-educated mothers but also alter the composition of that time to suit children??s developmental needs more than less-educated mothers. Results support this hypothesis: not only do highly educated mothers invest more time in basic care and play when youngest children are infants or toddlers than when children are older, but differences across education groups in basic care and play time are largest among mothers with infants or toddlers; by contrast, highly educated mothers invest more time in management activities when children are 6 to 13?years old than when children are younger, and differences across education groups in management are largest among mothers with school-aged children. These patterns indicate that the education gradient in mothers?? time with children is characterized by a ??developmental gradient.??     

中国农村地区的家庭禀赋与外出务工劳动力回流

中国农村地区家庭禀赋对个人的行为决策有着重要的影响,需要学术界予以更多的关注。为了考察外生性的家庭禀赋对劳动力就业流动的影响,文章通过构建新生代外出务工劳动力和户主子女的回流决策两个计量模型来进行经验论证。分析结果表明,农村劳动力的迁移选择是综合考虑家庭禀赋状况的理性决策,尤其是对于年轻一代的外出劳动力。家庭经济资本的增加会阻碍家庭外出务工成员的回流。外出劳动力回流的概率起初随着家庭人力资本和家庭自然资本的增长而上升,达到一定程度后开始下降。家庭成员只有拥有较为丰富的人力资本,外出务工劳动力才能对家庭社会资本加以充分利用。另外,分析显示年轻一代劳动力和第一代劳动力对家庭社会资本和自然资本的利用是有差异的。     

A Comparative Analysis of the Fertility of the Urban and Rural in China Since 2000

The different in the fertility of the rural and urban and future changing trend are very important questions to understand China’s population problem. This paper calculates the fertility of the urban and the rural since 2000 based on the statistical data and compares the fertility rate in the urban and the rural population since 2000. The finding shows that the TFR in the rural is less than 1.8 while the TFR in the urban is less than 1.3 and the difference is narrowing year by year. The fertility difference is mainly caused by the second child, generally speaking the second child fertility tend to increasing slightly while the first child fertility shows dramatic fluctuations because of the Chinese folk culture, the fertility fluctuation in the rural is much dramatic than that in the urban. The mean age at childbearing (MAC) has been delaying in both the rural and the urban areas in the decade.     

Welfare programs and the state economy

Welfare policy has been controversial and support is often drawn along political affiliation lines, the economic return of investment in welfare programs is frequently cited as a justification for new and expanded policies. To investigate the direct and indirect effects of welfare programs on economic performance, the authors develop a multilink approach, through employment and investment. The relationship is then tested with data from each of the United States from 1976 to 2006. Findings show welfare programs have no direct effect on a state's economy. Indirectly, welfare has a negative effect through investment, though the effect on employment is minimal.     

Beyond Rhetorical Differences: A Cohesive Account of Post‐devolution Developments in UK Health Policy

Health is perhaps the most significant policy area to be devolved to decision‐makers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Consequently, there has been a great deal of interest in assessing the extent to which health policies (which already differed somewhat prior to devolution) have diverged since 1999. To date, analyses have tended to focus either on health care policies or on specific public health issues (e.g. health inequalities or tobacco control). The story that emerges from this body of work suggests health care policies have diverged significantly, whilst public health policies have remained remarkably similar. This article is one of the first to consider health care and public health policy alongside each other. It reassesses and updates previous analyses, incorporating developments relating to the 2010 general election and the 2007 and 2011 devolved administration elections. Drawing on a variety of textual sources (policy documents, research evidence and corporate literature), our findings differ from existing analyses in suggesting that, despite some noticeable differences in policy rhetoric, approaches to both health care provision and tackling public health problems remain similar. Looking to the future, the article concludes that the common economic challenges, combined with a tight fiscal policy (that remains excepted from devolution), means the similarities in health care provision across the UK are likely to remain more pronounced than the differences. However, current debate about the constitutional settlement, and in particular the prospect of greater fiscal freedoms for the devolved administrations, may provide opportunities for more meaningful divergence in health policy than has been possible hitherto.     

Betting the farm on high food prices: A consumer based approach to agriculture protection

Our question is quite simple: If agriculture protectionism is a product of economic development, why is agriculture protected at such varying degrees by otherwise similarly developed countries? Previous attempts to fit agriculture into general models of trade policy formation have relied exclusively on producer demand for protection and merely assume the associated demand for lower prices that might come from consumers. Not surprisingly, these previous studies add only minimally to this strange phenomenon. Our method turns this approach on its head by modeling the political strategy of agriculture protection on the costs incurred by the consumer. Taking both producers and consumers into account more accurately reflects the intent of extant theoretical models of protectionism. Our results show that using the consumer as the dependent variable provides more robust results on common independent variables. Recent global events show that consumer disapproval of agriculture policies should not be underestimated by political scientists or politicians.