SOUTHERN (DIS)COMFORT: SEXUAL PREJUDICE AND CONTACT WITH GAY MEN AND LESBIANS IN THE SOUTH

Recent surveys have found antigay attitudes and behavior to be commonplace. In this article, we use contact theory to explain these prejudicial attitudes. We contribute to the literature on contact and prejudice by expanding contact to include not only whether the heterosexual knows any gay men or lesbians, but also how many, for how long, and in what ways. To these, we add a new and unique measure of contact: a person's contact with the gay community. The data are from a survey of 956 undergraduate students at a large urban university in the southeastern United States. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses find that contact with gay men and lesbians significantly reduces prejudice toward them; although, only as contact with gay friends or the gay community. Contact has stronger effects on women's prejudice than men's prejudice; however, the attitudes of African Americans toward lesbians and gay men are unaffected by gay contact. The results suggest that contact intervenes between prejudice and sex, race, religiosity, and gender attitudes.     

Analyzing the Impact of Bonding and Bridging Social Capital on Economic Well-Being: Results from Canada's General Social Survey

In this study we analyze nationally representative data from Canada's General Social Survey to investigate how various indicators of bonding and bridging social capital are associated with economic well-being and how the magnitude of their associations compare with each other. Our findings suggest that several dimensions of bonding social capital, including knowing neighbors well enough to ask favors of them and providing assistance to others, are positively associated with economic well-being. The study's indicators of bridging social capital were also linked to increases in the participants’ economic well-being. When comparing the associations of bonding and bridging social capital we ascertained that bridging social capital in the form of group membership, including Internet group membership and participation in groups, had a more robust association than any of the indicators of bonding social capital. We consider the implications of the study's findings in light of a technologically-advanced yet volatile economy.     

Medicaid Funding for Assisted Living Care: A Five-State Examination

Medicaid waiver programs financing assisted living care are examined in five states to gain insights about program implementation, accomplishments, and challenges. Documents, augmented with stakeholder interviews, are used to describe income eligibility, options for supplementing payments to facilities, risk adjustment payment levels, and participation. Needs determination and waiver-based payments are in place. Eligibility and funding levels are complicated by room and board allocations that are linked to the federal benefit rate for Supplemental Security Income. Provider participation may be diminishing. Many recipients have to accept shared occupancy as program payments are insufficient for single units.     

Occupational Mobility and Culture Maintenance: The Welsh in a Nineteenth Century Australian Gold Town

This article quantifies the concentration of Welsh male immigrants in a nineteenth- century Australian gold town within one occupational category (gold mining), and considers the extent to which that concentration was maintained and the relevance of this economic specialisation to culture maintenance. In addition, this study provides an analysis of intragenerational and intergenerational changes in socio-economic status amongst the Welsh, as indicated by occupational shifts, which gives a clearer picture than the images promulgated by contemporary Welsh leaders who strove to emphasize the industry and upward mobility of their fellow countrymen.     

General and specific measures of alienation: Is there a difference?

Nisbet and Perrin (1977) suggest that of the two types of alienation, general and specific, the latter is more prevalent. This paper examines differences between general and specific measures of alienation by breaking each into three component parts: powerlessness, self‐estrangement, and anomia. Results of tests to determine whether specific and general alienation are novel traits are mixed; the general and specific powerlessness measures are found to be more different from each other than are the measures of self‐estrangement and anomia. When the reported extent of general alienation and specific alienation is compared, all specific types are significantly greater. Finally, general measures of alienation correlate more strongly with measures of general phenomena than with specific phenomena, while specific measures of alienation correlate more strongly with measures of specific phenomena than with general phenomena.     

An analysis of some factors associated with success and failure in foster home placements

There has been little information available in the social work and sociological literature related to remarriage in Australia. In 1968, there were 106,345 marriages of which 14,116 unions involved at least one partner who had been married previously.¹ Thus, 13.3 per cent of all the marriages can be considered second marriages for one partner at least. Table 1 summarizes the marital status of bridegrooms and brides at the time of their marriage in 1968.     

Explaining the Gender Wealth Gap

To assess and explain the United States’ gender wealth gap, we use the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine wealth accumulated by a single cohort over 50 years by gender, by marital status, and limited to the respondents who are their family’s best financial reporters. We find large gender wealth gaps between currently married men and women, and between never-married men and women. The never-married accumulate less wealth than the currently married, and there is a marital disruption cost to wealth accumulation. The status-attainment model shows the most power in explaining gender wealth gaps between these groups explaining about one-third to one-half of the gap, followed by the human-capital explanation. In other words, a lifetime of lower earnings for women translates into greatly reduced wealth accumulation. After controlling for the full model, we find that a gender wealth gap remains between married men and women that we speculate may be related to gender differences in investment strategies and selection effects.     

Age-parity-specific birth rates and birth probabilities from census or survey data on own children

The ‘own-children’ method is a census- or survey-based reverse-survival technique for estimating age-specific birth rates for years previous to enumeration. In this paper it is extended to estimate birth rates and birth probabilities by parity as well as by age. The refined method is tested for accuracy by comparing ‘own-children’ estimates of age-parity-specific birth probabilities for the United States in 1969 with parallel estimates obtained by the method used in Vital Statistics of the United States. The ‘own-children’ estimates give relatively lower values at ages 15-19 and higher values at ages above 40, but compare well in between. The discrepancies are probably due mainly to adoption of illegitimate children of young mothers by older women. The ‘own-children’ estimate of the total fertility rate is very close to the published vital statistics estimate.     

Rural-Urban fertility differentials in Southern Nigeria: An assessment of some available evidence

The dearth of information on fertility in Nigeria has hitherto impeded efforts to arrive at a consistent pattern of rural-urban fertility differentials in Nigeria. Attempts were made from the mid-sixties onwards to analyse the pattern of rural-urban fertility differentials in some parts of Southern Nigeria from a few independent sources. One such attempt was made by Olusanya; in his study of Western Nigeria in 1966 and in 1969 he reported a higher urban than rural fertility for that region. This result was supported by Ekanem on the basis of data from his 1972 survey of parts of Eastern Nigeria. Given the relatively wider range of available data presently available for Southern Nigeria, this paper examines the Olusanya — Ekanem data together with recent statistics collected from Western, Mid-Western, and Eastern parts of Nigeria by other workers and points out certain inconsistencies and contradictions in the data and conclusions of Olusanya and Ekanem. It suggests that the bulk of available evidence to date suggests either that there is a trend towards the convergence of rural-urban fertility or a definite pattern of higher fertility in the countryside than in the towns. The conclusion also discusses some technical problems of comparing urban and rural fertility.     

Demographic transition in sub-Saharan Africa: How big will the economic dividend be?

In mid-demographic-transition, many Asian countries enjoyed a large demographic ‘dividend’: extra economic growth owing to falling dependant/workforce ratios, or slower natural increase, or both. We estimate the dividend, 1985–2025, in sub-Saharan Africa and its populous countries. Dependency and natural increase peaked around 1985, 20 years after Asia. The UN projects an acceleration of the subsequent slow falls but disregards slowish declines in young-age mortality and thus, we argue, overestimates future fertility decline. Even if one accepts their projection, arithmetical and econometric evidence suggests an annual, if not total, dividend well below Asia's. The dividend arises more from falling dependency than reduced natural increase, and could be increased by accelerating the fertility decline (e.g., by reducing young-age mortality) or by employing a larger workforce productively. Any dividend from transition apart, low saving in much of Africa (unlike Asia) means that, given likely natural increase, current consumption per person is unsustainable because it depletes capital per person.