Population Trends as a Counterweight to Central City Decline, 1950–2000

The share of metropolitan residents living in central cities declined dramatically from 1950 to 2000. We argue that cities would have lost even further ground if not for demographic trends such as renewed immigration, delayed childbearing, and a decline in the share of households headed by veterans. We provide causal estimates of the effect of children on residential location using the birth of twins. The effect of veteran status is identified from a discontinuity in the probability of military service during and after the mass mobilization for World War II. Our results suggest that these changes in demographic composition were strong enough to bolster city population but not to fully counteract socioeconomic factors favoring suburban growth.     

Oil Spill Disruption and Problem Drinking: Assessing the Impact of Religious Context among Gulf Coast Residents

Population Research and Policy Review - While a wide body of research has indicated that social resources may be enhanced through religious practice, few studies have explored how social resources...     

Burnout and Death Anxiety in Hospice Social Workers

Hospice work has been regarded as particularly stressful due to the complexity inherent in the provision of end-of-life care. Burnout and death anxiety are especially relevant to hospice social workers because they regularly function in a high-stress, high-loss environment. The purpose of this study was threefold: to determine the prevalence of burnout and death anxiety among hospice social workers; to examine associations between burnout and death anxiety; and to explore the factors which may contribute to the development of death anxiety and burnout. Participants completed four items: the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS), the Death Anxiety Questionnaire (DAQ), a demographic questionnaire, and a set of open-ended questions. Findings indicate that mean scores on the subscales of the MBI-HSS ranged from the low to moderate range and that a strong positive correlation existed between death anxiety and the depersonalization subscale of the MBI. Three key themes emerged from the qualitative data: (a) personal interest in hospice social work developed through a variety of ways; (b) although death anxiety decreased from exposure and understanding of the death process, there was increased death anxiety surrounding working with certain patients; and (c) burnout was primarily related to workload or difficult cases.     

Adolescent Emotion Socialization: A Longitudinal Study of Friends' Responses to Negative Emotions

Although peer influences are thought to be critically important to adolescent development, there is a paucity of research investigating the emotion socialization practices that take place between adolescents. This longitudinal study evaluated close friends' responses to negative emotion using a newly developed assessment tool of peer emotion socialization, you and your friends. Adolescent participants (N = 205) exhibiting a range of internalizing and externalizing problems between 11 and 17 years of age were assessed and re‐evaluated two years later. Participants were asked to rate the frequency with which their friends responded to them by encouraging, distracting, matching, ignoring, overtly victimizing, and/or relationally victimizing their emotions. The results indicated high levels of internal consistency and moderate levels of long‐term stability. Close friends most often responded supportively to the participants' emotional displays, but these responses differed by gender. Also, friends' emotion socialization responses were concurrently and predictively associated with participant problem status. This study contributes to a better understanding of the processes by which adolescents' emotions are socialized by their friends and has important implications for future prevention and intervention efforts.     

Networks Versus Need: Drivers of Urban Out-Migration in the Brazilian Amazon

As urbanization rates rise globally, it becomes increasingly important to understand the factors associated with urban out-migration. In this paper, we examine the drivers of urban out-migration among young adults in two medium-sized cities in the Brazilian Amazon—Altamira and Santarém—focusing on the roles of social capital, human capital, and socioeconomic deprivation. Using household survey data from 1,293 individuals in the two cities, we employ an event history model to assess factors associated with migration and a binary logit model to understand factors associated with remitting behavior. We find that in Altamira, migration tends to be an individual-level opportunistic strategy fostered by extra-local family networks, while in Santarém, migration tends to be a household-level strategy driven by socioeconomic deprivation and accompanied by remittances. These results indicate that urban out-migration in Brazil is a diverse social process, and that the relative roles of extra-local networks versus economic need can function quite differently between geographically proximate but historically and socioeconomically distinct cities.     

The Influence of Graphical and Symbolic Language Manipulations on Responses to Self-Administered Questions

This article reports results from 14 experimental comparisonsdesigned to test 7 hypotheses about the effects of two typesof nonverbal languages (symbols and graphics) on responses toself-administered questionnaires. The experiments were includedin a survey of 1,042 university students. Significant differenceswere observed for most comparisons, providing support for allseven hypotheses. These results support the view that respondents’answers to questions in self-administered surveys are influencedby more than words. Thus, the visual presentation of questionsmust be taken into consideration when designing such surveysand, especially, when comparing results across surveys in whichthe visual presentation of questions is varied.     

Approximating likelihoods for large spatial data sets

Summary.  Likelihood methods are often difficult to use with large, irregularly sited spatial data sets, owing to the computational burden. Even for Gaussian models, exact calculations of the likelihood for n observations require O ( n ³) operations. Since any joint density can be written as a product of conditional densities based on some ordering of the observations, one way to lessen the computations is to condition on only some of the 'past' observations when computing the conditional densities. We show how this approach can be adapted to approximate the restricted likelihood and we demonstrate how an estimating equations approach allows us to judge the efficacy of the resulting approximation. Previous work has suggested conditioning on those past observations that are closest to the observation whose conditional density we are approximating. Through theoretical, numerical and practical examples, we show that there can often be considerable benefit in conditioning on some distant observations as well.