Conceptualizing and Validating Marital Quality in Beijing: A Pilot Study

Since the inception of the economic reform, marital relationship in urban China has undergone dramatic transformations. Though the burgeoning body of scholarly research has demonstrated that marital quality has increasingly become an important aspect of family life among married persons in urban China, both the conceptualization and measurement of marital quality remain underdeveloped. The purpose of this pilot study is to develop and validate a comprehensive and culturally appropriate marital quality scale, namely the Chinese Marital Quality Scale (CMQS). Results from the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) conducted on a sample of 387 married persons from Beijing indicate that the CMQS can be conceptualized as a two-factorial and multidimensional construct, encompassing marital happiness, marital interaction, marital disagreement, marital problem, and marital instability. Additional statistical analyses also indicate that the CMQS has exhibited satisfactory reliability and concurrent validity. It is thus concluded that the CMQS is a reliable and valid instrument to measure marital quality in contemporary Beijing and possibly in other Chinese cities.     

Intra-uterine Mortality and Maternal Nutritional Status in Rural Bangladesh

This paper is an investigation of the relationship of a maternal nutritional status with intra-uterine mortality in a population of chronically malnourished rural Bangladeshi women. First, life-table techniques are used to compare the level of intra-uterine mortality in this population with levels reported in other studies. Then the relationships of maternal nutritional status, age, parity, foetal loss and season of conception with intra-uterine mortality are examined in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate foetal mortality in rural Bangladesh to be markedly higher than in other populations where living conditions and health care are superior. Maternal nutritional status, maternal age and season of conception all appear to be related significantly to foetal mortality.     

The Influence of Classroom Ethnic Composition on Same- and Other-ethnicity Peer Nominations in Middle School

The study of peer group status typically involves examination of peer nominations received. In this study, the focus was on nominations given and received. We examined the degree to which middle school students from different ethnic groups demonstrate same‐ethnicity preferences in their peer nominations, the effects of the classroom ethnic composition on these preferences, and the association between same‐ethnicity preferences and social standing. Latina/o, Asian, and White students demonstrated a positive same‐ethnicity bias (i.e., greater acceptance and less rejection of same‐ethnicity peers) whereas African‐American students demonstrated a global same‐ethnicity bias (i.e., they were more likely to nominate African‐American students in general). All students made more nominations to same‐ethnicity peers when there were larger numbers of same‐ethnicity peers in the classroom. Students who made more acceptance nominations to same‐ethnicity peers were more accepted among same‐ethnicity peers and less accepted among other‐ethnicity peers. The significance of the ethnic context to understanding students' peer status and the benefits and costs of same‐ethnicity biases are discussed.     

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: UNIVERSITIES, NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE US SUPREME COURT

The legal context in which universities operate is among the forces shaping the ways in which new information technologies are taken up and used. In the USA, constitutional law - that law which addresses how society is to be structured and what types of processes should be permitted within it - is particularly important in determining what institutions can do. The ultimate arbiter of constitutional law is the US Supreme Court, the decisions of which establish basic principles for the US legal system. This article reviews the entire body of US Supreme Court decisions that deal with higher education and mines them for their implications for the use of new information technologies by universities.     

Emotion Understanding in English- and Spanish-speaking Preschoolers Enrolled in Head Start

Research assessing children's emotion understanding has increased over the past several years. Despite the proliferation of research, there have been few studies conducted examining the development of emotion understanding in children from diverse backgrounds. Further, there has been no research conducted examining the psychometric properties of emotion understanding measures when used with children from diverse backgrounds. A total of 597 preschool children from low‐income families enrolled in Head Start (248 Spanish‐speaking and 349 English‐speaking) were given an emotion understanding assessment in their native language at two sessions separated by six months. All children showed significant growth in emotion understanding abilities from time 1 to time 2, with English‐speaking children generally outperforming Spanish‐speaking children. The psychometric performance of the measure was analyzed for both English and Spanish samples and for English‐speaking children at different levels of language ability.     

Concentration function and sensitivity to the prior

Summary In robust bayesian analysis, ranges of quantities of interest (e. g. posterior means) are usually considered when the prior probability measure varies in a class Γ. Such quantities describe the variation of just one aspect of the posterior measure. The concentration function describes changes in the posterior probability measure more globally, detecting differences in probability concentration and providing, simultaneously, bounds on the posterior probability of all measurable subsets. In this paper, we present a novel use of the concentration function, and two concentration indices, to study such posterior changes for a general class Γ, restricting then our attention to some ∈-contamination classes of priors.