Real men, real husbands: Caregiving and masculinities in later life

Drawing on data from in-depth personal interviews with a sample of fifty-three older men caring for their impaired wives, authors report findings on these men's caregiving experience, specifically on the way they see themselves as men within such role. Through analytic methods based upon content analysis and open coding, authors found that when describing their gendered understanding of themselves participants evidenced several negotiations with the dominant masculine ideology in order to maintain their sense of masculinity and legitimate their presence in a feminine role. This was accomplished by reframing their definition of a man and reinforcing that of a husband and by retaining varying degrees of power over the caregiving relationship. The social visibility of the role within particular gendered community-based social networks was found to be important in shaping these older men's masculinities.     

The relationship between sexual abuse and drug use: findings from Houston's Safer Choices 2 program

Self-report drug use data were collected from 282 female alternative school students surveyed through the Safer Choices 2 study in Houston, Texas. Data collection took place between October 2000 and March 2001 via audio-enabled laptop computers equipped with headphones. Logistic regression analyses indicated that sexual abuse history was significantly associated with lifetime use (OR = 1.9, p < or = 0.05). While the relationships tested in this study are exploratory, they provide evidence for an important connection between sexual abuse and substance use among female alternative school students.     

VICTORY CELEBRATIONS AS THEATER: A DRAMATURGICAL APPROACH TO CROWD BEHAVIOR*

Drawing on data derived from a field study of victory celebrations, this paper suggests a dramaturgical approach to crowd behavior. Existing theories of crowd behavior are either contradicted by the field data or do not adequately account for the heterogeneity of activity observed, for the interaction between the various categories of participants, or for the shifts in the behavior of the participants and the resultant change in the character of the celebrations. Subsequent analysis indicates that the victory crowds are best understood from a dramaturgical standpoint. Several theoretical, conceptual, and research implications of a dramaturgical approach to crowd behavior are suggested and discussed. The paper concludes with an expanded conception of crowd behavior, one which emphasizes its spatial and temporal as well as interactional dimensions.     

Leadership as social identity management: Introducing the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) to assess and validate a four-dimensional model

Although nearly two decades of research have provided support for the social identity approach to leadership, most previous work has focused on leaders' identity prototypicality while neglecting the assessment of other equally important dimensions of social identity management. However, recent theoretical developments have argued that in order to mobilize and direct followers' energies, leaders need not only to ‘be one of us’ (identity prototypicality), but also to ‘do it for us’ (identity advancement), to ‘craft a sense of us’ (identity entrepreneurship), and to ‘embed a sense of us’ (identity impresarioship). In the present research we develop and validate an Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) that assesses these dimensions in different contexts and with diverse samples from the US, China, and Belgium. Study 1 demonstrates that the scale has content validity such that the items meaningfully differentiate between the four dimensions. Studies 2, 3, and 4 provide evidence for the scale's construct validity (distinguishing between dimensions), discriminant validity (distinguishing identity leadership from authentic leadership, leaders' charisma, and perceived leader quality), and criterion validity (relating the ILI to key leadership outcomes). We conclude that by assessing multiple facets of leaders' social identity management the ILI has significant utility for both theory and practice.     

Foraging for patchily-distributed leaf miners by the parasitic wasp,Dacnusa sibirica

Summary We studied the rules used by the female parasitoid,Dacnusa sibirica Telenga (Hymenoptera: Braconidae), for deciding when to leave a tomato leaflet on which she is searching for larvae of the leafminer,Liriomyza bryoniae Kalt. (Diptera: Agromyzidae). Females would deposit a marking pheromone on the leaflet and would leave the leaflet when the amount of the pheromone accumulated to the thresholdL, which is proportional to the amount of search effort on the leaflet.L appears to increase with host density since it rises after every encounter with a host (or mine).D. sibirica would employ an area-concentrated search, which is advantageous in foraging for hosts showing a clumped distribution.     

Economic incentives for financial and residential independence

In this paper we examine the impact of the resources of children and of their parents on the children’s transition to residential and financial independence. Previous studies of this transition focused primarily on the impact of family structure and parent-child relationships on the decision to leave home, but much less is known about the role of economic factors in the transition to independence. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for the period 1968–1988, we estimate discrete-hazard models of the probability of achieving residential and financial independence. We find that the child’s wage opportunities and the parents’ income are important determinants of establishing independence. The effect of parental income changes with the child’s age. We also find some evidence that federal tax policy influences the decision to become independent, although the magnitude of this effect is quite small.     

Effects of family planning and health services on women��s welfare: evidence on dowries and intra-household bargaining in Bangladesh

This paper demonstrates how the availability of family planning and maternal and child health services alters the structure of intra-household bargaining. The overall welfare gains from such programs are likely to be large, but when women obtain access to services only through marriage, some of these gains may be partially offset by changes in their bargaining power and in the dowries that they pay their husbands. I examine these marriage market effects using a family planning and health services program in rural Bangladesh, finding that compared to women without program access, women in the treatment area are 35% less likely to be able to make purchases without permission from their husbands or another household member. Moreover, a difference-in-difference specification confirms that women pay 14% higher dowries in order to obtain husbands with access to the program. The fact that adjustments are made both before and within marriage suggests that marital contracts in rural Bangladesh are negotiated along multiple margins.     

Fathers' Early Emotion Talk: Associations With Income,Ethnicity, and Family Factors

Contextual, mother‐, child‐, and father‐level variables were examined in association with fathers' emotion talk to infants during a shared picture book activity, in an ethnically diverse, low‐income sample (N = 549). Significant main effects included the rate of emotion talk from fathers' romantic partners (i.e., the infant's mother), infant attention and distress, and sensitive parenting. Significant interactions were also found. Higher income African American fathers referred to negative emotions more than non‐African American higher income fathers. In addition, African American fathers who demonstrated more negative and intrusive parenting referred to positive emotions more than non‐African American fathers who demonstrated negative and intrusive parenting. Our findings support family systems theory and, specifically, the interdependence of individuals' behaviors within the family unit. Interaction effects are discussed with respect to cultural variation in beliefs about parenting behaviors and the cultural experience of African Americans, including the Black cultural experience and the minority experience.     

Capping Kids: The Family Cap and Nonmarital Childbearing

An explicit goal of policymakers in drafting welfare reform policies was to reduce incentives for nonmarital childbearing. This paper estimates the extent to which state welfare reforms have lowered age and race-specific nonmarital fertility. Using state-level data from 1984 to 1999—a time period that includes the passage and implementation of national welfare reform—we estimate fixed effects models corrected for heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation. We find evidence that the family cap, a policy that decreases or eliminates the incremental increase in benefits for mothers who have an additional child while on welfare, is associated with a decline in nonmarital birth ratios. However, we also find that the family cap is associated with higher marital birth rates. Taken together with other research, our findings suggest evidence of policy endogeneity.