Disability Considerations for Measuring Poverty in Canada Using the Market Basket Measure

Social Indicators Research - Persons with disability (PWD) in Canada experience disproportionately high poverty rates. Poverty measures are often used to benchmark income assistance levels and...     

Understanding intimate partner violence against women in the rural South

Most U.S. intimate partner violence (IPV) research to date has been limited to women residing in urban areas, with the small body of research focusing on rural populations being primarily qualitative. In this case-control study of Southern rural women, while many factors are consistent with those found in urban settings, unlike findings elsewhere, IPV risk appears to increase with age, and race showed no increased risk. Furthermore, in rural areas where guns are more acceptable than in other parts of the United States, partners of IPV victims are considerably more likely to carry weapons than partners of nonabused women. Given the geographic limitations to police and medical response to severe IPV in a rural setting, an improved understanding of IPV risk among this population can aid health care providers in ascertaining risk before it escalates further.     

Family Size,Cognitive Outcomes,and Familial Interaction in Stable,Two-Parent Families: United States, 1997–2002

Measures of children’s time use, particularly with parents and siblings, are used to evaluate three hypotheses in relation to the vocabulary and mathematical skills development: (1) the resource dilution hypothesis, which argues that parental and household resources are diluted in larger families; (2) the confluence hypothesis, which suggests that the intellectual milieu of families is lowered with additional children; and (3) the admixture (“no effect”) hypothesis, which suggests that the negative relationship between family size and achievement is an artifact of cross-sectional research resulting from unobserved heterogeneity. Each hypothesis is tested using within-child estimates of change in cognitive scores over time with the addition of new children to families.     

Social Coping and Life Satisfaction in Adolescents

This study examined the relationships among early adolescent social coping behavior and measures of subjective well-being, specifically global life satisfaction and friend satisfaction. A total of 1,011 students in grades 7–8 at a southeastern US middle school completed measures of global life satisfaction, friend satisfaction and coping, on two occasions, 5 months apart. Social support seeking coping behavior at Time 1, but not problem-solving, distancing, internalizing or externalizing coping behaviors at Time 1, uniquely predicted global life satisfaction and friend satisfaction at Time 2. Implications for research and promoting adolescent well-being are discussed.     

The undecidability of the spatialized prisoner's dilemma

In the spatialized Prisoner's Dilemma, players compete against their immediate neighbors and adopt a neighbor's strategy should it prove locally superior. Fields of strategies evolve in the manner of cellular automata (Nowak and May, 1993; Mar and St. Denis, 1993a,b; Grim 1995, 1996). Often a question arises as to what the eventual outcome of an initial spatial configuration of strategies will be: Will a single strategy prove triumphant in the sense of progressively conquering more and more territory without opposition, or will an equilibrium of some small number of strategies emerge? Here it is shown, for finite configurations of Prisoner's Dilemma strategies embedded in a given infinite background, that such questions are formally undecidable: there is no algorithm or effective procedure which, given a specification of a finite configuration, will in all cases tell us whether that configuration will or will not result in progressive conquest by a single strategy when embedded in the given field. The proof introduces undecidability into decision theory in three steps: by (1) outlining a class of abstract machines with familiar undecidability results, by (2) modelling these machines within a particular family of cellular automata, carrying over undecidability results for these, and finally by (3) showing that spatial configurations of Prisoner's Dilemma strategies will take the form of such cellular automata.

     

Beyond zero-sum: game theory and national forest management

Following two decades of bitter struggle, the current debate over management of the U.S. national forests is characterized by animosity, controversy, and seemingly intractable gridlock. This view has led some to characterize the current management process a situation of pure conflict or a zero-sum game. In this article, we develop a game-theoretic model based on an argument that national forest policymaking is a game between the U.S. National Forest Service and Environmentalists and that this game is not zero-sum. The model is used to account for outcomes associated with contemporary management policy and to examine some recent changes to the game's rules and how this may affect outcomes. The analysis shows that some changes will have little to no effect on outcomes, while others have a significant potential to do so.     

GLOBALISATION AND REGIONAL RENEWAL REVISTED

The articles in this forum address how the epochal process of globalisation pertains to rural and regional Australia. Collectively, they demonstrate the complexity of globalisation in rural areas in three ways. First, globalisation is a multi‐faceted phenomenon involving more issues than the fluxion of economy and polity around “free” trade. It simultaneously effects and incites ethical and practical reactions concerning national boundaries, environment, community, health, wealth, language and essentially all other matters with social valence. Second, globalisation has diverse and differential impacts both between the developed and developing nations and within them. Third, globalisation has generated collective angst and organised protest. Taken as a whole, these papers simultaneously illustrate theoretically abstract and privately mundane aspects of globalisation.