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...     

Overlapping generations models with realistic demography

This paper revisits the literature on overlapping generations models in the demographic context of a continuous age distribution and a general age schedule of mortality. We show that most of the static results known for the 3 or N age-group models can be extended to the continuous model. Some results, previously established for economies without capital, are extended to productive economies. We also make some progress on the existence of some steady states as well as on the dynamic properties. Received: 27 March 2000/Accepted: 25 April 2001     

The structure of subjective well-being in nine western societies

The structure of subjective well-being is analyzed by multidimensional mapping of evaluations of life concerns. For example, one finds that evaluations of Income are close to (i.e., relatively strongly related to) evaluations of Standard of living, but remote from (weakly related to) evaluations of Health. These structures show how evaluations of life components fit together and hence illuminate the psychological meaning of life quality. They can be useful for determining the breadth of coverage and degree of redundancy of social indicators of perceived well-being. Analyzed here are data from representative sample surveys in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and the United States (each N≈1000). Eleven life concerns are considered, including Income, Housing, Job, Health, Leisure, Neighborhood, Transportation, and Relations with other people. It is found that structures in all of these countries have a basic similarity and that the European countries tend to be more similar to one another than they are to USA. These results suggest that comparative research on subjective well-being is feasible within this group of nations.     

Age and marital status at first birth and the pace of subsequent fertility

Taking care to minimize the truncation bias inherent in cross-sectional data and controlling for other variables, this paper demonstrates the strong effects of both age and marital status at first birth on the pace of subsequent fertility. These effects are particularly strong in the interval immediately following the first birth but persist even into the fourth interval. Important differences are found with respect to the experience of rapid fertility, rather than in the mean lengths of intervals. These results add to the growing attention to the social dimensions of age as a variable in fertility processes.     

Target Fertility,Contraception, And Aggregate Rates: Toward A Formal Synthesis

This paper develops a stock adjustment model relating total expected births to conventional aggregate fertility rates for married women over 25. Each year, cohorts bear about 20 percent of their additional expected births. Aggregate U.S. rates have been consistent with expectations as expressed in surveys between 1955 and 1975; indeed, total expected births may be inferred from aggregate fertility behavior. A peculiar empirical finding is that the additional expected fertility of nonterminators has not changed since 1955, despite the dramatic decline in total expected and actual fertility. The model leads to a dynamic expression for the duration pattern of current and cumulative fertility and for the proportion of couples who have terminated childbearing. The model is also used to analyze the effects of changing contraceptive failure rates on fertility patterns. For example, a decline in “timing” failure rates increases duration-specific fertility five years later.     

Measurement and Replication: Evaluating the Consistency of Eight U. S. Fertility Surveys

This paper addresses the comparability of data from eight national fertility surveys conducted in the United States between 1955 and 1980. We examine the extent to which substantive conclusions about the levels and correlates of the timing offirst birth vary across these data sources by comparing samples of women who were eligible to be included in more than one study. Results obtained from Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and logistic regression analyses of several measures of timing indicate few study effects. Thus findings based on data from one survey can be replicated with comparable data from another. One notable exception is the relationship between contraceptive use prior to the first birth and the timing of that birth. The contraceptive variable appears to be poorly measured, leading to unstable estimates of the relationship. In general, our results suggest: (1) the feasibility of pooling data from the various surveys when modeling delayed childbearing; and (2) reasonable accuracy in assessing trends in the timing of first birth from multiple data sources.     

Measuring acceptances in a family planning program: the decomposition of rates by eligibility criteria

Acceptance rates in family planning programs can be broken into components useful in analyzing programs and in evaluating success. In almost any program some couples can be defined as "ineligible" on the basis of alternative criteria. (Sterilized couples are an obvious example.) Then, the total acceptance rate can be initially separated into two components-the proportion eligible and the acceptance rate among the eligible. If some of those initially defined as ineligible become acceptors, there is a third component-the ratio of all acceptances to acceptances among the eligible only. These various components can be used to analyze the basis for varying acceptance rates between different strata of a population.     

A comment on ‘social and economic factors in Hong Kong's fertility decline’ by Sui-Ying Wat and R. W. Hodge

The recent article by Wat and Hodge appears to make incorrect inferences about the relation of certain social and economic indicators (infant mortality, employment opportunities for women, and education) to Hong Kong's fertility decline, based on a multiple regression of these variables to the crude birth rate of Hong Kong for 1951–1967. Such modernization measures probably have at least a long-run causal relation to fertility decline. It is also possible that the family planning programme ofHong Kong may have added little to the effects, as the authors suggest. However, I do not believe that their multiple regression analysis establishes these conclusions.     

Balancing Employee Religious Freedom in the Workplace with Customer Rights to a Religion‐free Retail Environment

In October of 2009, Trevor Keezer was terminated by Home Depot for refusing to remove a pin from his uniform declaring “One Nation under God, Indivisible.” Mr. Keezer, a cashier with Home Depot, contended that the button he had worn for over one year before any action was taken by his employer expressed his support for American troops and his Christian faith. Were the actions taken by his employer warranted or was Mr. Keezer the victim of arbitrary religious discrimination unrelated to job performance? Religion is becoming an increasingly polarizing issue in the workplace, forcing retail managers to balance the respective interests of employees, coworkers, and patrons of retail establishments. And from all indications, if legislation pending in Congress is enacted, maintaining the balance will become more problematic.     

Ten years later: Locating and interviewing children of drug abusers

Longitudinal studies require high follow-up rates in order to maintain statistical power, reduce bias, and enhance the generalizability of results. This study reports on locating and survey completion for a 10-year follow-up of the Focus on Families project, an investigation of 130 families headed by parents who were enrolled in methadone treatment for opiate addiction. Despite having no contact with participants in the study for at least 10 years, the project successfully located nearly 99% of parent participants and 98% of their children. Twenty-four percent of the parents and one child had died before the follow-up. Of the surviving sample, 91% of parents and 86% of the children completed the follow-up interview. Multiple techniques were used to locate study participants, including internet searches, researching court and public records, collaborating with government and service agencies, and contacting family and social networks. For more than half of the sample, costly efforts were required to locate individual participants.