Effects of Marriage and Children on Financial Risk Tolerance: A Synthesis of Family Development and Prospect Theory

Family development and prospect theory were used as a framework to predict variability in individuals' subjective financial risk tolerance within distinct family structures. Gender, age, and income were expected to interact with the main effects of family structure (marital status and children). Theory-generated hypotheses were examined in Study 1 (data from university housing respondents, n = 76) and Study 2 (the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances, n = 4,305). One family structure main effect (child presence) was significant for investment risk tolerance in both studies. Family structure interactions (marital status × age and child × income) were significant for employment risk (Study 1), and child × age was significant for investment risk in Study 2.     

Perceptions of and Responses to Stigma

In the last 10 years, interest in the concept of stigma has grown remarkably throughout the social sciences. Today, stigma is an important topic that bridges many disciplines, including sociology, psychology, social psychology, and public health. This literature review primarily addresses perceptions of and responses to stigma from the insider's or target's perspective. The topics examined in this review include the following: defining stigma, public opinion and attitudes toward the stigmatized, measurement of perceptions of stigma and discrimination, the coping strategies employed by stigmatized persons to deal with stigma, the impact of stigma in terms of psychological and behavioral outcomes, explanations of coping strategies and outcomes, and strategies and interventions to reduce stigma. As many of the concerns faced by stigmatized persons are universal, what has been learned in research about one stigmatized group can provide insight into another. Promising directions for future stigma-related research are identified and discussed.     

UNDERSTANDING THE DECISION TO PARTICIPATE IN A SURVEY

The lack of full participation in sample surveys threatens theinferential value of the survey method. We review a set of conceptualdevelopments and experimental findings that appear to be informativeabout causes of survey participation; offer an integration ofthat work with findings from the more traditional statisticaland survey methodological literature on nonresponse; and, giventhe theoretical structure, deduce potentially promising pathsof research toward the understanding of survey participation.     

Fast retraction of evidence in a probabilistic expert system

We present and justify a propagation algorithm to facilitate the simultaneous calculation, for every node in a probabilistic exper system of the distribution of the associated random quantity, conditional on all the evidence obtained about the remaining nodes.