Solidarity and tension between age-groups in the United States: challenge for an aging America in the 21st century

In this article, we argue that intergenerational tensions in the United States reflect a strategy for serving the aged that stresses the underlying values of individualism and self-reliance. Using national survey data, we examine the extent to which Americans' view of public responsibility for the aged has shifted between the mid-1980s and late-1990s, a period characterized by the intensification of "generational" politics, as well as a growing hostility toward "big government." We consider four factors that may be responsible for the escalation of intergenerational tensions as they are manifest in the erosion of public support for programs and policies serving the elderly: (1) Declining intergenerational solidarity with the aged ; (2) Increasing concerns over age-inequity in public programs ; (3) Increasing concerns over resource-inequity in public programs; and (4) Increasing opposition to big government . Results indicate that the public has generally grown more apprehensive about the value and costs of government programs serving both the elderly and the poor. Yet, the fact that Social Security enjoys far more support than social programs serving the poor suggests that the elderly are perceived as more deserving of their benefits than other dependent groups in society. The public also appears increasingly reluctant to redistribute old age benefits according to need. Age-group contrasts revealed little evidence of direct tension between the generations. The results suggest that growing distrust of government and reluctance to help the poor has indirectly fueled opposition to public spending on the older population. Proposed changes to programs and policies affecting the elderly will need to take into account the ambivalence felt by many Americans toward a government they expect to make good on its promise to care for all older citizens, but to use fewer resources in doing so.     

Strategies of interaction

Our general theoretical orientation proposes that individuals in a task-oriented group setting have a variety of strategies or rules by which they decide how to organize their exchange behavior. Status consistency, reciprocity, and sex roles are examined as possible bases for interpersonal strategies. Hypotheses derived from this examination are tested in a two-person game experiment, in which independent variables are payoff matrix (mixed motive vs. cooperative), information transfer (one-way vs. two-way), and social context (married couples, mixed sex strangers, and same sex strangers). The dependent variables are number of cooperative choices and reciprocity, the latter being measured by the correlation between number of cooperative choices by one subject in a five-trial block and the number of cooperative choices by his/her partner in the previous five-trial block.     

Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 h of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries, we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns.     

People Like Us: Dominance-oriented Racial Affiliation Preferences and the White Greek System on a Southern U.S. Campus

Studying in-group affiliation preferences can be a valuable tool for understanding race relations in the contemporary United States. We draw on theories of social dominance and social identity to analyze racial attitudes, as measured by the Social Distance Scale, for a subset of black and white students at the University of Mississippi. While both black and white students expressed strong in-group preference, this preference was stronger for whites than for blacks, especially for white women presently affiliated or planning to affiliate with campus Greek organizations. Social dominance orientation, a measure describing whether social inequalities are accepted and justified, mediated the greater in-group preference of many whites, especially for intimate or high-power relationships. We discuss possible individual and institutional causes for the differences we observe, and we draw implications for understanding continued self-segregation both on- and off-campus in a society that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, espouses “color-blind” ideals.     

Grandfather caregivers: race and ethnic differences in poverty

We use data from the 2006 American Community Survey to examine race and ethnic differences in the effects of marital status and co-residence of the middle generation on the likelihood of poverty among grandfathers who have primary responsibility for co-resident grandchildren (N = 3,379). Logistic regression results indicate that race/ethnicity and household composition are significant predictors of poverty for grandfather caregivers: non-Hispanic white grandfathers, those who are married, and those with a co-resident middle generation are the least likely to be poor. The effects of race/ethnicity, marital status, and the presence of a middle generation are, however, contingent upon one another. Specifically, the negative effect of being married is lower among grandfathers who are Hispanic, African American, non-Hispanic, and non-Hispanics of other race/ethnic groups compared to whites. In addition, having a middle generation in the home has a larger negative effect on poverty for race/ethnic minority grandfathers than for non-Hispanic whites. Finally, the combined effects of marriage and a middle generation vary across race/ethnic group and are associated with lower chances of poverty among some groups compared with others. We use the theory of cumulative disadvantage to interpret these findings and suggest that race/ethnicity and household composition are synergistically related to economic resources for grandfather caregivers.     

Social and spatial networks: Kinship distance and dwelling unit proximity in rural Thailand

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals’ dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship networks of all individuals living in 51 agricultural villages. After presenting arguments for a relationship between individuals’ dwelling unit locations and their kinship relations as well as the particulars of our case study, we introduce the data and describe our analytic approach. We analyze how kinship – considered as both a system linking collections of individuals in an extended kinship network and as dyadic links between pairs of individuals – patterns the proximity of dwelling units in rural villages. The results show that in general, extended kin live closer to one another than do unrelated individuals. Further, the degree of relatedness between kin correlates with the distance between their dwelling units. Close kin are more likely to co-reside, a fact which drives much of the relationship between kinship relatedness and dwelling unit proximity within villages. There is nevertheless suggestive evidence of a relationship between kinship association and dwelling unit proximity among kin who do not live together.     

The Covariation of Antisocial Behavior and Substance Use in Adolescence: A Behavioral Genetic Perspective

Multivariate genetic studies have revealed genetic correlations between antisocial behavior (ASB) and substance use (SU). However, ASB is heterogeneous, and it remains unclear whether all forms are similarly related to SU. The present study examines links between cannabis use, alcohol consumption, and aggressive and delinquent forms of ASB using a behavioral genetic approach. Participants were 1,688 adolescents (482 monozygotic twins, 852 dizygotic twins, and 354 nontwin siblings) aged 15–23 years old (M = 16.91), sampled from the community in the U.K. Multivariate model fitting revealed that the genetic components of alcohol consumption and cannabis use correlated with those of both aggression (.21 and .49, respectively) and delinquency (.35 and .69, respectively). Results suggest that both aggression and delinquency have genetic effects in common with alcohol consumption and cannabis use.