Women Attending High-Risk Substance Abuse Clinics Versus General Obstetrics Clinics

Substance-abusing women experience burdens making attending high-risk prenatal care critical for a healthy pregnancy. Many face barriers that compromise their health by reducing access to care, delaying their first prenatal appointment. One hundred forty-one women attending a high-risk prenatal clinic were compared to a matched group from the hospital’s general obstetrics clinic. Analyses revealed that substance-abusing women with a mental illness attended prenatal care earlier than those without a mental illness. This is important because psychiatric illnesses might precipitate poor reproductive behaviors. Women with HIV also entered prenatal care earlier, which improves reproductive health. Clinicians’ roles are discussed.     

Payment of Universal Credit for couples in the UK: Challenges for reform from a gender perspective

Universal Credit has been rolled out gradually in the United Kingdom since 2013 as one integrated means-tested benefit replacing six different transfers with a single monthly payment. Previously, these benefits were awarded for distinct purposes and, for couples who claimed them, were potentially payable to different partners. Concerns about Universal Credit’s single payment include the opportunities it may create for facilitating domestic abuse, the fostering of more unequal power relations within couples, the reduction of financial autonomy for individuals, and the de-labelling of benefit payments. This article explores debates about the prospects for individual payments to partners in couples of Universal Credit as a jointly assessed integrated means-tested benefit, including different approaches emerging from the United Kingdom’s devolved governments (mainly Scotland and Northern Ireland). Whilst payment to each partner is likely to be more feasible where there are separate rather than integrated means-tested benefits, it concludes that genuine financial autonomy for partners in couples is best pursued via individually based non-means-tested benefits.     

The Use of Body Movements and Gestures as Cues to Emotions in Younger and Older Adults

Eighty-two younger and older adults participated in a two-part study of the decoding of emotion through body movements and gestures. In the first part, younger and older adults identified emotions depicted in brief videotaped displays of young adult actors portraying emotional situations. In each display, the actors were silent and their faces were electronically blurred in order to isolate the body cues to emotion. Although both groups made accurate emotion identifications well above chance levels, older adults made more overall errors, and this was especially true for negative emotions. Moreover, their errors were more likely to reflect the misidentification of emotional displays as neutral in content. In the second part, younger and older adults rated the videotaped displays using scales reflecting several movement dimensions (e.g., form, tempo, force, and movement). The ratings of both age groups were in high agreement and provided reliable information about particular body cues to emotion. The errors made by older adults were linked to reactions to exaggerated or ambiguous body cues.     

Always Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Community Organisations Controlling Assets

The idea of community-based organisations (CBOs) owning or managing physical assets, such as land or buildings, has a long history in many countries. This paper examines policy and practice in the UK where there has been significant interest in this field. A variety of benefits have been attributed to the role of assets including motivating community engagement, providing a vehicle for outsourcing public services, or creating financially sustainable organisations. The empirical research reveals there is a heterogeneous set of CBOs holding assets, but the majority of them are small with few paid staff. The analysis proposes a spectrum of CBO types in the field. It concludes that policy makers will need to recognise that these types are informed by contrasting traditions, ideas and operating logics that affect their different practices and resource dependencies.     

Return Chasing as a Driver in Individual Retirement Savings Investment Choices: Evidence from Australia

Australia’s retirement savings regime requires employers to make contributions to a superannuation fund for their employees. Workers who may have no experience of investment are asked to make relatively complex decisions, which have significant implications for their retirement lifestyle. Evidence suggests individuals may be unduly influenced by recent historical returns when making investment choices. Such a bias may produce sub-optimal results over the longer-term. This paper uses a large database from four not-for-profit retirement savings funds to investigate members’ investment choices using logistic regression and multi-variate tests. We find evidence that choices are driven by recent historical returns. We also investigate demographics and find a link between age and return chasing behaviour.     

Unwed fathers’ ability to pay child support: New estimates accounting for multiple-partner fertility

We present new estimates of unwed fathers’ ability to pay child support. Prior research relied on surveys that drastically undercounted nonresident unwed fathers and provided no link to their children who lived in separate households. To overcome these limitations, previous research assumed assortative mating and that each mother partnered with one father who was actually eligible to pay support and had no other child support obligations. Because the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study contains data on couples, multiple-partner fertility, and a rich array of other previously unmeasured characteristics of fathers, it is uniquely suited to address the limitations of previous research. We also use an improved method of dealing with missing data. Our findings suggest that previous research overestimated the aggregate ability of unwed nonresident fathers to pay child support by 33% to 60%.     

Exploring African American Masculinities: An Integrative Model

To date, African American masculinity has been explored from several perspectives and across many disciplines. Much of the work on Black masculinity derives from scholarly fields and paradigmatic approaches that are seldom in conversation with one another. This review explores the applications and critiques of deficit, Afrocentric, gender/sex role, and identity paradigms commonly applied to discourses on African American manhood across various disciplines. Additionally, this paper concludes with a call for paradigmatic triangulation in Black gender scholarship towards creating a comprehensive notion of African American masculinity.