Marital dissolution,remarriage, and childbearing

Earlier models of fertility hypothesize that marital dissolution and remarriage influence subsequent childbearing. This issue is examined by comparing the fertility of those in disrupted marriages with that of those in stable marriages. The results indicate that, by transferring women into a nonmarried status, marital dissolution decreases childbearing. The data also suggest that discord reduces fertility even before separation occurs—separated women had reduced fertility during the two years just before separation. It was found that marital dissolution without remarriage operates to truncate childbearing, thus decreasing family size. Dissolution followed by remarriage, however, lengthens the childbearing span of whites and has no influence on average family size; remarrying white women are able to make up for the childbearing lost between marriages. For nonwhites, we found that dissolution and remarriage increase the average time to childbirth, but, even more importantly, these events greatly decrease the number of children born.     

Disability and employment: towards an understanding of discourse and policy

This article explores the nature of disability employment policy drawing on evidence from fifteen countries. In line with earlier sociological approaches to disability it describes two ways of framing policy in the area. These two paradigms are developed and used to critically evaluate employment policy under the headings: legislative measures, open employment-financial employment support services and sheltered/supported provision. The dilemmas that may arise during implementation of policy are discussed and the consequences for the construction of an emancipatory employment policy. Finally, the article suggests some themes or dimensions that a coherent disability policy should have.     

Cohabitation and marriage in the 1980s

Using cohabitation and marriage histories collected in 1985 from 23-year-old women and men, this study investigates the process of union formation, considering transitions from single life into cohabitation and marriage. The outcomes of cohabitation are also considered--both the dissolution of unions and the transformation of cohabiting unions into marriage. These data indicate that large proportions of men and women experience cohabitation fairly early in the life course. At the same time, many cohabiting unions are dissolved fairly quickly and numerous others are soon transformed into marriages. Thus even though cohabitation will be experienced by many, most people will continue to spend substantially more time in marital unions than in cohabiting unions.     

Social change and the family: Comparative perspectives from the west,China, and South Asia

This paper examines the influence of social and economic change on family structure and relationships: How do such economic and social transformations as industrialization, urbanization, demographic change, the expansion of education, and the long-term growth of income influence the family? We take a comparative and historical approach, reviewing the experiences of three major sociocultural regions: the West, China, and South Asia. Many of the changes that have occurred in family life have been remarkably similar in the three settings—the separation of the workplace from the home, increased training of children in nonfamilial institutions, the development of living arrangements outside the family household, increased access of children to financial and other productive resources, and increased participation by children in the selection of a mate. While the similarities of family change in diverse cultural settings are striking, specific aspects of change have varied across settings because of significant pre-existing differences in family structure, residential patterns of marriage, autonomy of children, and the role of marriage within kinship systems.     

AN ALTERNATIVE VARIANCE-REDUCTION STRATEGY FOR RSM SIMULATION STUDIES

In the previous paper, Cooley and Houck [1] examined the simultaneous use of common and antithetic random number streams as a variance-reduction strategy for simulation studies employing response surface methodology (RSM). Our paper supplements their work and further explores pseudorandom number assignments in response surface designs. Specifically, an alternative strategy for assigning pseudorandom numbers is proposed; this strategy is more efficient than that given by Cooley and Houck, especially when more than two factors are involved.     

Sweeping Changes in Marriage, Cohabitation and Childbearing in Central and Eastern Europe: New Insights from the Developmental Idealism Framework

In Central and Eastern Europe following the political transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were dramatic declines in marriage and childbearing, significant increases in nonmarital cohabitation and childbearing, and a movement from reliance on abortion to a reliance on contraception for fertility limitation. Although many explanations have been offered for these trends, we offer new explanations based on ideational influences and the intersection of these ideational influences with structural factors. We focus on the political, economic, social, and cultural histories of the region, with particular emphasis on how countries in the region have interacted with and been influenced by Western European and North American countries. Our explanations emphasize the role of developmental models in guiding change in the region, suggesting that developmental idealism influenced family and demographic changes following the political transformations. Developmental idealism provides beliefs that modern family systems help to produce modern political and economic accomplishments, and it helps establish the importance of freedom and equality as human rights in both the public and private spheres. The disintegration of the governments and the fall of the iron curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s brought new understanding about social, economic, and family circumstances in the West, increasing consumption aspirations and expectations which clashed with both old economic realities and the dramatic declines in economic circumstances. In addition, the dissolution of the former governments removed or weakened systems supporting the bearing and rearing of children; and the legitimacy of the former governments and their programs was largely destroyed, thereby removing government support for old norms and patterns of behavior. In addition, the attacks of previous decades on the religious institutions in the region had in many places left these institutions weak. During this period, many openly reached out to embrace the values, living standards, and economic, political, and familial systems of the West. And, the thirst for freedom—and its considerable expansion—operated in personal and familial as well as political and economic realms. These dramatic changes combined together to produce the many changes occurring in family and demographic behavior.