DIVERSITY BUT NOT EQUALITY: DOMESTIC LABOUR IN COHABITING RELATIONSHIPS

This paper examines the domestic labour arrangements of cohabiting couples and the implications for gender equality. The discussion is based on a predominantly qualitative study of thirty young cohabiters. The men and women shared domestic labour in diverse ways but not equally, instead they used discursive strategies to avoid assessing whether their contributions were equal. The cohabiters expressed extremely egalitarian attitudes when asked general questions about society but equality is absent when they discuss their own relationships. I argue that the concept of equality is part of public discourse rather than a fundamental principle of cohabiting relationships.     

The social class of Catholics in Scotland

The social status of people brought up as Catholics in Scotland, as measured by their occupational class, is analysed by using cross-sectional survey data gathered in 1997. The main finding is that Catholics have probably risen in social status to a greater extent than non-Catholics. The experience of Scottish Catholics seems to be distinctive, because no such patterns are found for England, and indeed in this respect Scottish Catholics more closely resemble members of non-Christian religions in England than they do English Catholics. The most likely explanation is the particular role which state-funded Catholic schools have played in Scotland, especially the system of comprehensive secondary schools that was set up after 1965. However, the analysis is suggestive rather than definitive and needs to be replicated on cohort data with larger sample sizes.     

Bounded spaces: demographic anxieties in post‐apartheid Johannesburg

This paper attempts to shape a way of thinking about race, crime and the increasing privatisation and enclosure of space in contemporary Johannesburg, through the concept of terror. It examines the ways in which terror fuses with the figure of the criminal to create a city of new, post‐apartheid exclusions and segregations. It argues that the figures of the criminal, the boundary wall and the house are the symbolic objects of the new city, through which its internal and external geographies are being reconfigured.     

Posture Development in Infants at Heightened versus Low Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorders

Evidence suggests that children and adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit difficulties with postural control. Retrospective video studies of infants later diagnosed with ASD indicate that infants who eventually receive an ASD diagnosis exhibit delays in postural development. This study investigates early posture development prospectively and longitudinally in 22 infants at heightened biological risk for ASD (HR) and 18 infants with no such risk (Low Risk; LR). Four HR infants received an autism diagnosis (AD infants) at 36 months. Infants were videotaped at home at 6, 9, 12, and 14 months during everyday activities and play. All infant postures were coded and classified as to whether or not they were infant‐initiated. Relative to LR infants, HR infants were slower to develop skill in sitting and standing postures. AD infants exhibited substantial delays in the emergence of more advanced postures and initiated fewer posture changes. Because posture advances create opportunities for infants to interact with objects and people in new and progressively more sophisticated ways, postural delays may have cascading effects on opportunities for infant exploration and learning. These effects may be greater for infants with ASD, for whom posture delays are more significant.     

Formative research methods to understand patient and provider responses to heart attack symptoms

Formative research is often required for program planning, and for reducing uncertainty about generalizability of program effects. This article describes and justifies methods of formative research conducted for the REACT study (Rapid Early Action for Coronary Treatment), a multi-center collaborative randomized community trial aimed at reducing patient delay in seeking care for acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Formative research cast light on patient and community members’ decision-making process in seeking help for AMI, as well as barriers and facilitators of this process. Investigators at all five REACT Field Centers participated in the formative research. The process consisted of: (1) developing a common theoretical framework for the study intervention; (2) conducting a literature review and qualitative research to identify and address gaps in knowledge; and (3) developing a common protocol for the REACT study that accommodated the diversity of the target communities in terms of services, resources, history, and ethnicity. Analysis employed triangulation, defined as an explicit search for heterogeneous data sources to reduce uncertainty about forces at work and opportunities for intervention across settings and populations. Because the collection and interpretation of data went in stages, staff of several REACT Field Centers had independent input to the overall synthesis, then shared and revised the results. Advantages and limitations of this approach are discussed.     

Long- and short-term affective states in happiness: Model,paradigm and experimental evidence

The present paper evaluates relevant findings on long- and short-term affective states in subjective well-being and argues for a componential model that combines the two into the more general concept of happiness. Two age parameters, one for long-term and one for short-term affect are added to the simple model to account for age changes in happiness. Measures of long- and short-term affect are presented, as is a paradigm for separating the components. Support for the simple model is provided by an experimental investigation with 64 college students who were exposed to positive and/or negative mood induction. As expected, the induction had substantially greater effect on short- than on long-term affect measures, particularly the negative induction procedure. These findings are consistent with predictions. However, multiple age cohorts will have to be assessed within a longitudinal framework to obtain values for the age parameters.     

Associations among altruism, burnout dimensions, and organizational citizenship behaviour

Most studies of burnout have focused on lack of resources, prevalence of burnout, and negative outcomes. In contrast, this study examined the relationships among altruism, burnout and a positive outcome, namely, the engagement in organizational citizenship behaviour. Web questionnaires were distributed to employees in three professional organizations. The results from the 178 respondents indicated that altruism is related to organizational citizenship behaviour. Of the three dimensions of burnout, only reduced personal accomplishment was (negatively) associated with engagement in organizational citizenship behaviours. Implications of the results are discussed and directions for future research are offered.     

Nonparametric M-regression with free knot splines

Many problems of practical interest can be formulated as the nonparametric estimation of a certain function such as a regression function, logistic or other generalized regression function, density function, conditional density function, hazard function, or conditional hazard function. Extended linear modeling provides a convenient theoretical framework for using polynomial splines and their selected tensor products in such function estimation problems and especially for obtaining rates of convergence of the resulting estimates in a unified manner. For a long time the theoretical results were restricted to fixed knot splines and to log-likelihood functions that were twice continuously differentiable. Recently, Stone and Huang extended the theory to handle free knot splines. In the present paper, the theory is further extended to handle contexts in which the log-likelihood function may not be differentiable. Specifically, we establish rates of convergence for estimation based on free knot splines in the context of nonparametric regression corresponding to M-estimates, which includes least absolute deviations (LAD) regression, quantile regression, and robust regression as special cases.