The recent socio-economic transformations in Italy and its internal and external migratory movements

Recent migration trends involving Italy are described. The authors note that Italy has changed from a manpower-exporting country to a labor-importing country. Consideration is also given to changes in internal migration patterns.     

The encoding and decoding of liking from behavioral cues in both auditory and visual channels

Fifty high school students met in same-sex dyads for the first time over a cup of coffee in an experimental room designed as a comfortable living room. They then responded to a questionnaire designed to measure liking and perceived similarity. The interactions were video-taped. Two different panels of 6 judges later either viewed (video only) or heard (audio-only) the videotape and raed the subjects behavior on a number of scales. The judges also judged the degree of liking felt by the subjects by estimating subjects responses to the questionnaire. In addition gaze behaviour during the interaction was measured. Factor analysis demonstrated that 60% of the variance in The Liking Scale was attributed to 14 items relating to liking and perceived similarity. A separate factor to assess perceived similarity could not be found. Twenty-nine percent of the variance in the liking reported by subjects was predicted by an interrelated pattern of expressing behaviour including approproate looking, mutual gaze, self-disclosure, synchrony in movement and gesture, expressiveness of the face and liveliness of the voice. Video judges liking correlated 0.33 with subjects liking and 48% of the variance in their judgements was explained by the valid cues of looking and expressiveness of the face. Audio judges liking, although it correlated at 0.34 with video judges liking, did not correlate at all with subjects' liking because of an over-reliance on the important content cues. It is suggested that major problems leading to decoding inaccuracy may be over-reliance on content cues and over-confidence in the possibility of decoding accuracy. The evidence suggests that differences between subjects in encoding may be considerable.     

Selectivity,adaptation, or disruption? A comparison of alternative hypotheses on the effects of migration on fertility: the case of Brazil

This study, based on Brazilian data from 1976, compared the fertility of migrants and stayers at both origin and destination areas. Observed patterns of fertility differentials were then analyzed in terms of 4 hypotheses of fertility behavior focused on processes of socialization, adaptation, selectivity, and disruption. In the study sample, 31% of migrants moved from rural to urban areas, 45% of moves were between urban areas, and 20% of moves were between rural areas. Among rural-to-urban migrants, only 1/3 moved from traditional to modern regions. To uncover the main patterns of migrant and stayer fertility differentials in the study population, the major flows of migrants by origin and destination were disaggregated by recency of migration, education, and age. The overall conclusions were as follows: 1) rural-urban migration flows need to be disaggregated into various modern/traditional cross-classifications (e.g., modern-rural, traditional-urban, frontier-urban) and greater emphasis needs to be placed on rural-urban, urban-urban, and rural-rural flows; 2) no robust quantitative measures of migrant-stayer fertility differentials held across migrant groups, implying that migrants differing in terms of age, education, origin, and destination are likely to behave in significantly variable fashion with regard to stayer standards of fertility behavior; 3) migrant groups with overall lower fertility levels, such as the young and better educated, are less likely to experience significant fertility reduction to bridge the origin/destination fertility gap; 4) rural-to-rural migrants do not appear to experience any lasting fertility reduction even when they move to areas with lower overall fertility rates; 5) urban-to-rural migrants tend to bridge a larger fraction of the uphill fertility gap than rural-to-urban migrants; and 6) there was evidence of partial adaptation for most migrant categories once disruption effects disappear and evidence consistent with the socialization hypothesis (no fertility reduction for at least 1 generation) was apparent for migrants originating in the least developed parts of Brazil, the frontier region, and the traditional-rural region.     

THE EFFECT OF PROVIDER CONTROL OF BLUE SHIELD PLANS ON HEALTH CARE MARKETS

Blue Shield plans often are granted regulatory advantages by the states in which they operate. Run efficiently, such not-for-profit firms should use these lower costs to eliminate their less advantaged rivals, the commercial insurers. However, these higher-cost commercial providers have been able to offer insurance coverage at prices competitive with the Blues, as evidenced by the fact that Blue plans have, on average, less than 50 percent market share. Similar prices with lower overall costs implies that economic rents are being earned, rents which a not-for-profit firm cannot distribute to owners. In this paper we argue that when there are competing goals among the groups controlling the Blue Shield plans, the different possible "uses" of the regulatory advantage become endogenously determined, necessitating the use of simultaneous equation estimation. Testing this model we find the major effect of doctor-control of Blue Shield plans is to raise doctors' fees while lowering the amount of rents captured by both consumers and administrators.     

Individual behavior under risk and under uncertainty: An experimental study

These experiments are concerned with individual behavior under risk and under uncertainty. By exploiting the isolation effect the experiments were able to offer to 134 subjects the possibility of actually gaining or losing an important sum of money.The experimental data show that under risk as well as under complete ignorance the subjects' attitudes towards prospects of gains and towards prospects of losses are totally unrelated.The data also show that when facing prospects of gains, the subjects generally take the exact probabilities of the events into account, whereas, when facing prospects of losses many of then have only recourse to coarser categories of plausibility, or even no longer use their information at all.     

USING DUAL FRAME DESIGNS TO REDUCE NONRESPONSE IN TELEPHONE SURVEYS

This article reports on the results of a series of experimentsdesigned to improve response rates for telephone surveys. Inthree surveys telephone households were selected using bothstandard random digit dialing (RDD) techniques and lists oftelephone numbers purchased from a commercial firm. In the RDDportions of the samples "cold contact" interviewing methodswere used; in the list frame portions advance letters were mailed,and the listed household name was used in the introduction.Experiments were designed to test the effects on response ratesof the advance letters and use of the listed household nameas a means of establishing rapport. The advance letters increasedresponse rates, but no difference could be attributed to theuse of names. The mixture of RDD and list sampling techniquesis also used to evaluate the effects of relative response rateson substantive findings. The cost consequences of these dualframe designs are assessed along a number of dimensions, andthe cost and error components of these designs are discussed.     

Verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth to children,foreigners, and retarded adults

The verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to a listener who was either a six-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was a native speaker of English. The degree of warmth conveyed by the speakers differed only minimally across different categories of listeners. However, these communications did vary systematically within each category, in accord with the levels of cognitive and linguistic sophistication of each particular listener. Speakers tended to fine-tune communications by conveying more warmth to the more sophisticated children and foreigners than to the less sophisticated members of these categories. To the more sophisticated retarded persons, however, they conveyed—nonverbally—less warmth than to the less sophisticated retarded persons. The relevance of these findings to the communication of expectancy effects and to the social psychology of stigma is discussed.This paper was written while the first author was visiting at the University of Florida. We thank John Neil Bohannon, Linda Caporael, Margaret Clark, William Cooper, Monica Harris, Harry Levin, and Carol Sigelman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For their help in conducting this research, we thank Ann Ashworth, Pamela Brown, Linda Douglas, Susan Finkelstein, Tamara Harper, Robin Johnson, Susan Kirdendol, Sheila Larkin, Sue Limber, Jose Macaranas, Ashook Nimgade, Maria Papetti, Maurice Perry, Lester Pretlow, Carissa Smith, Laura Taswell, Tina Tedeschi, Charles Valadez, and all of our listener-subjects. We also thank the students, faculty, and administration of Dunmore High School, Dunmore, Pennslyvania, for their participation and cooperation. Support from NSF, NIMH, the National Academy of Education, and a Rackham Faculty Grant was invaluable. Most importantly, we thank Roger Brown and Robert Rosenthal for their wisdom and inspiration.     

An evaluation of socially responsive planning in a new resource town

New resource towns on the Canadian frontier have presented planners with opportunities to experiment with innovative planning ideas which attempt to resolve the persistent problems of such communities. In the planning of Tumbler Ridge, a new coal mining town in British Columbia, socially responsive planning was an attempt to develop a town using principles derived from social science research. In this paper the reactions of residents to selected attributes which reflect the application of these principles are examined five years after settlement began. Ratings of community attributes offer an indication of aspects of residential satisfaction, while the results of a principal components analysis suggest the dimensionality of residents' evaluative structures and provide a useful framework within which to consider planning issues. Issues examined are: the association between employment and the community environment; the suitability of the environment for children; and the social environment. While social aspects of the new community are judged as satisfactory, less positive elements reflect the underlying influence of the economic well-being of the mining company on overall community satisfaction. When compared to indicators of community satisfaction in other western Canadian resource towns, ratings for Tumbler Ridge tend to be fairly low. It is concluded that the inability of planners to adequately control implementation or dontinuity of their ideas has resulted in a community not distinctly different from other resource towns. Efforts have been further hampered by a lack of adequate models of the distinctive dynamics of resource communities.