Social networks,stress and child abuse

The study investigated the relationship between situational stress, strength of informal social networks and maternal child abuse. Structured interviews were conducted with 41 abusive mothers and 59 non-abusing mothers using an author-developed instrument to measure social network strength and situational stress. Abusing mothers, on the average, reported significantly weaker, less supportive informal social networks than the non-abusing mothers. Both the neighbor-friend networks and the kinship networks of the non-abusing mothers were found to be stronger than those of the abusing mothers. The data also supported the positive association of situational stress with child abuse. Both situational stress and strength of social network proved to be significant predictors of abuse. The findings supported the hypothesized mediating effect of strong social networks upon the relationship between situational stress and child abuse. Mothers living in highly stressful life situations who reported strong social networks were less likely to be abusers than mothers living in high stress situations who reported weak social networks. The mediating functions of social networks are proposed, and the implications of the findings for interventions with high risk parents to prevent child abuse are discussed.     

Economic determinants of family size in West Africa

The economic theory of fertility postulates that income and prices, broadly defined, are important determinants of family size. What follows is an attempt to test this theory against the behavior of 717 predominantly urban households in Sierra Leone. Husband's education is used as a proxy for income; the "price" of a child is accounted for by wife's education and wife's wage rate. Other important variables are wife's age, a measure of child "quality," wife's age at first birth, and child mortality. The findings of the study tend to lend support to the economic theory of fertility but contain certain peculiarities which indicate a need for further research.     

Rocking the Vote: Using Personalized Messages to Motivate Voting among Young Adults

We examined a nationwide effort to encourage young adults to vote in the 1996 U.S. presidential election. During the year before the election, individuals were given the chance to sign and self-address one of two kinds of postcards pledging to vote; these cards were mailed back to the individuals within 2 weeks prior to the election. It is important to note that some individuals completed pledge cards that prompted them to provide their own reason for voting by completing the sentence, "I will vote because ______," whereas other individuals completed pledge cards that did not contain this sentence prompt. We conducted a large-scale survey of individuals who filled out pledge cards and determined that receiving a pledge card with the sentence prompt had a positive influence on voting. Moreover, this effect was found above and beyond demographic and psychological predictors of voting. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Relationship satisfaction of Mexican American and non-Hispanic white American interethnic couples: issues of acculturation and clinical intervention

Despite the increasing prevalence of interethnic marriages, remarkably little empirical literature exists for guiding clinical interventions offered to these couples. This study compared the marriages of 72 couples with one Mexican-American partner and one non-Hispanic White American partner, 75 Mexican-American couples, and 66 non-Hispanic White couples. Overall, the interethnic couples were more similar to non-Hispanic White couples than they were to Mexican-American couples across multiple domains, with the latter group indicating modestly higher levels of relationship distress. Among interethnic couples, Mexican-American wives' level of acculturation related significantly to both their own marital- and parental-role orientation and to distress in their relationships with children, as well as to their husbands' marital distress regarding child rearing and the couple's interactions regarding finances. Implications for clinical interventions with Mexican- and White-American interethnic couples are discussed.     

Impact of caregiver-receiver relationship quality on burden and satisfaction

The purpose of this study was to investigate, through an interview process, both the burden and satisfaction of the caregiving relationship between female primary caregivers and female care-receivers living in the same home. The ten cases were families involved in a caregiver/care-receiver shared-residence situation of at least one year's duration. The primary method of data collection was semi-structured interviews. The results of the qualitative approach called for a reversal of perspective. The intent was to examine how burden and satisfaction impacted the caregiver-receiver relationship quality. However, it was the quality of the relationship between the caregiver and care-receiver which distinguished low burden and high satisfaction.     

Measuring cultural bias in a cross-national study

Cross-national research claims increasing attention, due in part to a growing awareness of worldwide interdependence. One of the most intriguing areas of research is the comparison of perceptions about the quality of life. However, even the first attempt to compare cross-national quality of life perceptions (Cantril, 1965) raised a question which still remains unanswered: What do the differences between countries mean? Presumably differences in income, in the objective conditions of the major life domains such as housing, health and employment, and in demographic variables account for some of the difference among countries' reported quality of life satisfaction. But how can these factors be separated from other non-random factors? The term we use for the latter is “cultural bias”. By cultural bias we mean the systematic cross-national differences in quality of life perceptions which are not explained by objective measures of quality of life nor by demographic factors. Ordinarily these culture-specific biases are acquired during the socialization process almost as automatically and unconsciously as one learns one's mother tongue. Cultural bias is manifested in the tendency for members of a particular culture to be optimistic or pessimistic, confident or cautious in evaluating their social and physical environment and in revealing these evaluations to others. Thus, our conception of cultural bias has something in common with the idea of national character, but it is more limited in scope. In this paper we discuss the problem of isolating the impact of cultural bias from the other factors affecting how people perceive their quality of life and measuring it. We describe a method which is capable of doing this and report the results of using it to measure the relative cultural bias between respondents in Springfield, Illinois and Aixen-Provence, France.     

Measuring housing and environmental quality as indicator of quality of urban life: A case of traditional city of Benin,Nigeria

Using objectively derived criteria from Nigerian 1959 Town Planning Act, the National Council on Housing definition of standard housing and Oredo Local Authority Building and Adoptive Bye-Laws, this study measured the quality of housing in the three major areas of structural materials, internal unit facilities provided and environmental or neighbourhood amenities/facilities. The computations showed that deficiencies were greatest in the neighbourhood, internal facilities and structural materials in that order. Quality showed a lapse rate from the core to the periphery and from high to low income areas. The QOL measurement showed that to the respondents the quality of the city housing detracts from their quality of living. Policy and planning implications of the findings were discussed.     

Reactions to the O. J. Simpson Verdict: "Mindless Tribalism" or Motivated Inference Processes?

The difference in opinion between White Americans and Black Americans as to whether O. J. Simpson is guilty of murder can be understood within the context of the literature on motivated inference. Both self-serving and group-serving motives can lead to bias in how people gather, interpret, and integrate evidence. The current study revealed that the relative salience of race and gender in women's self-concepts (measured by the Twenty Statements Test) was associated with different beliefs about Simpson's innocence or guilt. Although Black women were more likely than White women to believe that Simpson was not guilty, this was more true for Black women who spontaneously self-identified in terms of race. Similarly, when gender was an accessible aspect of identity, women were more likely to believe that Simpson was guilty. High need for cognition (i.e., the tendency to engage in effortful cognitive activity) actually magnified some of these differences.