Body Mass Index,Dieting, Romance,and Sexual Activity in Adolescent Girls: Relationships Over Time

Romantic relationships constitute an important, but understudied, developmental context for accommodation to pubertal change. Using a nationally representative sample of 5,487 black, white, and Hispanic adolescent females, this study examined associations among body mass index, current romantic involvement, and dieting. For each one point increase in body mass‐index (BMI), the probability of having a romantic relationship decreased by 6%. Further, involvement in a nonsexual romantic relationship—but not involvement in a sexual romantic relationship—was associated with a significant increase in the likelihood of dieting. Associations between relationship type and dieting did not vary by age, socioeconomic status, or race, but were stronger at higher BMIs. These findings confirm that weight has implications for romantic involvement, which is highly valued by adolescent girls, and that romantic relationships, in turn, are important contexts in which to consider psychological and behavioral accommodation to the physical changes of puberty.     

Why Have Children in the 21st Century? Biological Predisposition, Social Coercion, Rational Choice

This review examines arguments and evidence pertaining to the question: why have children in settings where the net economic costs of children are clearly substantial? Thereview is organized around three themes: biologicalpredispositions, environment (social coercion) and rationalchoice. Specifically, we explore the argument that evolution hasproduced sets of genes that predispose persons to childbearing bymaking sex and parenthood pleasurable. We review sociologicalarguments regarding the pronatalism/antinatalism of societalinstitutions. Finally, we discuss arguments that stress therationality of childbearing decisions by appealing to biologicalpredispositions and the economic and non-economic values ofchildren. The authors speculate that while a modern socialstructure and rationale supportive of childbearing could beconstructed, such changes are not inevitable and may be difficultin the face of competing interests. Moreover, future social andtechnological change could alter the context of childbearingsubstantially. This uncertainty complicates policyrecommendations.     

Reconsidering work time: a multivariate longitudinal within-couple analysis

Dual-earner couples now work significantly more hours than in the past, but few couple-level studies examine whether work hours are linked to mental health and quality-of-life outcomes. In 2001, Jacobs and Gerson proposed that combined spouse work hours would better predict outcomes than would spouses’ individual work hours. Longitudinal data from a random sample of 211 dual-earner couples with children partially support this hypothesis. Our findings suggest that future research on dual-earner couples’ work hours should be couple-level and longitudinal, estimate both linear and non-linear relationships, and include multiple positive and negative outcomes as well as subjective indicators of the meaning of work hours.     

Creating ‘stability’ for children in step‐families: time and substance in parenting

Children are said to be in need of stability for a ‘successful’ upbringing. This article focuses on the implications of this for parenting and childrearing practices in step‐families. It addresses the ways that conceptions of stability for children in family policy are tied to a particular family form and to maintaining continuity in biological parenting obligations, while parenting research has largely been concerned with measuring the consequences of changing family forms for children. In contrast, parents and step‐parents in step‐families themselves have far more complex understandings about the creation of stability for children in their care, around issues of dis/continuity in linear time and the social and material substantive constitution of stability. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the measurement of unemployment

This paper investigates how alternative measures of unemployment may be derived from information on unemployment duration. It begins by listing various properties that unemployment indices should satisfy, and shows how ‘duration profiles’ can usefully represent unemployment data. Theorem 1 establishes that unemployment indices are unanimous iff the duration profiles do not intersect. Two families of unemployment indices are examined in detail. Both allow unemployment to be decomposed across population subgroups. In addition, they can be expressed as the product of three components reflecting the contributions of the unemployment rate, mean unemployment duration, and differences in duration among the unemployed.     

Contents of Volume 17, 2001

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 17, 2001     

Where are the children in home–school relations? Notes towards a research agenda

In this article we unpack the assumptions behind the dominant British research, policy and practice home-school relations consensus that holds parents' involvement and participation in their children's education to be unquestionably necessary and beneficial. It presupposes a one-way relationship between parents and children in which children are implicitly placed as dependent and inert recipients of the decisions and activities of parents and teachers. It does not take account of the impacts of the gender of children and their parents, ethnicity, age or family form. We draw on evidence from a diverse range of sources to show that children do have individual and collective interests and priorities in the process of home-school relations, and that gender is particularly important in this. We argue for research on home-school relations that takes an essentially child-centred approach, treating children as competent informants on diverse aspects of parental involvement in their education.     

(Re)-migration: Indonesians of mixed descent and the journey ‘home’

ABSTRACT

Indonesia has a long history of outward migration, with the result that many children have been born outside Indonesia but consider it, through a parent, a ‘homeland’ in an emotive sense. This article examines the experiences of a number of different groups of people of ‘mixed descent’ (termed ‘Indo’ in Indonesian) who returned to Indonesia and found that they did not feel that they belonged, whether because they experienced a sense of disjuncture upon discovering that their memories did not match reality, or because they had never lived in Indonesia previously and only imagined it through a parent's stories. I closely examine the interconnectedness in the popular imagination of nationality with race and appearance in the Indonesian context, and argue that Indonesian national identity is strongly predicated upon anti-foreign sentiment, thereby making attempts of Indos who grew up outside Indonesia to describe themselves as Indonesian contentious. I also draw out the historical development of contemporary understandings about who can claim to be a ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Indonesian, which are based on colonial categories that in practice were different to how they have been portrayed in historical consciousness. The strong links between nationality and appearance/race and the complexities of the lives of individuals who choose to call several places home because of ancestral links complicate simplistic narratives of ‘local’ and ‘foreign’, ‘exile’ and ‘return’ to a homeland.