Our bodies, our families. The family's role in organ donation

The 1968 Uniform Anatomical Gift Act--in keeping with a legal (and medical) concern for individual autonomy--bypassed the family in establishing the legal requirements for cadaveric organ donation, but current practice wisely recognizes a role for families in the decision making.     

Physician perceptions of medical malpractice and defensive medicine

Using judgments obtained in interviews with 33 Massachusetts physicians, the annual statewide volume of expenditures incurred for defensive medical reasons in 1982 was estimated to be $1.0 billion, 12% of all medical care expenditures. Estimates for the nation were $37 billion, 14% of expenditures. Nationally, 180,000 cesarean deliveries were thought to be performed for defensive motives. In their own institutions, respondents judged 43% of all skull x-rays following injury to be medically justified, 30% to be defensive medicine, 16% to be placebos, and 11% to be physician misjudgments. In considering the economic and noneconomic costs of medical malpractice procedures, the dollar costs of insurance were considered most serious, followed closely by defensive medicine, unfairness, and poorer relations with patients. Thirty-two percent of the responsibility for the negative aspects of malpractice processes was assigned to lawyers, 21% to physicians, 18% to legislatures and courts, 16% to patients, and 13% to insurance companies.     

Immigration reform in France and the United States: reflections and documentation

This paper analyzes similarities and dissimilarities in French and American efforts to come to grip with irregular migration. The symbolic importance of immigration reform is argued to be a key political concern in both nations, although the politics of immigration reform has assumed a more partisan flavor in France, particularly since the municipal elections of 1983. In France, the theme of control and security, associated with the notion of preventing "automatic" immigration which would endanger the cohesion of French society, was widely utilized for political ends prior to and after May 10, 1981 (the date of Francois Mitterand's investiture). The American government, on the other hand, is confronted with the unenviable task of obtaining a legislative consensus on legalization and employer sanctions through an approach seeking to harmonize and integrate the demands articulated by various groups: employers, unions, and alien and ethnic interest groups (principally Hispanic groups divided into a hierarchy along a recently arrived/established cleavage). The American situation most sharply differs from the French case in terms of the absence of a right/left political cleavage. The real effects of clandestine immigration are to be found at the local level. In France, as in the US, the ability of local actors to exert pressure raises the fear that legalization and sanctions will change little, except in terms of symbolic legitimacy.     

Singapore's foreign workforce: some reflections on its benefits and costs

"This article provides some empirical information pertaining to the benefits and costs of foreign labor to Singapore and subjects to critical analysis some of Pang and Lim's hypotheses concerning the costs of labor importation presented in a previous article.... The article concludes with a discussion of the real cost to Malaysia of Singapore's labor importation policies and its potential for disruption of Malaysia's development plans."     

Eye-contact as a chance product of individual looking: Implications for the intimacy model of argyle and dean

From time to time during social encounters, people look at one another in the region of the eyes, and sometimes their eyes meet to make eye-contact. According to Argyle and Dean (1965), eye-contact in dyadic encounters signals the intimacy of the interaction and is controlled largely by the competing approach and avoidance forces that motivate the pair. In the present paper, new analyses are reported of three published experiments that were designed originally to test aspects of the intimacy model and it is shown that the duration of eye-contact is no more than a chance product of how long the two subjects look individually. Looking and not eye-contact, it is argued, should be the basis for models of visual interaction, and the intimacy model is ill-founded conceptually; the role of emotion in gaze has been overstressed at the expense of the concept of information; and the most important aspect of vision is in any case not looking and eye-contact but visual access to the whole person. The more cueless the encounter—that is, the fewer the social cues from vision and all the other senses combined—the greater the psychological distance; and the greater the psychological distance, the more task-oriented and depersonalized the content of what people say and, in turn, the less spontaneous their style of speech and the less likely a debate to end in compromise.Research for this article was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain.     

The influence of child spacing on child survival

Summary This study evaluates the strength of the influence of spacing on child survival. Data related to a traditional culture (Punjab) in which almost all children are breast-fed up to the age of 17 months. An initial pregnancy history survey, subsequent four years updating through continuous monitoring of vital events and a second cross-sectional pregnancy history survey at the mid-point provided a file containing information on pregnancies and survival of children of 5,018 women. The analysis first looks at the correlation between the lengths of the preceding and subsequent intervals of index children, then examines whether this correlation was related to the repeated pattern of child death or survival. Next, the influence of the duration of the preceding interval on the survival of the index child in general and after accounting for the fate of the preceding child were considered. Then the influence of the length of the subsequent interval on the survival of the index child after conception and after the birth of the next child were studied. Lastly, regression analyses with preceding and subsequent intervals as independent variables and age-specific survival or death as the dependent variable were performed.     

Family composition preferences in a developing culture: The case of Taiwan, 1973

Abstract As fertility comes increasingly under voluntary control in a developing society, it can be argued that individual desires or preferences about children will become more salient and more significant for eventual fertility. Hence, the study of preferences is increasingly important as contraceptive use is extended and results in decreasing the number of unwanted births.(1) Further changes in fertility then depend on changes in preferences. The assumption is that people will at least try to achieve the families they want, if the means to do so are available. The fact that contraception is used at all is some evidence of the soundness of this assumption, although it should be recognized that family size desires operate in a complex of preferences, under varying degrees of conflict and control. To expect a one-to-one relationship between attitudes or preferences and overt behaviour would be simplistic.