What would the princess want?

Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, and Political Manipulation of America's Largest Charitable Trust, by Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. 336 pp., $26.00 cloth, $16.00 paper.     

Heterogeneity in Two‐Parent Families and Adolescent Well‐Being

This study highlights the heterogeneity in two‐parent families and examines how adolescents fare when they reside in simple two‐parent, blended, and stepfamilies. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N= 1,769), we find that shared biological children in blended families have worse outcomes than children in simple two‐parent families, even though they reside with both of their biological parents. These differences occur for academic performance, delinquency, school detachment, and depression. Current explanations in the family literature do not account for the poorer outcomes of shared children in blended families. We suggest that the presence of half‐siblings creates a unique family situation that is not accurately represented in the current family literature.     

Feminism and the exclusion of army women from combat

Although claiming to represent the views of military women on the combat exclusion policy, feminist activists actually represent only a minority of Army women. Most women soldiers do support opening the combat arms to women, however only on a volunteer basis and with physical qualifications for those jobs. Most Army women are not interested in serving in the combat arms, and roughly half do not believe they would be capable of doing so. A gap exists, then, between activists who deny differences between men and women and seek to bring women's policy in line with men, and women soldiers who support greater opportunities for women but who do not perceive most women as equally qualified for the combat arms as men. Furthering the gap between these activists and much of their constituency, the feminist framing of the debate has neither been tailored to fit the specific nature of the military as an organization (one which does not value individualist perspectives) nor the particular circumstances of the lives of military women (particularly enlisted and/or minority women). She specializes in gender, rank, and race relations in the military, as well as U.S. participation in peacekeeping operations.     

A Panel Study of the Associations Between Maintenance Strategies and Relational Characteristics

Resilience in marriage is tied to the manner in which people strategically maintain their relationships. The associations between perceptions of five relational maintenance strategies (positivity, openness, assurances, social networks, and sharing tasks) and three fundamental relationship characteristics (liking, commitment, and control mutuality) are examined concurrently and over time. At three points in time, each separated by a month, married partners reported their perceptions of partner maintenance activities and their own beliefs regarding the relational characteristics. Results indicate that perceptions of maintenance strategies significantly add to the variance of these relational features, even when controlling for the participants' previous reports of the same measures.     

Negotiating Boundaries of Refugee Resettlement: A Study of Settlement Patterns and Social Support*

This article analyses aspects of the bureaucratie process of negotiating placement and social support by and for resettled refugees in Canada. Theoretical issues addressed include refugee resilience and effects of power structures on migrant networks. The article describes a qualitative study of underlying reasons for government‐assisted refugee secondary migration to Ontario. The study demonstrates that refugees seek social support by moving from initial settlement sites to join extended family and analyses how the resettlement bureaucracy, driven by political as well as humanitarian interests, attempts to control the process, in contradiction to refugees' preferences. The negotiation of placement and definitions of relevant social supports by bureaucrats and refugees are discussed. In conclusion, greater attention to refugee self‐determination is suggested to improve settlement outcomes.     

Learning-related behaviors, cognitive skills, and ability grouping when schooling begins

We use ECLS-K data from a national sample of students to estimate the determinants and consequences of reading ability group placement in kindergarten and first grade. We find that prior test score performance is the strongest determinant of such placement, followed in magnitude by the teacher’s judgment of the student’s learning-related classroom behavior. These variables explain most of the race, gender, and social class differentials when students are placed into ability groups for the first time. Within kindergarten and first grade classes where grouping is used, placement into a higher group exerts a positive effect on student learning-related behavior and reading achievement. Ability group placement and the teacher’s assessment of student behavior both have significant effects on student’s growth in reading achievement, even net of their prior reading achievement scores. Such grouping takes individual and group-level performance differences that emerge during the preschool period and causes them to widen more than would otherwise be the case during the first 2 years of formal schooling.     

Maternal mental health and faltering growth in infants

This study reports on the first phase of a large‐scale, longitudinal, multidisciplinary community study examining the growth, learning and development of young children with a particular focus on failure to thrive without organic cause. However, the group identified in this study may be better described as weight faltering. This paper examines the psychological data collected using the Parenting Stress Index, Rosenberg Self‐Esteem and the General Health Questionnaire in relation to child growth. There were no significant differences between the mothers of the weight faltering and control children in terms of parenting stress, maternal depression, maternal perceptions of their parenting competence or maternal self‐esteem. Maternal sensitivity to comments about child size, regardless of direction, had a negative impact on mood. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust likelihood functions in Bayesian inference

In order to deal with mild deviations from the assumed parametric model, we propose a procedure for accounting for model uncertainty in the Bayesian framework. In particular, in the derivation of posterior distributions, we discuss the use of robust pseudo-likelihoods, which offer the advantage of preventing the effects caused by model misspecifications, i.e. when the underlying distribution lies in a neighborhood of the assumed model. The influence functions of posterior summaries, such as the posterior mean, are investigated as well as the asymptotic properties of robust posterior distributions. Although the use of a pseudo-likelihood cannot be considered orthodox in the Bayesian perspective, it is shown that, also through some illustrative examples, how a robust pseudo-likelihood, with the same asymptotic properties of a genuine likelihood, can be useful in the inferential process in order to prevent the effects caused by model misspecifications.     

Simple non-parametric estimators for unemployment duration analysis

Summary.  We consider an extension of conventional univariate Kaplan–Meier-type estimators for the hazard rate and the survivor function to multivariate censored data with a censored random regressor. It is an Akritas-type estimator which adapts the non-parametric conditional hazard rate estimator of Beran to more typical data situations in applied analysis. We show with simulations that the estimator has nice finite sample properties and our implementation appears to be fast. As an application we estimate non-parametric conditional quantile functions with German administrative unemployment duration data.