Low-Income Children's Participation in a Public Health Insurance Program in Georgia

To expand health care coverage to uninsured, low-income children, the Congress created the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997. Given ample evidence that state Medicaid programs have failed to enroll many eligible children, experts questioned whether SCHIP could successfully enroll low-income children. Using Georgia state SCHIP data, we analyzed enrollment patterns and identified factors contributing to program enrollment. This study found that the children's enrollment is explained by perceived costs and benefits of joining the program as well as the underlying family structure, demographic factors, and health status. We discuss implications of these findings on the participation of low-income families in public sector programs.     

Inference in model-based cluster analysis

A new approach to cluster analysis has been introduced based on parsimonious geometric modelling of the within-group covariance matrices in a mixture of multivariate normal distributions, using hierarchical agglomeration and iterative relocation. It works well and is widely used via the MCLUST software available in S-PLUS and StatLib. However, it has several limitations: there is no assessment of the uncertainty about the classification, the partition can be suboptimal, parameter estimates are biased, the shape matrix has to be specified by the user, prior group probabilities are assumed to be equal, the method for choosing the number of groups is based on a crude approximation, and no formal way of choosing between the various possible models is included. Here, we propose a new approach which overcomes all these difficulties. It consists of exact Bayesian inference via Gibbs sampling, and the calculation of Bayes factors (for choosing the model and the number of groups) from the output using the Laplace–Metropolis estimator. It works well in several real and simulated examples.     

Kurtosis and spread

An increase in kurtosis is achieved through the location- and scale-free movement of probability mass from the “shoulders” of a distribution into its centre and tails. We introduce a coherent structure of ordering and measures, requiring no symmetry assumption, that represent different formalizations of this movement. For this purpose spread functions and spread-spread plots are defined. The orderings impose growth patterns on the spread-spread plot of the distributions involved, and the weakest involve both a specific scale-matching technique and placement of “shoulders”. The role of existing kurtosis orderings and measures in this general context is identified and examples discussed throughout.     

The Time Squeeze: Parental Statuses and Feelings About Time With Children

Policy makers, parents, and the public are concerned with perceived declines in parents’ time with children. Data from two national surveys (N = 1,159 and N = 821) used in this study show that nearly half of parents report feeling too little time with children. Work hours are strongly related to these feelings, even controlling for time spent with children, and explain why fathers more than mothers feel time strain. For fathers, those whose youngest child is an adolescent feel more strain than similarly situated mothers. Controlling for work hours, single parents are not more likely than married parents to feel that they spend insufficient time with children.     

ASYMPTOTIC LIKELIHOOD APPROXIMATIONS USING A PARTIAL LAPLACE APPROXIMATION

Elimination of a nuisance variable is often non‐trivial and may involve the evaluation of an intractable integral. One approach to evaluate these integrals is to use the Laplace approximation. This paper concentrates on a new approximation, called the partial Laplace approximation, that is useful when the integrand can be partitioned into two multiplicative disjoint functions. The technique is applied to the linear mixed model and shows that the approximate likelihood obtained can be partitioned to provide a conditional likelihood for the location parameters and a marginal likelihood for the scale parameters equivalent to restricted maximum likelihood (REML). Similarly, the partial Laplace approximation is applied to the t‐distribution to obtain an approximate REML for the scale parameter. A simulation study reveals that, in comparison to maximum likelihood, the scale parameter estimates of the t‐distribution obtained from the approximate REML show reduced bias.     

Momentum and the growth-free segment of a population

In the scenario of a sudden drop in fertility to replacement level. Preston (1986) argued that the population segment under age T, the length of generation, remained growth-free. Here we first present a new relationship for the momentum of any observed population as the ratio of 1) the proportion of the observed population under the mean age at childbearing to 2) the proportion of its life table population under that mean age. We then use that relationship to demonstrate Preston's approximation. Growth factors for other population segments are also presented. When the initial population is stable, momentum can be approximated as a function of the net reproduction rate alone.