Grow Old With Me! Future Directions of Race,Age, and Place Scholarship

This article reviews current theories of age and place to demonstrate a more inclusive perspective in sociology that considers race, age, and place. Scholars who study age have advanced our knowledge about what place means to old people or how environment operates in an oppressive way to aged bodies. Likewise, race scholars have advanced our knowledge about the ways oppression and White supremacy are rooted in place. Yet the two bodies of literature do not inform one another, and there are potentially dangerous gaps in our knowledge that contribute to oppression. The result is age scholarship about environment that lacks a critical race perspective and race scholarship on place that ignores the oppressive conditions of age. By reviewing these pieces, I argue that scholars must inform themselves of the ways in which we overlook important analyses and may potentially contribute to our own ageism.     

ALLOCATING INFECTION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SWINE FLU (H1N1) VACCINE

Previous research has isolated the effect of “congressional dominance” in explaining bureaucracy‐related outcomes. This analysis extends the concept of congressional dominance to the allocation of H1N1, or swine flu, vaccine doses. States with Democratic United States Representatives on the relevant House oversight committee received roughly 60,000 additional doses per legislator during the initial allocation period, though this political advantage dissipated after the first 3 weeks of vaccine distribution. As a result political factors played a role in determining vaccine allocation only when the vaccine was in particularly short supply. At‐risk groups identified by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), such as younger age groups and first responders, do not receive more vaccine doses, and in fact receive slightly fewer units of vaccine. (JEL D72, D73, I18)     

AN EGALITARIAN SYSTEM BREEDS GENEROSITY: THE IMPACT OF REDISTRIBUTION PROCEDURES ON PRO‐SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

In a meritocratic system, people are compensated on the basis of their individual ability, whereas in an egalitarian system people are equally compensated. Essentially, in the latter system high performers are taxed and subsidize underperformers. Would differences in income redistribution procedures affect people's pro‐social behavior? In experiments, we found that people are more generous toward strangers in an egalitarian treatment than in a meritocratic treatment. Interestingly, being taxed does not reduce the generosity of high performers, whereas being subsidized significantly increases the generosity of low performers. (JEL C91, D63, D64)     

Gender and Supportive Co‐Worker Relations in the Medical Profession

Women's growing numerical representation in the professions has not necessarily translated into women being truly integrated in these occupations. Questionnaire data are used to examine whether female physicians are socially integrated in the male‐dominated profession of medicine in terms of the support they receive from their medical colleagues compared to male physicians. The literature on tokenism and homophily suggests that women in male‐dominated professions receive less support than their male colleagues, whereas the social support literature predicts that women typically receive more emotional support than men but less informational and instrumental support. The results of this study shed light on the complex and multi‐layered ways in which gender is relevant to our understanding of the extent to which co‐workers provide empathy, information and assistance to one another.     

Marriage (In)equality: The Perspectives of Adolescents and Emerging Adults With Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Parents

The debate over whether same‐sex couples should be allowed to enter into civil marriages continues in the United States. Forty‐nine adolescents and emerging adults (ages 14–29) with lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents were interviewed for the current exploratory study, which examined how individuals perceived themselves and their families as being affected by marriage (in)equality, as well as the factors that shaped their perspectives. More than two thirds of participants voiced unequivocal support for marriage equality, citing numerous legal and symbolic benefits that their families were denied. One quarter of participants articulated critical perspectives of marriage or the fight for marriage equality, while also acknowledging the benefits associated with marriage. As the first study to examine the perspectives of individuals with lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents with regard to marriage (in)equality, this research has important implications for the marriage equality debate and provides a springboard for future studies on this topic.     

The Intergenerational Continuity of Fathers' Absence in a Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Sample

Fathers' absence is a pattern that shows intergenerational continuity, most notably within disadvantaged populations. The process whereby this pattern is repeated across generations is not well understood. Using data from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, the authors investigated pathways between fathers' absence in 1 generation and the experience of fathers' absence by their children. The current sample included 386 socioeconomically at‐risk individuals across 2 waves of data collection: (a) when they were children and (b) when they were adults with their own children. Analyses based on structural equation modeling revealed that men whose fathers were absent when they were children were more likely to become absent fathers, and women whose fathers were absent when they were children were more likely to have children with absent partners. Indirect pathways between fathers' absence in 2 generations through aggression, education, and substance abuse were illustrated for women. These findings add to the literature suggesting that fathers' absence during childhood has intergenerational effects.     

Correlates of perceived effectiveness of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative

A three-level growth-curve model was applied to estimate perceived impact growth trajectories, using multi-year data from project and school surveys on outcome and program implementation collected from 59 sites and approximately 1165 participating schools in the Safe Schools and Healthy Students Initiative. Primary interest is to determine whether and how project-level and school-level correlates affect schools’ perceptions of the Initiative's effectiveness over time when the effects of the pre-grant environmental conditions, grant operations, and near-term outcomes are considered. Coordination and service integration, comprehensive programs and activities for early childhood development, and change in school involvement were found to be significant predictors of school-perceived overall impact when the effect of poverty was considered. Partnership functioning, perceived importance of school resources, and school involvement were found to be significant predictors of school-perceived impact on substance use prevention when the effect of poverty was considered.     

The Efron dice voting system

About 50?years ago, Efron noted some counterintuitive properties of the long-term behavior of contests involving dice. For instance, consider the 6-sided dice whose sides are labeled (4,4,4,4,0,0), (3,3,3,3,3,3), (6,6,2,2,2,2), and (5,5,5,1,1,1). Each die has a 2/3 probability of rolling a higher number than the next one in the list and the last has the same 2/3 probability of rolling a higher number than the first. The non-transitivity of games involving non-identical dice was popularized by Gardner (Sci Am, 223:110–114, 1970). Although Gardner and other authors have observed that non-transitive dice serve to illustrate the complexities of the theory of voting, it does not seem that much attention has been paid to the corresponding voting system. Our purpose in this article is to present this voting system and compare its properties with those of other voting systems. One of the most interesting properties is the fact that cancellation with respect to the Efron dice voting system can replace cancellation with respect to pairwise preferences in Young’s characterization of the social choice function associated with the Borda Count.     

Predicting engagement in a transition to parenthood program for couples

Fostering participant engagement is a challenging but essential component of effective prevention programs. To better understand which factors influence engagement, this study examines several predictors of couple engagement in Family Foundations (FF), a preventive intervention for first-time parents shown to enhance parent mental health, couple relations, parenting quality, and child adjustment through age 3 years. FF consists of a series of classes delivered through childbirth education departments at local hospitals. Baseline data on socio-demographics, parent mental health, and couple relationship quality were examined as predictors of participants’ level of engagement in FF (n = 89 couples, 178 individuals). Sociodemographic variables such as parent gender, socioeconomic status, and age predicted program engagement to a limited extent. However, findings indicated that marital status was the best predictor of engagement. Discussion focuses on how findings can inform the development of practices that promote engagement, such as the use of targeted outreach efforts for individuals most at risk of disengagement.